In past blogs I have covered how to plan your intranet but one area that is often overlooked by organisations is how to train colleagues on your new intranet. Yes your new intranet should be intuitive but intranet training is essential to ensure everyone adopts and engages with your new software.
As a starting point to help get you thinking about intranet training, here are my top tips:
- Start planning your training programme when your intranet is being developed. By doing this it will become an integral work stream, rather than an afterthought. Remember the intranet is about connecting and communicating and you need to communicate key training dates in advance of go live!
- When it comes to how to train your colleagues, a good first point of contact is your supplier. They may already have training videos, manuals, guides that you could use and include some face to face training of content contributors as part of your software package.
- Identify early on who is responsible for compiling the training manual as time for this will need to be scheduled in. Your supplier may have a generic version that you can adapt.
- Schedule in time to make some simple training videos, that colleagues can access. Even if your software provider has generic training videos that you can access, it’s always great to film your own. Yes you are using them to train colleagues but they are also great for helping you to promote your intranet and the intranet team. Invite feedback and ask if any other training videos would be useful.
- Welcoming and accessible are two very important words for intranet professionals. If you are going to train your colleagues, you need colleagues to want you to train them.
- Identify who in your organisation needs which type of training. An end user will have different needs to a content contributor or editor.
- Create an intranet help forum to enable colleagues to seek help at the point that they need it and for other end users to share their experience and shortcuts.
- If your organisation is set over multi locations, you may need to recruit some super users that can be each locations “go to” expert for day to day intranet issues. This again would need careful planning from the outset and support from senior management.
- As your intranet continues to develop you need to think about how you would manage training on any future updates.
- If the majority of your colleagues are located on one site, intranet drop in sessions work really well. They are face to face so you would need to schedule regular time slots but they enable you to find out how the intranet is going down with colleagues and understand any issues they may have.
I hope this has got you thinking about your intranet training requirements. If you have any questions or concerns about your intranet, book a personalised demo with one of our intranet experts.
