In my previous blog I talked about how you can nurture your intranet engagement. Here I wanted to highlight one of the many intranet challenges of how to encourage colleagues to upload and complete their intranet profile information. Everyone who accesses their company intranet will need to find another colleague on a regular basis. As with many social media platforms, the joy that the search has returned the name of the person you are looking for can be quickly overtaken by disappointment if the search result displays an empty or partially completed profile.
How can you encourage colleagues to update their intranet profile page? I’ve included some thoughts below that you might find helpful.
1. Photo Upload:
If you have company photographs this should be straightforward. They are usually not the best photos ever taken, but at least you can ensure that every colleague will feature an image next to their name. By including their company photo, many will update their own to one to their preferred image very quickly!
2. Host a competition:
With Valentine’s as an example, you could hide hearts on some colleagues profile pages and then publish clues to find the colleagues and the hearts. The person who locates and names all of the hearts first wins a small prize. This could be positioned as a fun getting to know you game.
3. Lead by example:
Make sure that your senior management team’s profiles are fully complete and updated regularly. If you want everyone else to take time to update theirs, you need to lead by example as it will send a message that profiles are important.
4. Make it part of the induction process:
For new starters going forwards, can you make the process of creating their intranet profile part of the induction process? This would ensure that they are aware of why they need to do it and keep it updated.
5. Internal PR:
As part of your ongoing intranet marketing campaign, you could include examples of how great profiles have enabled brilliant connections to be made and the business benefit of that.
Within your own organisation, does everyone have a complete intranet profile? What tactics have you used that have worked? We would love to hear about your experiences. If you are looking for intranet inspiration I’d like to invite you to come along to one of our Showcases.
