So, you have made the decision that you need to refresh or build a new intranet but not sure where to start when it comes to getting feedback from your organisation. When starting the journey of designing and implementing a new intranet for your organisation, you need an effective way to gather your employee intranet requirements. Any intranet designed without consulting your employees is likely to fail before it launches. People will only use the intranet if they feel it is of use to them, so it’s absolutely vital that the requirements of users are identified from the outset.
If you are an Intranet Manager or have been given the role for the duration of this project, you may want to think about the opportunities open to you to gain a solid insight into what your employees want from their intranet. No matter what your background is whether Technical, communications or marketing your approach to requirements gathering will be the same.
You may have already used some of these methods during our summer intranet review or you may be starting from a fresh. Employee intranet requirements will come in many forms and you will need to adopt the role of detective to uncover and interpret their needs.
Many organisations use a combination of quantitative and qualitative research to really understand the core issues. A good place to start is with a staff survey. You can create a survey and distribute it to the whole company and invite feedback. Here at SORCE we have created a great survey template you could use as a guide to help get you started.
We typically say that you can expect a response rate of 30-40% for your internal survey. It’s a good idea to make sure that your employee intranet survey takes no longer than 5 minutes to complete, otherwise you will see your response rates start to fall.
The Staff survey may give you volume of data and highlight parts of the business that are very keen to tell you about their thoughts and perhaps those that are not so forthcoming.
Your role is to interpret the results and identify teams and or individuals you need to speak to further to clarify or dig deeper about the way in which they use your intranet.
Stakeholder interviews are a great way for gaining more in-depth insight into your end user requirements. It’s also a good way to get buy-in from individuals and teams from across the organisation. You should plan for each interview to take 30- 40 minutes and you should base your questions on their initial survey responses (if they have completed it). For further information on Stakeholder interviews, you might want to read our blog How to get the best out of intranet stakeholder interviews.
What next? If after completing your staff survey and having undertaken some stakeholder interviews you still have some knowledge gaps, or maybe your organisation is multi-site and even global. You might want to consider holding some employee intranet requirement gathering workshops. Holding a series of workshops would enable you to build support, ask further questions and help work through any issues that may have arisen. It’s a good idea to seek some help at this point from an impartial third party. This maybe from one of your shortlisted intranet suppliers. Here at SORCE our intranet expert Martyn Green regularly hosts requirement gathering workshops for organisations.
I hope this has been useful in providing a framework for your employee intranet requirement gathering. Next time we will be looking at what type of intranet maybe best suited to your organisation.
Here at SORCE we’ve experienced hundreds of intranets of all shapes and sizes and are skilled at helping uncover opportunities to improve engagement and business processes.
As intranet software and consultancy providers our software powers the intranet and extranet for hundreds of organisations. Our clients cover a wide range of sectors from finance to manufacturing, not for profit organisations (such as charities and housing associations) as well as local authorities and other public sector agencies.
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