Building an intranet – or employee experience platform – is something that has increased in importance over the years. Find a way to align employees with corporate goals was already a challenge – as far back as 2017, a study by Deloitte revealed that 77% of executives thought companies were not focused on aligning employees and their personal goals with corporate purposes.
But this complexity increased after 2020 due to the hybrid way of working many businesses adopted. How can you ensure everyone is aligned while all working from different locations?
Finally, the essential need in today’s fast-paced and volatile world is for businesses to be able to pivot sharply – which means getting your workforce to quickly shapeshift. Knowing how to create an intranet that gets people on the same page quickly and easily has therefore become mission-critical. A bad intranet is now tantamount to a bad office environment.
Building an intranet: remembering the basics
To create an intranet that employees will love, you need to make sure that the platform itself is employee-centric. This will not only boost engagement but will fuel collaboration and productivity across the organization as a whole.
The key is to take into account what employees need and want an intranet for, and use this reasoning to build an intranet that truly serves their needs and adds value to their working day. For example, this could be about improving internal communication, breaking down silos that are hampering collaboration, improving the speed of decision making, or driving better employee engagement across the business
Define your goals and objectives and create a vision statement for both your intranet and digital transformation project. These goals will set a benchmark for success that you can measure performance against, allowing you to make informed decisions and changes to ensure your intranet continues to hit your targets. Talk to staff and key stakeholders to see what they want to get from the intranet.
Ten key steps to creating an intranet
Defining the purpose of the intranet has been decided will guide all future work. Once you’ve done that first step you can move on to actually creating an intranet. Here are some building blocks to ensure your platform is one that employees will be completely engaged with.
1. Decide how to build your intranet
When implementing an intranet there are 3 things you can do:
- Custom build
- Develop an off-the-shelf intranet using downloaded software, which is then hosted on a server connected to your company
- Choose a cloud-based intranet provider
Custom building an intranet may sound appealing as it gives you total control, but it requires extensive technical knowledge and advanced expertise to do it properly. If you do not have the technical skills needed, then you could end up with an intranet that simply isn’t fit for purpose.
The issue with developing an off-the-shelf intranet from downloaded software is that the intranet’s capabilities are often limited and simply will not give you the functionality required. To improve functionality may require additional investment that could add up to substantial costs not planned for in the original budget. In addition, this intranet option still requires technical knowledge to set it up properly.
Choosing a cloud-based intranet solution has a number of advantages. They will build a customized intranet solution for your organization’s specific needs and requirements. They will then provide an online hosting service to host your intranet site, taking the pressure off your servers. Choosing an expert intranet provider can also speed up the deployment process, which will certainly take the pressure off you.
2. Get a demo
It is very important to demo the intranet to see what works well and what could work better. Most intranet providers provide the opportunity to demo their intranet product for free. Invite your project team to attend the demo, so that you can get plenty of feedback and highlight any potential issues early on in the process.
With adoption key to your intranet’s success, your top priority needs to be ensuring that your intranet caters to your users’ needs and delivers an unparalleled employee experience.
Use the demo to see examples of good design and UX. The design of your intranet is as important as its functionality. UX can be make or break for your users, as a clunky, hard to navigate intranet will deter employees from making it their go-to hub. To truly drive engagement and use of your platform, everything from its theming and color scheme down to its page structure should be optimized for your users. The key is simply to keep your users’ needs at the front of your mind as you consider intranet design.
Unily ranks first in all Use Cases in the 2024 Gartner® Critical Capabilities™ for Intranet Packaged Solutions.
3. Utilize productivity integrations
Modern businesses rely on a vast array of technologies to fuel performance, but jumping between platforms and systems can have a counterproductive impact on efficiency and productivity. Consolidating technology and tools with an intranet is an effective way of overcoming this problem.
Giving users intuitive access to the tools they rely on, such as Microsoft 365, SalesForce, and ServiceNow, straight from the intranet doesn’t just improve productivity; it also drives adoption of the platform and engagement with your content.
Integrations sit on a spectrum of complexity. Starting off with a simple apps and tools menu that aggregates third-party links in an easily accessible drop-down is a good place to start. But to really drive productivity gains, deeper integrations should be considered.
Think about surfacing data from external applications in dashboards on your intranet so your users can interact with multiple applications on one screen. Integrations like this can bring about powerful insights that turn your intranet into a highly effective enterprise tool.
Unily clients have reported productivity savings equating to $42m per annum from these kinds of integration, with Shell saving $42m, and National Grid reporting a time saving of 30 minutes a week per employee, equating to getting 140 days’ worth of productivity back into the business every week. In addition to the productivity benefits, the impact on the digital employee experience is profound, with users now able to interact with different systems from a central location - no additional log-ins required!
4. Make searching like Googling
With so much information stored across the intranet, along with various technology tools being integrated with it, it can be difficult for employees to quickly search for the information they need – this can harm productivity and reduce user satisfaction. To cut through the noise and solve the problem, enabling a ‘Google-like’ unified search across the intranet and its integrated platforms is essential.
With a well-integrated intranet, your search capabilities extend beyond native intranet content, allowing users to search across every repository for the information they need. With powerful search and integrations combined, the humble intranet is transformed from an information repository and engagement enabler to a critical business tool that connects organizational knowledge in a way no other tool can.
Users should be able to upload documents and search for others from this single place. Search can also be made easier by ensuring every document is tagged with logical meta-data, allowing them to be refined by location, tag, type, and more. Look for a search with refiners to help your users laser into the content they need.
5. Use data to drive innovation
Data is the lifeblood of a business and, when utilized, can drive innovation and insights that keep the organization ahead of the curve. The same applies to your intranet – to best understand the performance of the intranet and to keep it employee-centric, looking at the performance analytics is essential.
Easy to use analytics will track all aspects of how employees are interacting with content daily, with date and content filters, track content views, sessions, and popular topics. Analytics provides an enhanced view on communication, collaboration, productivity, knowledge, and networking, and provides insights on a variety of usage stats including:
- How well social is performing
- How your apps & tools are being used
- What documents are being shared
- How well your news, insights, and videos are being engaged with
6. Target and personalize
When your users come to your intranet, they want to see the content that matters to them. They expect the same tailored experience they get from their favorite consumer brands from their workplace technology, and this is particularly true of millennials.
Reflecting this change in the workplace means giving employees the ability to personalize their experiences, and content owners the ability to target communications to the right users. For larger organizations with multiple brands, locations, and departments, targeting and personalization options are crucial to cater to the needs of diverse user types.
Like customers, employees love choices, so providing users with ways of tailoring their intranet experience to their interests is a sure-fire way of driving engagement. One way is utilizing targeted homepages, which allow you to personalize homepage layouts, widgets, and content for different groups of employees across your intranet. This builds on the existing functionality which allows content managers to target particular pieces of content to groups of employees, making the intranet more personalized than ever. Experiences can also be targeted to devices so you can deliver more refined experiences for mobile users than their desktop counterparts - ensuring intuitive navigation from any device.
"People derive value from different newsfeeds and different content, depending on their role within the company. The Conche provides each of us with a personalized, relevant user interface, ensuring we all have the information we need to be our most productive"
Carlos Amesquita - Chief Information Officer at The Hershey Company
7. Empower content creators
Some 27 percent of tech budgets are controlled by departments other than IT, according to Gartner research. Take the burden off IT with a simple CMS that empowers non-technical users to take real ownership of the intranet. A platform with a library of widgets to choose from to perform specific functions means that you can surface content in ways that engage your users. It also means content creators can create dynamic layouts with ease.
92% of us trust the word of our friends and colleagues over top-down brand channels, according to The Nielsen Global Survey of Trust. Front-end editing lets users dive straight into crafting stories, without having to navigate your intranet CMS to find the right content trees or repositories. It takes the pain out of keeping CMS access secure, while still empowering every employee with a platform to share stories. Even mobile users can share insights with mobile-enabled front-end content creation - meaning your whole workforce can add their input wherever they are.
Having a broadcast center is another way of interacting with all employees easily through content – if you need to send a message out fast, reliably, and in front of everyone, a broadcast center enables content creators to easily build out engaging e-newsletters, emails, and alerts.
With a broadcast center, your content creators gain access to intuitive tools to build out engaging newsletters, emails, and alerts. They can choose from a range of pre-configured templates, and even automate relevancy and targeting for each individual user. A broadcast center can also support omnichannel strategies by enabling push notifications, email newsletters, and announcements that can be targeted to user groups.
A good broadcast center brings all the capabilities of specialist email-building tools into one place, uniting your digital landscape and simplifying processes for your content creators. With every channel in front of you and the ability to deliver visually engaging, timely, and intelligent internal communications, it's easy to increase engagement.
8. Bring the intranet to life with social spaces
Social features on an intranet are becoming more essential, especially with teams becoming more hybrid. Establishing an enterprise social network that uses familiar social features to enable users to connect intuitively helps support culture and collaboration in lieu of office dialogue.
Features such as the ability to @mention anybody in the company, using #hashtags and bespoke social reactions create a social buzz that allow conversations to continue without borders. Dedicated social channels not only break down barriers and bridge the gap between your international and disparate workforce, but they also provide safe spaces for subject-specific communication and discourse.
When social features are weaved throughout an intranet, employees are encouraged to share ideas, anecdotes, and opinions about the topics they care about. Overall, this contributes to an inclusive culture of belonging and acceptance for all.
As workforces become more disparate, social features on an intranet step in to keep culture and connection alive.
Internal social capabilities have also allowed The Hershey Company to “connect people to people, and people to content so we are able to work smarter together.”
"We have seen an increase of knowledge-sharing and collaboration across business units and even with our external partners. Our new capabilities have allowed us to access information and knowledge anytime, anywhere, from any device."
Michael Wetzel - Manager of Business Transformation-Corporate Systems at The Hershey Company
9. Help employees find one another
One of the primary goals of an intranet is to connect employees, regardless of if they work in different offices, time zones, or at home. Establishing a people directory allows this, giving users the tools to find anyone within their organization, from any device, in a matter of seconds.
Employees should be able to find their colleagues not only by name but also by location, skills, job title, and interests. Beyond that, it's important to make it easy for them to connect directly from whatever device they are on via call, email, or Microsoft Teams.
Drive adoption and compliance of the directory by making it familiar and easily editable like Facebook or LinkedIn. Allow users to add their skills and work experience, and encourage others to ‘follow’ them via social integration.
10. Prioritize accessibility
Finally, to engage every employee, you need to make sure you can reach every member of staff, overcoming difficulties including language, location, and physical accessibility obstacles that might occur.
Having a multi-lingual intranet and superior translation services is a must-have feature for an all-inclusive platform. A combination of machine-translated content and 1:1 translation editing makes publishing language-specific content simple and effective. With your content management system’s (CMS) one-click translation capabilities, you can convert your message into dozens of languages, ensuring your reach your entire workforce in their native tongue.
Ensuring the intranet is readily available and accessible through a mobile application is also critical. A mobile application means those employees on the frontline still have full access to the intranet no matter where they are stationed. Features such as offline reading and push notifications also mean they do not miss out on any important company news or updates.
"A significant portion of our corporate team members are out in the field or on the road, so we knew we had to supply them with a mobile option to ensure they stay connected with news, announcements, and information. Our franchisees want information on demand, and ZNET allows them to view it on their own time while still getting real-time alerts."
Andrea Griffith - Director of Corporate Culture & Communications at Zaxby's
In addition, to enable greater collaboration, communication, and efficiency between employees, it’s important to have digital enhancements on your intranet that make it accessible for those employees that have visual, auditory, and in some cases physical impairments. Look for intranets that are WCAG 2.1 AA compliant, have keyboard navigation user support, and screen reader and narrator capabilities.
Keeping your intranet fresh
Once you know to create an intranet, you’ll also need to think about successfully launching it and ensuring long-term adoption. Luckily, we’ve also got a whole guide for that which you can read here! But it’s worth remembering that the best intranets withstand the test of time by adapting to suit the evolving needs of the workforce. As you launch your intranet and beyond, keep measuring, testing and listening to employee feedback.
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