Your Intranet Is the Core of Your Employees’ Experience. Build It Right
An intranet may seem like just an internal internet, but that isn’t strictly true. The internet is the mechanism — the underlying machinery — providing the connectivity and interoperability that power the world wide web and all its many resources. The same is true of corporate intranets: It isn’t enough to simply have one, because it isn’t the intranet that delivers on the promise of a memorable employee experience, any more than the global internet is what delivers a memorable experience to its five billion users. intranets are important, but they’re facilitators of something far more important: Customer and employee experience.
This distinction matters, because IT departments across diverse industries often operate under the assumption, “as long as we have a fully functional, standards-based, universally accessible intranet infrastructure, then we’re golden. We’ve done our job.” Not true. What they’ve done is build a solid foundation, but the house is far from complete. We have a highway system; now we need something to ship across it.
It’s common to hear references to “the HR intranet” or “the finance intranet” or “the marketing intranet” in internal conversations about knowledge navigation. Those references to individual, standalone information entities should set off alarm bells, because ideally, the intranet is a knowledge hub within an organization — a starting place, the single go-to resource for organizational insight. In the same way that a Google window on the world wide web serves as the gateway to everything in the greater world of public knowledge, the intranet should provide that for the enterprise — a one-stop shopping experience that eliminates the need for employees to go scurrying across the landscape to different data stores. This is important: In a 2020 survey, workers overwhelmingly reported that they felt underutilized and uninformed in their jobs. According to the same survey, those workers spent, on average, 26 days per year searching for information, knowledge and expertise. That’s just over five weeks.
Intranet Qualities
It doesn’t take a major intellectual leap to see how a well-designed, carefully-thought-out intranet can contribute to higher levels of employee satisfaction — but what does it look like?
First, a well-designed intranet should be intelligent. We are, after all, in the era of AI-enabled business. The intranet should immediately know everything it needs to know about that employee from the moment they log in — who they are, where they work, what their job responsibilities are, how long they have been with the firm, what their training and experience profiles look like, who they report to and so on. That information serves as the basis for rapid, targeted parsing of information delivered to that employee, in the same way that Google searches “prune the tree” of information returned for a web search, prioritizing the data based on search history.
Next, the intranet should serve as the corporate Agora — the gathering place where employees go to gain knowledge and insight, to professionally connect with other employees and to stay informed about goings-on within the firm.
The intranet should offer a pan-organizational experience, meaning that it should not be silo-specific. From the entry portal, an employee must be able to vector off into resources offered by every vertical organization in the firm. Not only does this save time (remember those 26 wasted days?), it also presents a cohesive and coherent view of the company to the employee. That, in turn, creates confidence in the firm and a positive experience for the employee.
This pan-organizational experience can only happen if every organization within the enterprise is represented, which means that the team that oversees and manages the intranet must be made up of representatives from each entity. Companies that see the intranet as solely an IT function miss the point: To return to our earlier highway analogy, IT understands what’s required to build the roads; they have no idea what’s in the trucks that travel across it.
A good way to think of the intranet is as a “digital twin” of the actual organization. If the company has Sales, Marketing, Human Resources, IT, Engineering, Operations, Legal, Research and Development, and Customer Support organizations as elements of its structure, then each of those elements should have a place on the intranet to share its unique information, and each of those teams should have a representative on the “Council of Druids” that manages the intranet. This has several benefits: First, when employees visit the intranet, they see the entire organizational picture. Second, the information and insights from each of the functional organizations that make up the company can freely mix and enrich each other. Third, the overall design of the intranet experience is tailored for its users (employees) rather than for its administrators. And finally, the information offered by the intranet is kept current, because of the interdependencies among the knowledge insights offered by each element of the overall experience. The result? Higher adoption and usage, and the delivery of a better customer (employee) experience, which in turn leads to higher levels of employee insight, confidence and loyalty.
Learning Opportunities
Related Article: Intranets Mirror Their Organizations — The Good and the Bad
Intranet-Builder, Beware
In the spirit of caveat intranetor, two warnings. First, if you are thinking of the establishment and maintenance of an enterprise intranet as an IT compliance activity, as a way to “tick the technology boxes,” stop. You're dooming yourself to a failed project. Successfully building and maintaining a useful intranet requires careful planning, beginning with one fundamental question: Why are we building this in the first place? What’s the ultimate driver, and what do we need to do to ensure the product achieves what we need it to achieve?
Second, recognize that establishing an intranet is NOT a once-and-done activity. In the same way that stale content on a public web site sends a clarion call of irrelevance to site visitors, so, too is out-of-date material a guaranteed way to remove any incentive for employees to use the intranet — and to lose the opportunity for it to serve as a powerful tool that drives organizational cohesion. The intranet, like the web, is a living entity, and its content must be refreshed on a continuous basis if employees are to see it as an inalienably important knowledge and insight ally.
Finally, the intranet is only as good as the people who use it — and the people who use it are only as good as the value they garner from doing so. Back in the 1990s, Knowledge Management Systems were all the rage in large corporations. Unfortunately, most of them rapidly became the digital equivalent of the city dump: If an employee had a big enough shovel, adequate time, and a decent map of the dump, they MIGHT find what they were looking for. Data volume does not equate to usability: The intranet must be designed around the needs of its users, not the prowess of IT.
Customer experience is everything, regardless of whether we’re talking about external customers who buy products and pay the bills or the employees who ensure that those customers have something to buy in the first place. If the organizational intranet is designed and managed as the single go-to place for enterprise knowledge, wisdom and insight, then employees will treat it as a private club within the company where they go to see and be seen by those who matter. Otherwise, they’ll see it as a failing convenience store with half-empty shelves that offers no reason to stop by.
Related Article: Your Intranet News Is Up to Date. Your Metrics Should Be, Too
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About the Author
Dr. Steven Shepard is the founder of Shepard Communications Group. A professional author, photographer, audio producer and educator with more than 40 years of experience in the technology industry, he has written more than 90 books and hundreds of articles.
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