Your Digital Workplace Must Be Built on Tasks, Not Just Talk

Raise your hand if this sounds familiar: your organization launches a shiny new intranet, complete with high-res hero images, a sleek social feed and a video message from the CEO about “synergy.” Three months later, the analytics tell a grim story: the only people visiting the site are those looking for the cafeteria menu or the holiday calendar.

The problem? You’ve built a comms platform, but employees needed a workplace.

In my work as an independent digital workplace consultant, I’ve seen this pattern repeat across industries, from healthcare to higher education, from government to nonprofit. We fall into the trap of viewing the intranet as a megaphone for corporate communications. But a truly human-centric digital workplace isn’t about how much news we can push; it’s about how much friction we can remove.

Table of Contents

• The 'Want' vs. 'Need' Trap
• Communication, Collaboration and the Service Gap
• How the Top Tasks Method Works
• Evidence From the Field: What Employees Actually Do
• From Communication to Service
• The Challenge for Leaders

The 'Want' vs. 'Need' Trap

One of the most dangerous questions you can ask during a digital workplace redesign is: “What do you want on the new intranet?” Asking for a wish list inevitably leads to a ‘Christmas tree’ of features that sound good in a boardroom, but offer zero value in the field. To build a digital employee experience (DEX) that works, we have to stop asking what people want and start identifying what they need to get their jobs done.

This is where the principle of ‘top tasks,’ pioneered by Gerry McGovern, becomes essential. The methodology moves us away from internal politics and toward evidence-based design. By identifying the long neck of tasks — the small set of activities that provide the most value to employees — we can prioritize the digital interactions that matter most.

Communication, Collaboration and the Service Gap

The industry has shifted in recent years toward the concept of the Digital Headquarters (DHQ). As a DHQ, your digital workplace should be the primary “office” where work actually happens. However, most organizations still treat Internal Communication, Collaboration and Service Delivery as three separate islands.

• Communication tells you why the work matters.
• Collaboration is where you do the work with others.
• Service is how you are supported to do that work.

The “Service” element — primary processes a.k.a. business operations, but also IT support, HR self-service and facilities management — often gets the least attention. Yet, when we look at the data, it is precisely this service layer that holds the most critical top tasks. If an employee can’t find a protocol or fix a software issue, they aren’t going to stay for the corporate news. To create a seamless Digital HQ, we must bridge these silos. A news article about a new HR policy is useless if it doesn’t link directly to the service (the tool) and provide a space for collaboration (the discussion).

The digital workplace:

1. Supports with service and collaboration: Organizations provide employees the tools, information and resources to perform their primary tasks, as well as secondary ones. Because online collaboration is part of most employees’ work, facilitating it well is also indirectly a form of service.
2. Informs through communication and service: You reach employees through the combination of communication and service. On one hand, by sharing information from the top down, and on the other, by equipping them with the  resources and tools they need to do their jobs.
3. Engages via collaboration and communication: Collaboration methods such as working out loud (WOL), video meetings or document collaborating in documents helps involve employees.Communication and information sharing also help connectthem,especially when combined with interactive features like liking and commenting on messages in an intranet or enterprise social network (ESN).

How the Top Tasks Method Works

The Top Tasks methodology flips the script for intranet and digital workplace design. It moves us away from "what the department wants to say" toward "what the user needs to do."

The process begins with a rigorous exercise in pruning organizational ego. First, gather a "longlist" of potential tasks from search logs, stakeholder interviews, current digital workplace tools, et cetera. The list is then brutally refined into a shortlist of typically 60 to 100 items written in clear, action-oriented language. The goal here isn't to list every page on the intranet, but to capture the essential reasons why an employee visits. This shortlist serves as the foundation for a relative-ranking survey that forces users to make tough choices, revealing the long neck of high-value tasks.

The results usually provide a sobering wake-up call for leadership. We consistently see that the top 5% of tasks (the "Top Tasks") receive as many votes as the bottom 50% combined. This data provides the political cover needed to:

• De-clutter the homepage: Remove vanity banners and corporate news that nobody clicks.
• Optimize navigation: Build your information architecture around the tasks that actually drive productivity.
• Prioritize resources: Direct your IT and content budgets toward the 10–20 tasks that define the digital employee experience.

Top Tasks is not a one-and-done project. It is a management philosophy centered on the Task Performance Indicator (TPI). Instead of tracking meaningless hits or page views, we measure success based on whether an employee can complete a task and how long it takes them to do it. By continuously testing and refining these top tasks, we move from being content managers to productivity enablers, ensuring the digital workplace serves the people, rather than the other way around.

Evidence From the Field: What Employees Actually Do

The data from recent task identification studies across various sectors is revealing. It consistently shows that, while internal news is needed, it's rarely the reason people show up. They come to the digital workplace to do, not just to read.

Let’s look at the evidence from different organizational landscapes:

Healthcare

In an environment where health and safety are paramount, the top tasks are almost exclusively functional. For these professionals, the intranet is a tool for clinical accuracy and professional growth, not a lifestyle magazine.

1. Protocols, procedures, flowcharts: 6.7% of total points
2. Education, training, e-learning: 5.8%
3. Sharing knowledge, news, information: 5.3%
4. Who's who, face book (finding a colleague, department, expertise): 5%
5. News: 3.5%
6. Announcements: 3.3%
7. My personnel file: 3.2%
8. Schedule, shifts, shift swap: 2.4%
9. Syndromes, problems (dementia, rehabilitation, etc.): 2.4%
10. ONS (digital patient records): 2.2%

Five of the 93 tasks in the survey got as much as 26% of all the points. This is as many points as the lowest scoring 59 tasks. And, to the point of this article: seven of the tasks in the top 10 are service-related, either primary or secondary tasks.

Higher Education

At a university of applied sciences, the digital workplace is an engine for collaboration. Interestingly, HR self-service tasks like Viewing leave and pay slips (5.5%) also rank significantly higher than corporate announcements.

1. HR matters (declarations, reporting sick, leave…): 10.8% of total points
2. Collaborate via Microsoft 365: 8.6%
3. Education applications: 7.6%
4. Org wide internal news: 6,6%
5. Applications: 5.0%
6. Announcements (facilities, IT, HR, etc.): 4.6%
7. Finding people: 3.7%
8. Annual schedule: 3.5%
9. Booking a meeting room or classroom: 3.3%
10. Program-specific information and communication: 2.9%

Three tasks got as much as 27% of all points combined. And arguably here, too, seven of the top 10 tasks are about employee and student services.

Non-Profit

For employees dealing with complex legal and social cases, the intranet is a lifeline for information.

1. Work instructions, manuals: 7.2%
2. Refugee data platform: 6.5%
3. Finding a colleague: 5.7%
4. Information and documents in my field of expertise: 5.5%
5. Internal news: 5.2%
6. For you and your work: 5.1%
7. Practical tips by subject area (asylum, integration, etc.): 4.4%
8. Weekly overview of relevant news items: 4.1%
9. Policy and information about client work: 3.7%
10. One overview of tasks, actions and notifications: 3.6%

Again, four of the 59 tasks received the most points (24.9%). And again, the majority of tasks are related to services to this organization’s employees and volunteers.

From Communication to Service

To make working better — my personal mission — we must shift our focus from engaging and reaching employees, to serving them. A task-oriented digital workplace doesn’t ignore communication; it embeds it within the flow of work. It recognizes that a nurse looking for a COVID-19 protocol is more likely to engage with a relevant news update on safety than a generic post on the company’s vision.

The goal is to create a digital environment that helps people find information, find colleagues and perform tasks so they can do their jobs well. When organizations get this right, the impact is measurable: 90% of employees in task-optimized environments report that the intranet “helps them do their job well.”

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Super Example: Dutch Energy Network Operator

A Dutch energy grid operator gives us a standout example of this task-centric strategy in practice. By pivoting from a traditional, top-down communications model to a service-oriented digital headquarters, they achieved results that set a global benchmark. Their approach earned them the Step Two Intranet & Digital Workplace Gold Award a few years ago.

Their top tasks are:

1. Store, search and share files: 6.1% of all points
2. Timesheets/time registration: 6.0%
3. Intranet as access to other systems and platforms: 6.0%
4. Finding colleagues: 5.6%
5. Internal news organization-wide: 4.8%
6. IKB (Individual Choice Budget): 4.7%
7. Book meeting rooms (internal or external): 3.9%
8. Request leave: 3.6%
9. Department/team meetings (agenda, minutes, etc.): 3.1%
10. Sharing knowledge, documents with colleagues: 2.9%

This focus on employees’ top tasks for the past 10 years has paid off.  Quantitative data from employees tells a powerful story of the digital workplace’s success. On a 10-point scale, staff rated the intranet’s ability to: 

• Help them find information at 7.1
• Find colleagues and expertise at a remarkable 8.1
• Helping find and perform tasks 7.8
• Supporting overall job performance 7.2

As many as 90% of employees gave the intranet a score of at least 6 out of 10 for helping them do their job well. This goes for office staff as well as frontline workers. These aren’t just engagement stats — they are proof that a focus on service delivery directly enables people to do their best work.

The Challenge for Leaders

The transition to a task-based digital workplace requires a shift in power. It means the “Home Page” is no longer a collection of real estate owned by different departments, but a gateway designed for the user.

It requires us to measure the factual, objective experience. Stop looking at page views and start looking at task completion rates. Stop measuring “likes” and start measuring “task success.” This way, you actually contribute to what Tabhita Minten and I call “great DEX” in our book:

“Great digital employee experience is the sum of all digital interactions in a work environment, where the needs and expectations of employees come first.”

Are you building a digital workplace that serves your organizational chart, or are you building one that serves your people? The data suggests that if you choose the latter, the engagement you’ve been chasing will finally follow.

Editor's Note: How else can digital workplace leaders remove friction for employees?

• 5 Things You Can Do Today - for Free - to Improve Your Digital Employee Experience — As digital employee experience leaders, our focus should be on making big changes. But we shouldn't lose sight of the simple actions that can improve DEX.
• Why More Workplace Technology Creates More Friction — Employees lose nearly a full workday every week battling fragmented software. Here’s how complexity is crushing productivity, morale and revenue.
• Measure What Matters: The Fifth Principle of Digital Employee Experience — When cross-functional teams define what “good” looks like — from a systems perspective and the experience of employees — they’re more invested in achieving it.

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