6 ways to give your company intranet the power of purpose

Set your organization up for long term success

Organizations with a culture of purpose, beyond making a profit, inspire employees and, according to Deloitte, perform better than their peers by instilling business confidence that fuels investments, innovation, and long-term growth. By applying the same sense of purpose, a business can reap rewards that last way beyond go-live and set the organization up for long-term success.

There is a video on the Unily intranet home page by Simon Sinek from 2013, entitled How great leaders inspire action. Sinek says that “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it” and it tells a compelling story about how enterprises should seek to change the digital workplace forever. Of course, it is of vital importance that leaders inspire their employees with vision and strategic purpose but how many apply that thinking to their business intranet?

#1. Having a company intranet for the sake of it

Any business that sets out to deliver an intranet simply as a matter of ‘checking a box’ on their annual list of objectives, or to keep internal communications/marketing/HR happy is not going to end up with a successful, well adopted and valuable business tool.

#2. Build an intranet and they will come

Those believing that implementing a new business intranet with new features is enough to bring immediate success will be disappointed. Technology is a means to an end and unless the intranet delivers real business value then end-users will not care about the bells and whistles.

#3. Better done than perfect

Be prepared to iterate. Get started quickly and fulfill the core business use cases in the first phase, show value and then move on to the next iteration. Solicit feedback from users and adapt your strategy and roadmap in accordance with changing trends and needs of your internal customers. The best company intranets are never really finished; they continue evolving with the company they serve instead.

#4. Have a strategy and set goals for your business intranet

If no one knows what was the objective to be achieved, it's impossible to measure when you get there. Take time at the beginning of the project to audit and express the requirements of the business as SMART objectives.

#5. Everything has a purpose

Ensure that every element of the new company intranet has purpose; this is especially true on your home page. Your on-screen real estate is limited and valuable, so question whether everything is serving a purpose and be prepared to challenge the status quo. Avoid having sacred cows (dedicating part of the home page to a particular internal function just because of politics), which will reduce the effectiveness of your solution.

#6. Let people know

Once you have refined your purpose, make sure that you communicate it throughout your organization. A business intranet will make the communication of such information a whole lot easier.

Summary

The long-story-short is that a company intranet with a defined purpose will be more successful than one that doesn't know what its purpose is. Time spent considering your strategic business goals will pay off in terms of producing a superior digital workplace that will lead to tangible outcomes and happy users.

Asking yourself these key questions is a good place to start:

• What are the key business problems we’re trying to solve?
• How do we envisage technology will support our business strategy in the short to long-term?
• Who are our key users, and how will their needs affect my choice of technology?
• Are we using technology in the right way to keep my business agile?

Unily is a best practice, but customizable, turnkey solution that can be deployed in a fraction of the time of a custom solution. Unily is a managed offering that includes SLA-backed support and regular free upgrades in response to platform changes by Microsoft and our customer driven roadmap. The pricing is transparent, all-inclusive and fixed for the term of the contract providing predictable budget forecasts.