5 frighteningly effective tips to engage staff to adopt your new intranet

Intranet platforms are valuable tools for boosting productivity and encouraging employee engagement. But how do you get your staff to adopt a new intranet, use it day to day and get them to complete their profiles even when using it is to their advantage?

As Halloween is lurking just around the corner, you could scare them into submission. Or, rather than risking a lengthy lawsuit, you could read our frighteningly effective tips on getting your staff to adopt their new intranet.

Show off your new intranet platform with a teaser video

Predictions suggest that by the end of 2017, video content will represent 74% of all internet traffic. It's safe to say that most of us are visual creatures with an unquenchable thirst for… video content.

When it comes to building buzz around your new company-wide intranet platform, putting together a visually striking informational video that showcases its features, quirks, and capabilities and then sending it out to all of your staff members will prove most effective.

Not only will this provide valuable information about the platform but it will also create a sense of anticipation, placing the intranet at the forefront of your employees' minds before launch.

Launch your intranet in style

Studies suggest that 98% of users feel more inclined to purchase a product after attending a launch or activation. This experiential marketing mindset also works internally. By hosting an official launch party for your shiny new intranet solution, you will immerse your staff in the platform and, in turn, encourage them to adopt the intranet fill out their profiles with haste.

For example, when the VELUX group launched its digital workspace, the company provided a photo booth to encourage employees to update their intranet profile pictures. As a result, the company boosted its intranet engagement and spread company-wide awareness of the new internal initiative in a big way.

It's Halloween soon, so if you're ready to launch, perhaps you could rent out a photo booth of your own, complete with sinister props like Freddy Krueger claws or a Mike Myers mask? Just a thought.

Make your intranet solution personal

In today's world, when it comes to driving employee engagement, a one-size-fits-all mentality won't do. Nowadays, you have to make your offerings personal – and your intranet is no exception.

Not all of your employees will want to read the same feeds or interact with the same content, so providing an area where your employees can personalize their intranet experience will incentivize them to fill out their profiles and start using the platform.

Examples of how you can achieve this include offering:

• Personalized bookmarks.
• Bespoke employee workspaces.
• Customizable staff profiles.
• Open company message boards.
• The option of following colleagues.
• Employee status updates.

By providing these capabilities, letting everyone know about each personalized feature during a company update, and asking your staff members to attend small group intranet user sessions to show them how to use each piece of functionality while outlining the benefits, you’ll have them uploading their profile pics and personal info in no time.

Make your intranet easy to adopt

This tip may sound obvious, but it's overlooked by many: make your intranet platform navigable and easy to adopt.

In the digital age, providing a flawless user experience is essential, and this should extend to all of your internal assets, including the intranet.

By asking your staff members what they hope to get out of an intranet solution, focusing on user experience, and integrating the intranet with a number of other key internal platforms, you will make employee adoption far easier.

Bonus tip:

In addition to integrating your intranet solution with internal platforms, why not allow your employees to add profile information by logging in via their LinkedIn accounts?

This will make it incredibly simple for your staff to sign up, which in today's fast-paced professional world is an incentive in itself. It will also ensure that user profiles are information-rich and kept up to date, which in turn will build employee trust levels and serve to promote engagement on an ongoing basis.

Make your intranet social and fun

We are social creatures. In fact, Facebook alone has two million monthly visitors worldwide.

In addition to personalizing your intranet, launching it in style, and making your platform easy to adopt, you should use it as a space for social interaction and company event updates, as well as a place where colleagues can reward and recognize one another.

By emulating the fun and lighthearted features of today’s big social media channels, you can incentivize your employees to check in regularly, becoming an active part of your internal digital community and ultimately using its professional functions to streamline their work objectives.

Here are a few ways you can do this:

• Add the option for staff to publish personal blog posts on the intranet (checked and proofed by an appointed moderator, of course) - a way of sharing personal news, knowledge, information, pumpkin carving tips… you get the idea.
• Include the option to publish and share captioned online photo albums to share with other staff members.
• Introduce a reward and recognition scheme where employees can recognize their colleagues’ achievements with digital badges that can be redeemed towards awards and incentives.
• Develop an internal buy and exchange area for employees

By showing your staff the importance as well as the virtues of your new intranet as well as incentivizing them to take advantage of its powers, will result in better adoption across your organization and with this your get a more powerful tool for collaboration.

Avoid this advice at your own peril (obligatory ominous Halloween signoff).

To find out how else we can help you, please do get in touch.