Editorial
Research Report
The ROI of Employee Experience
Every content owner wants to know what content is popular. But when we audited a major bank's intranet containing half a million pieces of content, we found a pattern: 90% sat in complete darkness, never accessed. Another 1% shone brightly — heavily used, often mandatory. But it was the 9% in between, in the shadows, where the real insights lived. This was content employees were trying to use but couldn't quite make work.
Like any good horror story, the real danger isn’t what’s obvious. It’s what’s been festering for years in the dark.
Across clients — banks, universities, global corporations — we see these same three zones.
The proportions vary slightly, but the pattern is depressingly consistent:
- The darkness (60-90%): Content that's never been accessed. Not once. This represents organizational amnesia, failed initiatives that no one bothered to clean up, and content that was created "just in case" but serves no one. The learning here is simple: delete it. But there's a new urgency to this housekeeping. In the age of generative AI (GenAI), this ROT (Redundant, Obsolete, Trivial) content presents a genuine risk — enterprise AI tools can resurrect abandoned pages and present them as current, trustworthy information. That outdated policy from 2019? That process document for a system you decommissioned three years ago? GenAI doesn't know they're obsolete. It just knows they exist in your knowledge base, ready to confidently mislead employees with information that was wrong before and is wronger now.
- The bright spots (1-5%): Heavily used content — but don't celebrate too quickly. These are often mandatory policies, required forms or tools employees must use whether they work well or not. High usage frequently just means "unavoidable," not "good."
- The shadows (5-15%): Content with some engagement, but struggling. This is where transformation happens, mostly because this is where you can see exactly how the system is failing people.
Why We Obsess Over the Wrong Metrics
Most knowledge management systems chase vanity metrics: page views, engagement rates, most popular content. Teams celebrate when a new article gets 500 views. They create dashboards showing upward trends in content consumption.
But these metrics miss the diagnostic gold; they don't tell you what employees can't find. They don't reveal what employees find but immediately abandon. They don't show you what should exist but doesn't. And they certainly don't connect content performance to operational costs like support calls, help desk tickets or time wasted searching for information that's buried somewhere in the system.
The real insights come from examining the negative space: what isn't working and why.
The Shadows: Where the Insights Live
At the bank, the 9% revealed patterns we've now seen across every client audit. The same problems, every time:
- Content with unclear scope: Pages relevant to one geography or business unit but not clearly labelled. Employees in London would waste time reading procedures that only applied to colleagues in Singapore. Or worse, Singapore employees would skip pages that did apply to them because nothing indicated they should care. The fix? Adding clear scope labels to say "This applies to you" or "This doesn't apply to you." Simple yet remarkably effective. These pages moved from the shadows into regular use, which makes you wonder how much time was wasted before someone thought to label things properly.
- Good content, poor structure: Valuable how-to guides buried by indexing failures or inconsistent information architecture. The content existed; employees just couldn't find it, so they'd email HR instead. At a large university, we found that content with consistent layouts significantly outperformed pages with custom designs. Turns out people can find things more easily when everything doesn't look different. Adding proper tagging moved pages from the top 5% to the top 1%. These weren't massive redesigns. They were basic structural hygiene that should have been there from the start.
- The multi-purpose page trap: Authors trying to serve 10 different user needs on one page because they'd been told to "consolidate" or "reduce page count." The result is always that it serves none of them well. When we broke these pages apart — one clear user need per page — usage increased and bounce rates dropped. People could finally find what they needed without wading through nine other things they didn't.
But the most insidious pattern was what we call "livening it up."
The 'Liven It Up' Trap
Content owners, fresh from their half-day SharePoint training, love to tinker. They've just discovered widgets, modules and features, and by God, they're going to add them. Pages look more impressive, more engaging, more "professional" — which is to say, it makes the content owner feel useful. What they actually do is make pages harder to use. But that's someone else's problem.
The perfect example: accordions. Content editors love them. They make pages look "cleaner" and more organized. Every audit shows they're performance killers, but that doesn't stop anyone.
Nielsen Norman Group's research is unambiguous: every click decision, no matter how minor, adds cognitive load. It's easier for users to scroll down a page than to decide which heading to click on. But the deeper problem is behavioral: accordions encourage authors to cram five different messages onto one page rather than giving each message its own clear purpose and URL. Why create five pages when you can hide five messages behind five clever little dropdowns on one page? Much tidier. Much worse.
And despite Google's official claims that they index accordion content equally, real-world testing tells a different story. When SearchPilot made hidden accordion content visible on Iceland Groceries' site, organic sessions increased by 12%. On internal intranets, where search engines are far less sophisticated than Google, the problem compounds — your enterprise search can barely find visible content, let alone content hidden behind JavaScript.
We've watched editors complain when we remove accordions. "But it looks so much cleaner!" they protest. The data disagrees. Accordions add complexity, increase cognitive load and hurt discoverability. Editors often don’t understand that less is more, opting to add more to show a page is "full."
The Cascade Effect
When we fixed the messy middle at that bank, we discovered how much damage bad content had been doing all along.
How-to and where-to guides moved from the 9% zone into the top 1%. Employees could suddenly find the information that had been there the entire time, just buried. The transactional services these pages signposted saw dramatic increases in usage — because people could now locate them. HR support calls dropped — not because HR got better, but because employees could finally find answers without ringing someone. IT help desk tickets for common issues fell, tickets that represented hundreds of hours of support time spent essentially saying "It's on the intranet, let me send you the link."
The unused and underused content wasn't just a content problem — it was hemorrhaging money. Every buried how-to guide was generating support calls. Every unclear page scope was wasting employee time. Every accordion that should have been plain text was creating friction that multiplied across thousands of users into actual operational costs. Fix the content architecture, and you accidentally fix the expensive symptoms that no one had connected back to the root cause.
From Knowledge Systems to Insight Systems
This is the fundamental shift organizations need to make (but probably won't). Traditional knowledge management asks: "Did we publish it? Is it findable?" which is to say, "Have we technically done our job?"
Insight systems ask questions that might actually be useful:
- Why is this content struggling? Is it unclear scope? Poor structure? Unnecessary clutter added by someone who thought they were helping?
- What patterns predict performance? Do templated pages outperform the custom designs that took three times as long to build? Does proper tagging — that basic, boring structural work — make more difference than the fancy widgets everyone added?
- What's the downstream impact? Are support calls increasing because critical information is buried under someone's idea of good design? Are employees wasting time because content tries to serve everyone and thus serves no one?
Unused content becomes a diagnostic tool revealing uncomfortable truths: where silos exist that everyone pretends aren't there, where employee needs aren't understood because no one asked, where aesthetic concerns trump usability because the people making decisions aren't the people using the system, and where operational costs hide in plain sight because they're distributed across hundreds of small frustrations rather than one large, visible failure.
The dark side of knowledge management — that vast landscape of unused and underused content — is actually a goldmine of insight into employee experience. It just sometimes tells you things you'd rather not know.
Your Dark Side Diagnostic
Five questions to ask about your unused and underused content — assuming you're prepared for honest answers:
Webinar
Mar
26
Do Learning Programs Really Work? How to Turn Education Into Engagement In Healthcare
See how leaders are using learning programs to build trust with healthcare professionals and create measurable engagement.
Register
Webinar
On demand
Fuel Your Front Line: Workforce Trends Shaping 2026
Get expert insight into the tools and tactics top frontline teams will need in 2026.
Watch Now
Webinar
On demand
Fix the Disconnect Between Projects and Profit
Your margins are hiding in disconnected data. Let's find them.
Watch Now
Webinar
On demand
AI in Customer Service: Faster Resolutions, Happier Customers
Don’t let rising demand burn out your team. See how to build a smarter, more resilient support org.
Watch Now
The Graveyard Audit: What's never been accessed? You're maintaining content that serves no one, which means you're paying people to manage files that might as well not exist. Delete it.
The Scope Problem: Can employees tell if content applies to them? Test your labels, headers and navigation. If the answer is "it depends" or "they should be able to work it out," the answer is no.
The Clutter Test: What makes pages harder to use? The widgets. The modules. The accordions. The dynamic content blocks that seemed like a good idea in a YouTube video. Be ruthless.
The Multi-Purpose Trap: What pages are trying to serve 10 different user needs because someone decided "consolidation" was the goal? Break them apart. One page, one purpose. Yes, it means more pages. No, that's not actually a problem.
The Structural Patterns: Do your best-performing pages share common characteristics: consistent layouts, proper tagging, clear labels? Template them. Replicate what works. Stop letting every team reinvent the wheel; gratuitous differentiation helps no one.
The shift from knowledge management to insight systems isn't about better search algorithms or stricter content governance. It's about treating your digital channels as diagnostic tools that reveal how work actually happens — and where your digital workplace is failing employees.
Unused and underused content isn’t neutral. It isn’t harmless. It's gently generating cost — in duplicated effort, support tickets, wasted hours and AI systems confidently surfacing the wrong answer.
Every buried how-to guide is a support call waiting to happen. Every unclear page is time someone doesn’t get back. Every piece of ROT is a liability in an AI-enabled organization.
The real question isn’t “What’s our most popular content?”
It’s: “What’s our content costing us?”
The only real question is whether you really want to know.
Editor's Note: How else can content owners help employees find what they need?
- Less Content, More Clarity: Why Less Is More in the Intranet — In a world of constant notifications, channel creep and inbox anxiety, the best internal comms teams are brave enough to say: “No one needs this message.”
- Connected Intelligence Can't Fix Your Broken Knowledge Management — AI-powered knowledge management is the latest tech promising to fix what 30 years of tools couldn't. But what if the technology was never the problem?
- Preserve Your Organization's Critical Knowledge With Knowledge Maps — Knowledge maps help you better understand knowledge-related risks and opportunities — and have a proven track-record for results.
Learn how you can join our contributor community.