Editorial
Writing, soliciting and maintaining good content is a big challenge for intranet managers — and it's one they very often get wrong.
Intranet managers can take one important lesson from one of the simplest businesses there is, the coffee shop.
What Coffee Shops Have That Intranets Need
The ground floor of my apartment building has two coffee shops. Every time I go in, they have clean tables, good coffee and fresh croissants.
Both also make it very clear what is on the menu that day and how to order.
Intranets are very different in this respect.
Forty-seven percent of digital workers struggle to find the information or data they need to effectively perform their jobs, according to a 2023 Gartner survey. Outdated, duplicated or poorly managed intranet content is often the cause, which contributes to information overload and inefficiency in digital workplaces.
While skilled and experienced employees from multiple departments operate the intranet, they struggle to do a good job, ending in bad results.
If your intranet were a coffee shop, you’d have no customers because no one wants bad coffee, croissants from yesterday or expired sandwiches — at expensive costs.
So, what should intranet managers learn from my local coffee shops?
Invested Ownership
The baristas behind the counter of a coffee shop own the results of their business, whether we are talking about some KPIs or just plain tips.The people departments assign to manage the intranet content for that department rarely have the same type of drive. They might be the most tech savvy person from that department, but they are not the natural owner of the content they post, so reap none of the benefits of doing this job.
The result is incomplete, poorly structured content that quickly becomes obsolete over time.
Yet each department has people who would be more than willing to contribute and maintain timely intranet content, because it is a natural extension of their job description.
Think of the people in charge of business expense reimbursement or overtime or supplier invoice payments or fleet management or protective equipment. Proper intranet content will greatly help any of these internal service providers do the very job they were hired to do in the first place. Genuinely relevant and helpful intranet content will help them better communicate with their internal customers and reduce trivial support calls.
Intranet managers should focus on engaging this cohort of internal service providers to show them how the intranet is a natural extension of their capabilities and why they should own the content uploaded there.
Clear Visual Management
Baristas can see in a glance how many people are waiting to be served, how many tables need cleaning, and the expiration dates of the goods they’re selling.
By contrast, content related to a single topic can be spread across multiple repositories and tools in a digital workplace. Combine this with lack of true ownership and you'll understand why so many intranets suffer from stale content.
What you need to do is to build the digital equivalent of a store, where the owner can quickly check all the content that is tagged with a specific category and that internal customers can find.
Service-Oriented Approach
Baristas treat every person crossing their door as a customer. They have a clear understanding of what their customers want, and they do their best to deliver it.
By contrast, most intranet contributors see what they do as just ‘work’ and don't understand the service they’re delivering for internal customers, with the intranet as storefront.
You will need to work on the mindset of all these topic owners. When topic owners are invested in the work, it will not only improve your intranet, but also significantly affect the way your company performs.
Putting the Lessons of the Coffee Shop Into Practice in Your Intranet
Intranet managers have to break down their intranets into separate coffee shop sections, each owned by internal service providers.
Each section will allow an internal service provider to better deliver their internal services to internal customers, with lower support efforts, faster transitions and higher compliance rates.
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All these coffee shops should be structured like a mall, so customers can move from shop to shop according to their work pipeline.
When this alignment happens for every section of the intranet, when the overall structure of your intranet resembles a shopping mall, your job will become 10 times easier as you'll be sailing with the wind instead of against it.
Editor's Note: Read more tips on refining your intranets:
- So You Want to Build a SharePoint Intranet. Here's What to Know — SharePoint intranets hold potentials and pitfalls. A look into the hidden costs, challenges and implications for communications professionals.
- What Internal Comms Can Learn From Joshua Bell's Subway Experiment — What can a viral social experiment involving one of the world’s greatest violinists teach us about attention and digital noise in the corporate world?
- AI-Powered Intranets Just Made Your Internal Comms Job Way More Interesting — The rise of AI-assisted intranets doesn't spell the end of internal comms. It just means the job is changing. Here's how.
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