Employee intranets are brilliant business tools that, done right, can positively impact many areas of your business. In this blog post we’ll look at how you can grow your employee intranet after you have launched, the steps you can take to get more people involved and how it will impact them. To help further, download our guide to conducting stakeholder interviews and constructing your own user surveys.
Many employee intranets are delivered to solve specific business challenges, to centralise business documents, to reduce internal emails or to share and store corporate knowledge. Once you have successfully delivered your employee intranet there may be teams, departments even companies within the same group that for whatever reason aren’t using the intranet in the same way as your core audience.
Depending on your business these could include:
- Remote workers
- Factory workers
- Senior management
Typically people fail to engage with your employee intranet if they are unable to see the relevance to their job and their objectives.
To get them engaged you will first need to understand what they are looking to achieve and the barriers that may exist for them to access the employee intranet. You can use our intranet survey template for questions that can be asked to each group.
Remote workers may struggle to access the intranet as they are rarely in the office or on the corporate network. Allowing them to access your intranet from their smartphones could overcome this. By understanding their objectives you may find that the intranet can be used to support them when they are out and about, helping them to find and share best practice with their colleagues.
Factory workers are likely to not have the same level of intranet access as their office based colleagues. Can the employee intranet be available on shop floor terminals that allow them to look up stock levels, to order more inventory or even available at home where they can request holidays or view their payslips.
Senior management are a crucial audience to keep engaged on your employee intranet. One way of doing this could be to provide access to KPIs on the intranet or to have an area where senior management can share important information with each other.
Use our guide to get ideas how the intranet can add value to these groups. You may want to follow up the survey with one-on-one interviews to understand their needs in more detail.
