10 Ways to Improve Your Company Intranet
Company Intranets are an invaluable resource for employees – a place to find key policies, find out who’s who, share knowledge and keep updated. But many Intranets are sadly unloved and uncared for. There are many reasons for this, but as we visit companies to help them reinvigorate their intranets, we find similar issues cropping up over and over.
Here are a few things to consider to breathe new life into your Intranet, or to put into the planning for your new system.
It needs to be clear to the user what the system does, how it works and where to find things. Keep the homepage clean, with clearly identifiable areas for news, links and navigation. Make sure that you have a navigation system that is easy to use, is consistent through the whole site, and that reflects how your company is structured. Get feedback and monitor stats to see what people like and what they don’t, and act on this to improve the intranet over time.
[/vcex_icon_box]It’s lovely to let each team put lots of information onto the intranet about themselves, and upload every last piece of useful guidance. But there will be key information in your organisation that it is important that people can find quickly. Expense Form, Health and Safety Policy, Product Key Facts, Research Papers etc. By clearly identifying what people need access to, and clearly organising this, you produce a system that is relevant and useful. You’re aiming for an Intranet that people use for their day-to-day working life, and a system that, if it breaks, people will get upset about. Pictures of the marketing manager’s cat probably won’t pass this test!
[/vcex_icon_box]So many intranets, especially SharePoint Intranets, give each team a nice calendar, task list, noticeboard and ‘general’ document library. Many teams have no use for these, and they sit there empty. So many people then go to these pages, see nothing there, think ‘that’s a rubbish page’, and don’t delve any deeper. Occasionally, team calendars and tasks lists can be great features. My advice is, only give them to teams when they ask for them, and then, if they don’t use them, take them away. Use the page for something useful – latest policies or user guides, performance dashboards, signposts to key information….
[/vcex_icon_box]The most popular intranets tend to have one or two features that lots of staff love. This could simply be a well-organised policies library. It could be the Phone Book or the Knowledge Base. Sometimes a Marketplace or forum takes hold and encourages networking and collaboration. Try to find out what staff want from an intranet, and put this in a key position to drive footfall to the site.
[/vcex_icon_box]If, like many others, you are using SharePoint Online for your intranet, there is huge scope to build mini-systems that will make your organisation run more efficiently. Anything from simple document approval workflows, up to full-blown quality management systems can be built on SharePoint online. Because SharePoint is a mature collaboration platform, these systems can often be produced at a fraction of the cost of fully bespoke software. And by using SharePoint Online and Office 365 you are cutting down ongoing support and licensing costs by leveraging the investment that you have already made.
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