How to engage your employees with intranet to ensure maximum ROI

Having an intranet can provide immense business opportunities. It can improve your corporate culture and communication, promote collaboration, boost transparency, and make the day-to-day tasks simpler and more streamlined for your employees. 

Businesses are increasingly finding out-of-the-box intranet solutions that far exceed what was available in the past. They’re more modern interfaces with advanced tools and solutions.

Even with all the benefits intranet can bring to an organization, if employees aren’t engaged with it and making full use of it, it’s a wasted investment.

The following are some ways to get your employees engaged with your intranet to ensure maximum ROI. 

Planning

If you haven’t already decided on a new intranet solution, it’s valuable to start planning beforehand to figure out what employees really want. 

Survey your employees to find out what they like about your existing intranet if you have one, and what they don’t like. 

Once you get a new intranet solution, you can keep asking for feedback. 

Have focus groups and gather feedback from key stakeholders.

Once you choose an intranet solution, use what the information you gathered to customize it to your business and your employees. Even out-of-the-box solutions can be easily customized to your business needs.

If you already have an updated and modern intranet solution, try to explore why employees aren’t using it. 

Some common reasons include:

• Employees don’t know it’s available – you should create a dedicated onboarding program for the intranet itself if it’s new, and for employees when they get hired. You want to show employees not only how it works, but how it will benefit them in their daily life. 
• You aren’t keeping it updated – you want to ensure you’re upholding things on your end as far as keeping your intranet updated. If the intranet seems like it has old, outdated information, there’s not much incentive for employees to engage with it. 
• Problems with navigation and search: If you’ve set your intranet up in a way that’s clunky as far as searching and navigation go, it’s going to be a turnoff to employees. You want something that’s intuitive, easy to use, and makes it easy for employees to find what they need. 
• No buy-in from leadership: If company leaders don’t make the case to engage with the intranet and don’t make it a priority, why would employees? It’s critical that enthusiasm and intranet engagement starts at the top. 

Provide Intranet direct communication

Employees want transparency in the workplace, and they want to feel like they’re being heard. Achieve both of these goals and also get your employers more interested in your intranet by providing a direct channel of communication and feedback to managers and company executives. 

Make it an integral part of daily workflows

An intranet should be an essential part of the day for your employees, but it’s up to you to make that the case. 

Your intranet should be something employees log into each morning and then at night log out of.

If they want to find company updates, share ideas and collaborate, or work across departments, they should feel the intranet is where they go to do that. It should also be something that makes their job easier and boosts their productivity. 

Really think about how to achieve these goals within your particular organization. 

Make your intranet invaluable. 

One way to start doing this is by making the browser homepage for your employees your intranet. 

The intranet then becomes something every employee has to look at on a daily basis.

Then, from there, make sure you build it out with the most integral widgets and tools for your employees to get through their day. 

Also, consider the fact that throughout the day, employees will often use a dozen or more desktop applications for working, communicating, sharing and more. 

They’re moving around from app-to-app, and it’s having a huge impact on productivity. 

With a good intranet solution, you can alleviate that, and you need to sell it as such. 

Give your intranet an identity

Finally, just as you want to brand your business, you also want to brand your intranet. It needs to have its own interesting, compelling, and succinct identity. This could be done through how you name the intranet, how you design it, or a combination. 

It positions the intranet as something that stands alone within the business and yet is invaluable. 

As part of your intranet’s identity, focus on functionality but also aesthetics. A beautifully-designed intranet is going to be inherently compelling to employees and boost engagement.