Editorial
Research Report
The State of the Digital Workplace
I once considered Top Tasks the best methodology for designing good intranets.
But something was missing ….
To be clear: I like Gerry McGovern. I bought his book, “Top Tasks: A How-To Guide,” read his newsletter regularly and applied some of his teachings.
Yet when you look at the results most organizations achieve with the method, a hard truth emerges: beyond news, directories and a handful of basic features, intranets consistently fail employees.
One of the reasons that stays behind these failures is the design model itself.
Table of Contents
- The Limitations of Top Tasks
- Subjective by Nature
- Top Tasks Miss Critical, High‑Impact Work
- They Fragment Related Work
- Work Is Not Just Transactional
- No Task Owners
- The Approach Is Resource‑Heavy
- The Core Question
- A More Durable Design Model
- Two Models, Two Outcomes
- Closing Thoughts
The Limitations of Top Tasks
The Top Tasks method is a user‑centered approach that focuses digital design on a small number of tasks users perform most often. Instead of relying on internal opinions, organizations identify and validate user tasks through large‑scale surveys.
The method shifts attention away from content volume and organizational structure toward what users declare to be the most useful tasks in practice.
Top Tasks demands strict prioritization. Navigation, content and design are built first to support the highest‑value tasks, while low‑value tasks are addressed in later stages.
Every decision is measured against one question: does this help users complete their Top Tasks quickly and clearly?
In my experience, a number of factors limit the effectiveness of the Top Tasks approach.
Subjective by Nature
Ask the same employee what their “top tasks” are six months apart and they will give you different answers. Ask two people in the same role, and you will get different lists.
Top Tasks Miss Critical, High‑Impact Work
Top Tasks surface what people do on a regular basis. However, they do not reliably surface what matters most for various parts of the business.
Consider these examples:
- calculating sales commissions
- ordering supplies for a specialized machine
- managing customer complaints
- paying supplier invoices
These activities are critical to business operations, yet they are unlikely to emerge as Top Tasks in a large organization, as they are performed in specialized areas of the business. As organizational complexity grows, the likelihood of not properly addressing such tasks or ignoring them altogether increases.
Intranets built this way optimize for frequence and importance, but not for comprehensiveness.
They Fragment Related Work
“Requesting time off” may qualify as a Top Task. Other top tasks would be “Access to policies” or “Access to announcements.”
But understanding carry‑over rules, identifying backup approvers, reading updated policies or learning that the time‑off system are all related tasks, which support the main task of “requesting time-off.”
As a result, context is broken. Related information is scattered. Employees must mentally reassemble what the digital workplace should have provided as a coherent whole.
Work Is Not Just Transactional
Digital work is not only about executing tasks.
People need to be motivated, informed, trained and supported with the task at hand.
An intranet designed primarily around task mechanics overlooks the human and organizational dimensions that make work sustainable and effective.
No Task Owners
In Top Tasks nobody “owns” a task, partly because it may involve a wider pool of skills that would cross departments.
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I argue that someone is responsible for and owns the underlying topic of each transversal employee task.
In practice, this person works as an internal service provider for that task and is naturally interested in having it executed well.
The Approach Is Resource‑Heavy
Identifying Top Tasks properly is time consuming:
- Selecting representative users
- Scheduling and running interviews
- Synthesizing results
- Relying on specialized expertise
The process is time‑consuming, and difficult to scale. For all that effort, the outcome remains fragile and incomplete.
The Core Question
Would you fly in an aircraft designed around top tasks?
Or would you expect every system — navigation, propulsion, controls, electrical, etc. — to be explicitly designed, owned and integrated?
Digital workplaces are complex systems. Designing them around popularity rather than structure is a risky proposition.
A More Durable Design Model
For every transversal task an employee performs, there is an owner inside the organization. That task belongs to a service delivered to employees as internal customers by the owner.
A more robust approach uses internal services as the load‑bearing structure, not task popularity.
Identifying business services and their owners is a much cleaner process. You ask each department head to identify who in his team is responsible for work delivered internally to a significant audience and ask them to fill in a simple matrix with the service owner, service name, service description, audience and business impact, priority.
Then you engage all these internal service owners with the idea that a dedicated intranet section for each one of them will help them deliver a better service to their internal customers and, most important, will reduce the effort to support their audience.
In each internal business service section, the service owner will have upload a series of information that represents an extension of the Why, How, What model.
From a user‑experience perspective, the intranet should function like a shopping mall:
- It contains a comprehensive set of services offered to all employees.
- Navigation will be filtered by audiences (only the services where the user is part of the audience will be displayed).
- Consistent layouts.
- Employees moving seamlessly from service to service (shop to shop) as needed.
- Topics are designed like shops, that besides transactions, provide motivation, core resources like SOPs, updates, training, support and allow feedback to the owner.
- Content is up to date as internal business service providers are naturally inclined to provide a good service (just like in a mall where very seldom see dirty windows or disorganized stores with expired goods).
Two Models, Two Outcomes
Model one:
A centralized intranet team curates and optimizes a set of Top Tasks first, and the other tasks later. You have a considerable management overhead.
Model two:
Internal service owners are enabled — using shared templates, standards, governance and substantial personal wins — to manage their own service experiences directly for employees.
The second model distributes responsibility, scales naturally and allows continuous improvement where work actually happens.
It shifts the intranet from a publishing platform to an operating model for internal services.
Closing Thoughts
Top Tasks are a useful diagnostic tool. Yet, in my opinion, they are an insufficient design foundation for modern digital workplaces.
If we want intranets that truly support work, we must design them the way organizations really operate: through services, ownership and structured responsibility — not popularity lists.
Editor's Note: There are different schools of thought around intranet design. For other takes, read:
- Your Digital Workplace Must Be Built on Tasks, Not Just Talk — Your intranet gets ignored because it's built for comms, not work. Here's the data-backed method that puts employee tasks first and gets results.
- The Communicator's Guide to Building a Corporate Intranet, Part 1 — Ready to fix the mess that is your intranet? Part 1 of this five part series explains what an intranet is for and who should build it.
- The Only Intranet That Matters — Too much information causes stress. How does this apply to our intranets?
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