Firstly, define what “success” means for you. An intranet is about providing value for your employees, whether that is providing a platform for easy collaboration, a place where your employees can quickly find the information they need or a place to create content and share their ideas and knowledge.
“The 5C’s of Successful Intranet” is a handy way to explain what the fundamental purposes of an intranet are. The 5C’s embody the key pillars and experience of a good intranet, so being:
Communicate; Collaborate; Community; Contribute; and Customise.
Intranet Success: Communicate
Communication is about sharing. Not only is it essential in keeping employees in the loop with business news and objectives, but there are several other ways to communicate in an intranet environment that may not be so obvious.
Microsoft Teams, for example, can be fully integrated into your intranet so you’re able to understand whether a colleague is available or not to chat, and if they are, you can converse with them in realtime.
Discussion boards, blogs and activity streams are all good vehicles for improving communication in our daily working lives and helps people share their ideas, find out information and feel as though they’re able to have a say, which all adds value to an organisation. Communication barriers can affect your employee’s efficiency which may hinder productivity and growth. Good communication provision in an intranet empowers users to share knowledge more effectively and engage positively with one another.
Intranet Success: Collaborate
Collaboration embodies the concept of working with one another more effectively. Enterprise platforms make the ability to collaborate with your peers more
accessible. Team areas for instance, allow an audience to share documents, have discussions in forums and access task lists which all improve teamwork and
management visibility.
Getting collaboration right promotes productivity by enabling information gathering and sharing more easily – what we really want to achieve is helping users to
get their jobs done faster and better, all the while remaining cohesive and consistent with the work within their team. There are various collaborative enterprise tools available to encourage a more open and collaborative culture to flourish.
Intranet Success: Community
Community creates a sense of belonging and establishes an informal space for information sharing and team building. Community areas help to dissolve barriers that may exist between business units and/or office locations. A community is more than an audience engaging with the intranet, it is an area where employees can openly turn to for support from their peers, as well as access information and participate in the more social side of their working lives, such as sports clubs.
There is a myriad of functionality that can be created in an intranet that generates a sense of community, from dedicated discussion forums to specialist applications that allow for immediate group engagement.
Viva Engage is such a tool that is being adopted into many organisations. It allows an audience to share information with one another in a more transient, conversational way that reflects our real-life and natural way of communicating with one another. In some respects, it may come to replace a
large portion of traditional communication via email which normally is a more formal approach to discussion.
Intranet Success: Contribute
Allowing an intranet audience to contribute is one of the most important of our 5 C’s. As the digital workplace evolves, it is apparent that employees value the ability to contribute directly to an organisation. This can be in as gentle a form such as casting votes in an intranet poll, sharing opinions about what biscuits to serve in meetings, or crucially contacting content owners directly when content may be inaccurate or out of date.
What’s important is that employees feel their opinions are heard and are listened to, thereby creating an inclusive culture and contributing to staff satisfaction, which obviously benefits the whole organisation.
Intranet Success: Customize
The homepage of an intranet is crucial to its overall success. It’s your first touchpoint with the organisation and the gateway to knowledge sharing. By customising your homepage and making it relevant to you and your goals, your engagement with it will increase as it allows you access to the areas you visit most frequently, saving you time and effort in finding exactly what you need, fast. Tailoring the intranet to provide key content on the homepage to a specific audience based on factors like location, unit or role helps feed through priority information like staff changes and company news, and fosters a sense of inclusion.
Summary
We’ve discussed how communicating via an intranet can take many forms, but this communication is only effective if barriers to engage with colleagues are broken down. By putting your employees first and understanding the challenges they face daily, you’ll be able to strategise a way to get them working more effectively. Technology alone is not the answer. The success of an intranet also depends on fostering a sense of community and inclusion, identifying advocates or power-users to help drive adoption organisation-wide. Putting together a launch plan and training your employees to use the intranet effectively along with
tactical solutions to get employees to use it, like gamification and competitions for example, will all increase its overall success.