Intranet Managers Summer Opportunities not to be Missed

Intranet engagement is always a key measure of success and given the last 18 months, we have had to rapidly respond to how and what we use our intranets to communicate. They always were a key internal communications tool but because of the pandemic, more people than ever will have been logging in to your intranet to access critical business information. 

You don’t want to lose their interest or see your engagement levels dwindle. Use this time to plan out your content and review what’s happening internally. There will inevitably be working practices information to communicate but besides this, what else are you going to say? How will you say it? How can you get more people involved in actively creating content? 

What are the key takeaways that you want your intranet users to leave with? “Wow, great content, this is a great intranet?” or, “It’s the same old content, why is no one updating it? “ 

Create a content plan by week and by month and update this on an ongoing basis. Think about written content, documents and videos. A combination of all of these will really help bring your intranet to life. 

It’s a good time to review your intranet’s performance. See who is using it regularly, what are they doing and can you spot any problem areas? Are there some teams using it more than others? Why is this? Take time to review your stats, speak to colleagues to add insight to the numbers and see if there are any enhancements you can make to improve your numbers. 

If your intranet design hasn’t been refreshed in a while, this might be a good time to see how you can update it. Maybe a September mini relaunch would help reignite your engagement levels and help bring attention to any key new areas you’ve added. 

You don’t need a full rebrand, but maybe updating the layout, the navigation, the user journey might all help to create a fresh experience. 

During the pandemic new software may have been introduced to help keep your business operating and there might be some older software that is integrated that is now redundant. Is the new software now a permanent feature? If so, could it be integrated with your intranet? Should you remove links to the old software that is no longer needed ? 

From new starters, to remote and hybrid workers, is your intranet meeting all of their needs? Could you create new areas specifically for onboarding new starters or supporting health and wellbeing?  Take some time to explore what’s possible, speak to teams about what they would find useful that your intranet currently doesn’t have or do and draft your new plans. 

I hope this has given you some food for thought. Let’s make the most of the summer and really take time to think about our intranets, what they do now and what their potential could be over the coming months.  As always if we can help with your intranet software, please get in touch, we are here to help.