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The ultimate guide to improving your company intranet

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WHAT IS AN INTRANET? BY: AMY YEE

Intranets have come a long way from where they started. With this evolution comes a need for revolution among business and technol-ogy stakeholders. We help you figure out where to start:

It used to be easy to define an intranet. It used to be, for the most part, simply a network based on TCP/IP protocols belonging to an organization, usually a corporation, which you could only access via proper authentication – generally if you were a member or employee of that organization. It also used to be mainly static content, mostly hosted on premises, and for many companies, likely became the greatest Wild West of untamed content that anyone ever paid for.

What’s the intranet today?

Today, it would be a mistake to assume that you could define it sufficiently in one or two sentences. For those close to it, it’s easy to think that saying “let’s make some improvements to our intranet” means the same thing to everyone in the same organization. However, thanks to the rising complexity of needs, proliferation of various internal and 3rd party tools, growth of content types and multiple ways of com-municating, employees no longer know what the intranet is, and what it is not.

If an employee clicks on a link on the corporate home page that takes them to an application from Workday (an HR tool), and then they go to a SharePoint site to find a policy that helps them use the application, and then they get on Yammer to check with their boss if what they’re doing is ok, but their boss is offline so instead they send them an email which gets stored automatically to their department team site – which parts of that are the “intranet,” and does it matter?

An intranet team may see individual components and how they relate to one another, but for your aver-age employee, it’s a different story. An employee has goals to reach and needs to be met, and what they often see is a continuous online work experience that either supports or does not support those needs and goals.

Let’s look at the research

Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group published a study that found that although intranets today are dramatically better designed than intranets 10 years ago, and intranets used to be better than web-sites for getting work done, intranets have fallen far behind front facing websites. This is due to the rising complexity of needs and problems that intranets must solve in today’s workplace.

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A host of other areas besides design must be considered, as well as an employee experience that meets business needs: What is the right balance of delivery methods for a piece of content aimed at a particu-lar audience (homepage, email, alert, etc.)? Which third party tools need to be searchable by enterprise search? Which data repositories should be considered when migrating information? The list continues.

An intranet is…

So what defines the intranet? It’s not where it’s hosted/stored – information can be hosted anywhere, and you may have a blended approach. It’s not about mostly corporate content being published – com-munication and knowledge sharing has become much more bi-directional and valuable information can come from anywhere in the company. For the user experience, it sometimes just comes down to brand-ing – what looks like the intranet is considered the intranet – and even this is superficial and variable for the most part.

This ambiguity is partly why we’ve seen the rise in popularity of terms like “digital workplace,” but while this is the right direction and a good term, the concept doesn’t make decision-making any easier for the people doing the planning, nor does it necessarily make it any easier for users to get their work done.

Where do we go from here?

So how do you get started on something so worthwhile, but also potentially overwhelming? We suggest that your first step be working with others to come up with your very own definition of your intranet. The objective is to come up with something that will be helpful for focusing discussions and establishing the scope of your project. Here’s a holistic model we like to use that can guide your discussion. Have some meetings with stakeholders around the following and capture their feedback (we love sticky notes for this) about:

Drivers at the core: ~ Put your user at the center. This gives you a point of focus and is likely to result in a solution that is user-centric. Who are your users? How do you define your audience?

~ Now, moving outward from what that user experiences, consider the user’s goals and day-to-day tasks. What is their work context?

What is their business context and their associated goals?

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Surrounding intranet considerations: ~ What are the different types of content that you have? What do you you wish you had? ~ Where does the content live today and how effective is it? ~ How is that content delivered? ~ What third party access/integration tools exist? ~ Who owns what? What are the processes, measures of success and other governance considerations?

Then, for the purposes of your project, define your scope by crossing out what will not be included (or by moving that sticky note to the fringe)

A user-centric model for your intranet:

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This will help paint a picture of the state of the components and structure that form your intranet, in addition to some assumptions that go along with it. For some, this might include or exclude particular data repositories, for instance. For others, it might include governance around content that is published through both email and on the home page.

It may also begin to define the scope. From there you’ll likely discover a need to re-define the scope, which is perfectly acceptable. It might look like a mind-map, messy, with different directions and arrows, but it makes your assumptions explicit and gets everyone on the same page.

Sometimes the answer is simply “We don’t know.” That’s a great answer. It opens a door.

It’s an amazing journey, and you’ll probably learn a lot. We always do.

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IMPROVING EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT WITH A GREAT INTRANET BY: RANDY WOODS

Much has been written about how your intranet can improve employee engagement, but we are often asked about how you can start addressing that today. We provide you with a few options:

Why does your intranet matter to your business? While intranets can produce tangible, measureable re-turns on investment (see Proving intranet ROI: A case study) the true value of an effective intranet lies in less tangible, but more important outcomes. Chief among these are:

~ Deepened employee engagement ~ Broader corporate alignment (this will be discussed in a companion post)

The value of employee engagementAs most leaders now realize, there is a direct relationship between how engaged employees are in their jobs and the financial success of an organization. There are hundreds of studies that have established the relationship, including:

~ Harvard Business Review found that 71% of executives see employee engagement as a critical factor for business growth

~ Gallup’s meta-analysis of studies shows that corporations with highly engaged employees have 10 percent higher customer rates, 21 percent higher productivity and 22 percent higher profitability than those with low engagement levels

~ A UK taskforce found that companies with high levels of engagement had employee turnover rates 40% lower than their low-engagement-level competitors

Clearly employee engagement matters, and yet worldwide only 13% of employees report being “en-gaged” at work. And fewer than half would recommend their current employer to prospective employ-ees.

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So what does this have to do with your intranet?

The drivers of employee engagement are complex, and you will find studies suggesting that everything from the coolness of the office environment to the meaningfulness of the corporate mission have animpact, but virtually all of these studies agree that employee engagement increases when three things happen:

1. Employees clearly understand how their job contributes to the corporate mission – how they can personally make a difference

2. High performers are publicly recognized for their efforts3. Leadership closes the loop, providing frequent, transparent updates on the success of corporate

initiatives and changes in corporate strategyEach of these actions requires sharing information. Increasingly, your corporate intranet is the conduit for internal communications. Indeed, I would argue that increasing employee engagement is becoming the central purpose for intranets in mid and large size organizations.

3 intranet tactics you can employee TODAY to improve employee engagement

1. Make celebration centralDedicate space on the most popular page of your intranet to promote those acknowledged in employee recognition programs (you have those, right?). Include their photos, and allocate significant screen real-estate. Make it clear that these people are important.

If you have too many winners to include them all on the home page then personalize the content so that intranet users see recognition recipients in their own department. This makes in-person congratulations more likely. (“The correlation between employee happiness and their rating of co-workers is 23% higher than between happiness and their rating of their direct supervisor.”) 2. Show how individual action mattersBegin publishing case studies that illustrate how individual actions made a difference in achieving cor-porate strategy success. Work to find these case studies from within each major group in the company, and then publicize them on the intranet. Use graphics or interviews to draw a direct line from individual action to corporate success.

3. Provide dashboards – with real numbers – to allMake presenting corporate wide dashboards on the intranet a priority. These do not have to be complex, but they do need to effectively convey how the efforts of employees are translating into success, or are failing to do so.

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There will be trepidation about doing this – you’ll likely hear the question: what if we don’t have good numbers to share? if the numbers are not good, your team will figure it out. If they are good and you don’t share them, they may think you’re hiding something. Bet on transparency. Do not let technology slow this down. Start with a simple graphic that is manually updated and posted – just get started:

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2 longer-term intranet initiatives to drive employee engagement

1. Make the intranet a place to do workAn analysis of 12,000 work diaries found that employees are most satisfied on days when they make progress in their jobs. Even small, incremental progress seems to underpin employee engagement. Re-envision your intranet as a place where employees actually do work and where their progress is made visible to them. Again, do not let technology slow you down – consider starting with a simple, on-demand tool like Commit to 3 or Trello.

2. Introduce an effective social intranetYes, I know that “corporate social” sounds very 2009, and social intranet projects have failed more often than they have succeeded, but when they work, they really work. There is considerable evidence:

Aberdeen and Thought Farmer showed that effective use of social tactics inside the enterprise contrib-utes significantly to employee engagement.

Keys to enterprise social successEmphasize social tactics to implement that are both fast and high impact – allowing employees to pub-licly thank each other is a perfect example. Systems like Tinypulse provide a simple way to get started.Senior management engagement – you need to absolutely insist that the most senior management lead the way in use of the social platform. Ongoing, consistent and personal input from C-level executives is critical to driving broader company adoption.

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A SUCCESSFUL INTRANET STRATEGY IN 8 STEPS BY: RANDY WOODS

Too often organizations fail at developing a strategy prior to embarking on an intranet renewal project. Avoid that mistake with our intranet strat-egy process.

Intranet redesign projects start – or at the very least should start – with a deep understanding of what you are going to accomplish, who you are going to accomplish it for and how you will measure success. An effective intranet strategy:

~ Develops stakeholder alignment ~ Provides a foundation for determining ROI of your efforts ~ Ensures the real needs of your real users are addressed ~ Provides a road map for going live and life beyond launch ~ Ensures you have a plan for long term ownership and maintenance

Nonlinear’s 8 step intranet strategy process

We will drill down into each of these eight steps in additional posts in this series.

Who should be reading this post?This intranet strategy process has been designed for large organizations – more than 5,000 employees with global or very diverse work forces. Smaller organizations need to find the same answers that this process aims to reveal, but can often combine steps or begin with an predetermined set of quick wins.

Step 1: Define your business context

Before you begin contemplating an intranet renewal project, you need to:

~ Understand where you stand today: How is the intranet being used? What needs does it meet? What needs does it fail to meet?

~ Understand where you might go: How ambitious do you plan to be? Can you find an example of a corporate intranet to serve as a target?

~ Understand who you must serve to be successful: who are your users? What are their needs? How could a more effective intranet make them more productive?

~ Define how this project can contribute to the business needs of your organization: How does intranet renewal drive towards corporate priorities? How are you going to measure this? To whom will this be reported?

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Step 2: Understand who owns your intranet

Do you have clarity about who is responsible for the success of the intranet? An intranet governance plan answers this question, along with associated issues such as:

~ Whose budget will fund the intranet renewal project? ~ What stakeholders will have input into intranet priorities? ~ Who will own responsibility for adoption of the intranet ~ What counts as the intranet anyway? Top-down information? File shares? Social systems? HR’s enter-prise system?

Step 3: Laying the ground work for assessing ROI

Intranet ROI is often spoken of and very rarely actually tracked. This is partially for good reasons – most of the value provided by an intranet does not lend itself to hard return on investment calculations:

~ What is the value of a better decision made because someone could find the information they need? ~ What is the return on an avoided law suit because employees understood corporate policy?

The one area in which solid ROI calculation can be performed is in terms of employee efficiency. If you measure how long it takes employees now to complete the most common tasks – and your new intranet reduces this time – you can demonstrate time savings which have a real hard cost. To do this, you must perform a time and task analysis on your existing intranet. Otherwise, you won’t have a baseline against which to calculate the return on your intranet redesign project.

Step 4: Understanding your users

You need to understand the motivations of the employees that use your intranet; both the motivations that the intranet fulfills today and those areas where it fails. It’s important to separate the facts about intranet use and satisfaction from anecdotes and persistent myths that develop in all organizations. Non-linear employs multiple techniques to gain this understanding:

~ User interviews ~ Participatory design exercises ~ Employee surveys ~ Contextual inquiry – observing users in context ~ Card sorting exercises – both facilitated and unfacilitated ~ Statistical analysis of how the current intranet is used ~ Usability and usage testing ~ Statistical analysis of the terms that users type into the intranet search engine

The objective is to gain a rounded view of your user needs in a format you can then translate into a more effective intranet.

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Step 5: Aspirational information architecture

While you are unlikely to fully flesh out the new intranet’s information architecture during development of a strategy, it’s very useful to capture a shared vision of the intranet visually. This provides a concrete artifact on which stakeholders can discuss, and in an ideal world, agree upon. We call them aspirational wireframes and their role is to:

~ Translate strategic needs into features and functionality ~ Capture the key user needs and represent approaches to meeting them ~ Indicate potential integrations that would improve the employee experience ~ Define areas of content that might be suitable for personalization ~ Illustrate how mobile users may view and interact with intranet content

These wireframes provide a visual framework for ensuring stakeholders are aware of the possibilities of the intranet redesign and aligned on the vision for intranet renewal.

Step 6: Technology and tools

To be effective, your intranet strategy must be based on the reality of your current technology landscape:

~ Can your existing content management solution meet the needs of intranet renewal? ~ Is your current search platform effective? Can it be made more effective? ~ To what extent can desirable integrations with enterprise systems realistically be accomplished? ~ Can your mobile strategy be executed without shattering your enterprise security policy? ~ Are there other technology projects underway that intersect with intranet renewal?

Answering these questions defines the limits of what your intranet renewal project can accomplish – your strategy must live within these limits or identify funding for extending them.

Step 7: Prioritization

You will almost certainly have more needs than can be realistically fulfilled in the initial phase of an in-tranet renewal project. You will need to make hard decisions about where priorities lie. These decisions need to be informed by four factors:

1. How much business value does a given feature deliver2. How important is the feature to intranet users3. How difficult or expensive will it be to implement4. What other costs – content creation, user adoption, governance – are associated with the feature

Nonlinear commonly uses user stories and a prioritization workshop with key stakeholders to manage the prioritization process.

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Step 8: Intranet road map and the intranet strategy

All of the information gleaned and decisions made in steps one through seven need to be captured and summarized in an intranet strategy. Nonlinear usually finds that the strategy presentation has several distinct components:

~ A business objectives analysis describes how the intranet redesign project will contribute to corpo-rate priorities

~ The intranet road map visually depicts the outcomes of the prioritization exercises and puts tentative timelines on the intranet redesign project

~ Aspirational wireframes provide a visceral sense of how the project will deliver business value

~ A governance plan indicates where responsibility for intranet success lies, both for the duration of the intranet redesign project and for ongoing management of the system.

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CAN YOUR EMPLOYEES FIND YOUR INTRANET? BY: RANDY WOODS

If you are answering “of course” to this question, it’s a good thing you’re here. We look at how common it is for employees to get lost finding their intranet and what this means for your organization.This is a fundamental question and one that is apparently overlooked by more organizations than you might expect. You’d think that given all of the efforts that go into usability testing, optimizing the in-tranet search engine or providing social enterprise tools, employees would be able to find it – but all of your intranet efforts are useless if no one can find your intranet in the first place.

“Of course our employees can find the intranet!”

Are you sure about that?

We took a quick look at the top 200 intranet-related searches performed on Google using the Keyword Planner and then added up all of the searches for terms like “kenan flagler intranet” and “provena in-tranet” and deemed these “organization-specific” intranet searches. From there we hypothesized that the implied intent of these searchers was to access their organization’s intranet- then we ran the numbers:

~ People use Google to try to find their corporate intranets 73,470 times each month

~ 77% of the top 200 intranet-related searches were by people seeking their organizational in-tranet (we excluded the very popular term “intranet” from the top 200. If you do include it, searches for organizational intranets are about a third of the search volume)

~ 105 of the top 200 intranet-related search terms imply the searcher was looking for their organiza-tion’s intranet

~ And the winner for most-sought intranet? United Airlines with 8,360 searches for their intranet per month. Fairview Health Services takes the silver

The search volume for organization-specific intranet searches dwarfed such common search terms as “What is intranet” and “define intranet”

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Is this just a curiosity or does it matter?

We think it matters for 2 reasons:

1. The intranet and employee awareness: The vast majority of intranet teams focus on building an ef-fective intranet that delivers real value to users, but some of this focus needs to be on promoting the intranet to those very users. Organizations with a diverse group of employees – offsite, onsite, mobile – need to find a way to make intranet access memorable.

2. Search marketing campaigns: This only applies if you are one of the few hundred firms currently bidding on pay per click ads on Google for intranet-related terms. You are throwing away at least a third of your budget if you’re using the default broad match option. People seeking their corporate intranet are unlikely to be those who might be interested in purchasing your intranet software or service.

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PROVING INTRANET ROI- A CASE STUDYBY: RANDY WOODS

One of the most difficult parts of any intranet renewal or intranet overhaul is proving the return on the investment for finished product. We demonstrate how Nonlinear revamped an intranet to outstanding results.One of Canada’s largest telecommunications companies engaged nonlinear to reinvent their intranet, but before we launched into that project, we insisted they create a framework for the business value of the renewal project.

The Nonlinear intranet ROI methodology can be used by anyone embarking on an intranet renewal proj-ect but it’s crucial that you think about it at the beginning of the project. The concept is simple: the key source of return for most intranets is improvements in the efficiency with which employees can find the information they need. The Nonlinear approach to quantifying this improvement has five steps:

1. Analyze data on intranet use and the results of employee surveys to identify the most frequent tasks employees attempt to accomplish and the information they try to find. Select representative exam-ples of the most common attempted actions

2. Assemble a cohort of employees – ideally with a wide variety of tenure – and then watch them at-tempt to complete representative samples of these frequent activities. Determine if they can success-fully complete the actions, and, if they can, how long they take.

3. Have the intranet team and your selected partners go forth and build a new intranet using UX best practices and with an eye to the new social intranet. Return to this process once the 1.4 years re-quired to build an exceptional intranet have elapsed.

4. Assemble a cohort of employees – include the surviving members of the original cohort. Ask them to perform the same tasks on the new intranet. Time them and evaluate their success.

5. Do the math to figure out how much faster they can complete their assigned tasks with the new intranet. Multiply this by how frequently each employee attempts these tasks (your intranet analyt-ics can help here). Scale that up by total number of employees and multiply by fully loaded cost per person. If you’ve done your job right, the answer will be an exceedingly large number.

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A real world example

Nonlinear used the methodology outlined above during our engagement with the telecommunications company we mentioned at the beginning of this post. We selected tasks that represented the most com-mon uses of the original intranet, including:

~ Finding corporate forms ~ Finding HR forms ~ Access to corporate systems ~ Requesting facility services ~ Reading company news

In step two, we required a dozen representative intranet users – and we made sure they were not in any way involved in the intranet renewal project. We quantified how long it took to complete the representa-tive tasks.

About 1.4 years later a new intranet was launched and we re-conducted the original usability test. Then we multiplied the time savings by how frequently the task was attempted by an employee each week.

Task Time to complete task in seconds (original intranet)

Time to complete task in seconds (new intranet)

Time savings per attempt (seconds)

Number of attempts/ week

Time savings/ employee per week (seconds)

Find a corporate form

115 54.6 60 0.5 30

Find an HR form

103 48 55 0.25 14

Interact with a corporate system

142 27 115 5 573

Request facility services

101 19.8 81 0.5 41

Read company news

45 16.2 29 5 144

The result of the analysis is compelling – the average employee saved about 22 minutes each week.

Twenty-two minutes does not feel like an enormous time savings, but if we assume those minutes are put to productive use (and not spent on extended lunch breaks), the cumulative savings across the orga-nization are astonishing.

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When you scale the savings up to the 27,000 employees in the company, the total cost of the saved time is well in excess of $10,000,000 per year.

Sensitivity analysis, ROI and payback period

The very best part about this methodology is that you can easily adjust the primary assumptions to develop a range within which you feel confident the real-world results will fall. In this case, using any reasonable range of assumptions, the total cost of the time saved dwarfs the investment made in the intranet renewal – the pay-back period is measured in weeks at best, or single digit months at worst. We can’t reveal the total dollars invested in the intranet improvement program, but suffice to say that the the return on investment is extraordinary.

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A FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE: ALIGNING YOUR COMPANY INTRANETBY: RANDY WOODS

Your company intranet can be a vehicle for driving your corporate strategy, but only if you know what you’re doing. We’ve got tips to get you on the right track.Your corporate intranet likely generates tangible, measurable value by making employees more efficient at their jobs, but is it delivering on the far more important, intangible promise of an effective intranet?

In a previous post we discussed the critical role that intranets play in employee engagement. An equally critical intangible role for intranets lies in employing it as a vehicle through which we can ensure the whole company is contributing to the execution of the corporate strategy.

Strategy in the real worldBusiness schools allocate time and energy to helping their students master strategy development, but it turns out that brilliant strategy is increasingly futile outside the world of academia. Most organizations are unable to translate strategic decisions into real world actions; the numbers vary, but most studies suggest upwards of 80 percent of strategies fail to hit their objectives and at least half are absolute and complete failures.

The key question is “why?” There are as many answers to that question as there are corporate consultants for hire, but it is appears that a lack of shared understanding of what corporate strategy means under-pins many failures. Consider that:

~ When asked to identify their company’s strategy from a group of six options, less than one-third of execuitives were able to do so correctly – that’s only double what one would expect from straight up guessing.

~ A Harvard Business Review study reports that “fewer than one-third of senior executives’ direct re-ports clearly understand the connections between corporate priorities; the share plummets to 16% for frontline supervisors and team leaders.”

Somewhere there is a gap between the direction set by leaders and their team’s understanding.

Teams are begging for real communicationAt the same time that strategies flounder when facing the realities of execution, employees are express-ing an increasing desire to understand how best they can contribute to the organization – and where the organization is going:

~ Ketchum reports that 74% of those surveyed ranked open communication as the top-ranking attri-bute of effective leadership – but said that only 29% of leaders communicate effectively

~ TinyPulse found that management transparency correlates with employee happiness more strongly than any other factor – with a correlation coefficient of 0.94.

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Using the intranet to drive corporate alignmentBridging the gap between strategy and execution – getting everyone behind one big arrow – certainly requires ongoing and consistent communication, but frequency of communication isn’t enough. As a recent study discussed in the HBR discovered, being able to parrot the corporate strategy does not mean an employee can make decisions driven by that strategy.

Understanding requires more than repetition – it requires absolute clarity and a commitment to simplic-ity.

In most organizations, the intranet is viewed as the primary conduit of information from the senior team to the rest of the company. Used effectively, it can help provide all employees with clarity of corporate strategy by going around, through, over and in spite of, the org chart.

4 intranet tactics to deploy today to support strategic alignment1. Give a corporate strategy profileTake the 3-5 most important aspects of the corporate strategy and make these central to the most visited pages on the intranet. Support each aspect with examples of implementation and provide context for the decisions that individual team members can make to achieve the end strategy.

2. Begin thinking like a publisherYou need to provide employees with reasons to use the intranet – daily or hourly – then put the corpo-rate message in front of them. Online publishers deeply understand their job is to attract a target audi-ence and then monetize their attention by showing them ads. The intranet manager’s job is similar: get the eyeballs on the intranet pages – then convey the corporate strategy.

3. Celebrate wins – loudly and visiblyIndividual activities that directly contribute to corporate strategy should be given pride of place on high profile intranet pages. In addition to helping deepen employee engagement, this provides real evidence that others are effectively translating corporate strategy into real action.

4. Obsess about visitor statisticsYou need to know if you are successfully getting the strategic message across. Different analytics pack-ages will report this in different ways, but try to get a near real-time understanding of:

~ The percent of all employees who see strategic messaging at least once per week ~ Click throughs from high traffic pages to content describing corporate strategy ~ Comments, questions or feedback on pages discussing corporate strategy

Broadly reporting these figures – both up and down the chain of command – can help garner support for ambitious intranet projects in support of strategic alignment: monthly video town halls, social feedback loops for employee commentary, real-time dashboards sharing corporate success, etc.

By incorporating even a few of these suggestions into your company intranet, you’ll be well on your way to having an effective communications hub that informs and celebrates your employees and ultimately helps to drive your corporate strategy.

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5 INTRANET BEST PRACTICES TO START USING TODAY BY: DAN BARKLEY

Is your company intranet becoming tired and under used? You’re not alone. Spruce things up with these five intranet best practices and get your employees back on the intranet train.If you’re reading this, chances are:

~ your intranet is not in the best shape ~ you have some stake in the intranet ~ you’re having a hard time making any positive change happen

Sound familiar? Without fail, there comes a point in the life cycle of a poor or stagnating intranet where organizations paralyze themselves. As things get progressively worse, general attitude shifts to the belief that the intranet is so beyond fixing that starting to improve it is an exercise in futility. It’s like that messy garage (or basement, or back room) that has been neglected for so long that you just don’t know where to begin to clean it up and make it functional again.

This post presents five intranet best practices that you can put into action today – without CEO approval, a 7-figure budget, or a comprehensive multi-year business plan. In effect, it’s the small steps to clean-ing up that garage an hour at a time, instead of spending weeks on end without a light at the end of the tunnel.

1. Pull the team together (define and communicate the intranet roles and responsibilities)This is one of the most important items to address in providing a highly functional intranet. If roles and responsibilities are not clearly defined and communicated, an organization is relying on the general goodwill of individuals to create and maintain a valuable intranet. This rarely works, and the best case scenario is that the intranet will have a couple of valuable, yet unrelated areas that are championed and maintained by a select few unrelated individuals.

Defining roles and responsibilities can start with an initial meeting with key stakeholders to build consen-sus and define an initial organizational chart. Chances are that you already have some rough or informal structure in place, so this is a time to revisit, make necessary changes and re-establish the organization’s roles and responsibilities to address the issues that led to the demise of the current intranet.

In some organizations this step may seem next to impossible, but perseverance and planning can ac-complish some pretty amazing things, and unfortunately – it is absolutely necessary. A word to the wise: it’s important to approach this with a flexible attitude; assume that roles and responsibilities may need to evolve as the intranet evolves, so be sure not to box yourself in unnecessarily by trying to come up with the perfect organizational structure from the get-go.

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2. Make it relevant (revisit and refresh a key area to align it with employees and the business)An effective intranet will be in-tune with employees and the organization as a whole, but for any number of reasons, oftentimes intranets gradually fall out of tune. Instead of embarking on a massively expensive project to correct this problem, start small by choosing a specific relevant area of the intranet. The area needs to be of interest to employees, but also small enough that you can make positive change with relatively minor effort and time investment.

You’re looking for a quick win. Maybe it’s HR-related like refreshing the employee benefits area, or cor-porate/employee news, or something less formal like adding social or charitable events. You will need to figure out what is best for your situation based on your expertise, authority and the organization. In any case, the point of a quick win is to renew interest and generate some momentum for subsequent im-provements.

To take this one step further, define a short governance standard to support your work and ensure that this area is revisited regularly to keep it relevant. Following this standard will be within the responsibilities outlined in the “pull the team together” best practice outlined above.

3. Make it useable (implement a key usability improvement)Yes, a complete usability overhaul of an intranet can be a sizable and daunting project, but it’s not nec-essary to take this “all or nothing” approach. Often, key usability improvements can be the low-hanging fruit you’re looking for to bring users back to the intranet. Choosing the high-return usability improve-ments will depend on your particular organization, the intranet technology used, the existing design, and the proficiency of the user base – these improvements can vary widely. A refresh of the top-level naviga-tion may be important if your company has gone through a recent re-organization, but the intranet has not followed. If the intranet doesn’t reflect an organization’s structure and terminology, users will instant-ly assume that everything else on the intranet is also out of date.

A search tune-up may be a valuable undertaking and require relatively minor effort to have a significant impact. Finding the top-25 search terms and ensuring search is tuned to provide expected results can have a very positive impact and instill confidence in the intranet. Conversely, if an employee searches for “employee benefits” and the first result is a blog post from eight years ago, confidence in the intranet may be lost.

4. Make it look good (refresh branding)Like a usability improvement, a branding refresh can also have a big impact with relatively little effort, nor does it need to be an all-encompassing rebranding. Intranets inevitably stray away from the guide-lines that were originally established and after a couple years the different areas of the intranet no longer “hang together” very well. Departmental pages may look dramatically different from each other or differ-ent from the main pages. In this situation, a branding refresh may just be some rework to get everything realigned with the style guidelines already in place.

Another approach may be to freshen up the look by implementing new styles and colors through stylesheet changes. This would not need to impact structure or the core organization of the intranet, but it can often provide a fresh new look to entice users back to the intranet. A branding improvement is particularly beneficial if combined with a “make it relevant” improvement. Use the branding improvement to bring users back to the intranet, and use the relevant content to keep them there.

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5. Make it easy to improve (create resources to help the community)A successful intranet requires a community effort. A single person within an organization cannot be ex-pected to create and maintain an intranet. Publishers and contributors are necessary to provide the con-tent to make an intranet valuable. Those roles may take several forms depending on your organization and the scope of your intranet. They could be key individuals within departments that are responsible for keeping their respective pages up to date. Alternatively, they could be central corporate individuals in HR, finance, marketing or sales responsible for regular communication of important information to the broader organization. In any case, if the barrier to contribution is too high, these individuals will not be able to do their job.

Often these barriers can easily be broken down with things like standards, guidelines, training, or even simple how-to tutorials. Standards and guidelines help contributors understand what they should be do-ing so they don’t have to second-guess themselves, or worse, do nothing. Training and how-to tutorials build up the necessary knowledge and confidence in the contributors to be able to do their job. These artefacts do not need to be extravagant projects. It’s amazing how effective a 30-second informal “how-to” video can be in an organization with many diverse contributors.

Start tomorrow, or even better, start today!

An all or nothing approach can be paralyzing. Hopefully this post has instilled the notion that valuable steps can be taken to improve your intranet without massive upfront investments in time or money. These small steps are important to renew interest and generate momentum for subsequent steps or larger follow-up projects if necessary. We’re experienced at finding and realizing those “quick wins” so give us a call if you’d like some help. Now, on to that messy garage…