Even the most well-equipped intranet teams will experience, in varying degrees, intranet constraints. Below are some common constraints paired with some helpful tips and suggestions.

Lack of Management Endorsement

Endorsement from your management team offers many benefits - from increased user adoption to reinforcing your company’s culture. However, you may discover that there exists a lack of endorsement from your management team. If this is the case, here are some tips:

• Be open about the intranet’s vision and objectives and the organizational-wide benefits it’ll bring
• Ask for advice and try to take on-board helpful suggestions
• Give your management team an opportunity to voice their concerns and apprehensions to allow you to address them quickly
• If there’s a lack of endorsement after the launch there may be a resistance to change, or a lack of understanding concerning the software - it may be helpful to offer training sessions dedicated solely to the management team which addresses their particular needs
• Is there a communication platform for the management team to share their vision? Try to make correlations between the needs of the management team and the functionality on offer from the intranet

Resistance to Change from Staff

If you’ve been tasked with transforming, or introducing a new company intranet you may have experienced resistance from staff members. Employee resistance can take many forms, the most common being a lack of usage and confidence in the intranet - thus low user adoption rates.

Having a feature-rich intranet platform and promoting its benefits organizational-wide, may not be enough to tackle this problem once it surfaces. Introducing change can often be an uncomfortable process, despite it being positive change. Follow the change management tips below to minimise change resistance:

Awareness: During the preliminary stages of planning an intranet, it’s important to keep your employees fully up-to-date with information relating to the forthcoming changes and the proposed impact.

Listen to Feedback: There must be a genuine effort to capture employee feedback and answer questions that arise. Depending on the type of change, the communication method varies; small changes can be communicated via email but changes that will have a significant impact warrant employee meetings and face-to-face communication.

Involve Employees: Try to determine if certain aspects of a project can be decided through an employee vote, this will provide project motivation and help get employees involved.

Irregular Content Creation

Regularly updating your intranet with relevant content can be challenging if you don’t have a dedicated intranet team or individual. Adopting a decentralised content management approach will involve the assignment of content contributors from each department or business unit. These content contributors will provide on-going updates from their departments and ensure there’s a steady flow of relevant content. Additionally, enterprise social networking tools, such as Innovate, enable employees to instantly post short updates into an activity stream. These regular posts will help to keep the intranet fresh with relevant content.

Limited or No Intranet Strategy

In the absence of a clear strategy, the intranet will not evolve to meet the changing business needs. Your strategy should incorporate some of the following points:

• Current intranet problems and issues
• Staff needs and pain-points
• Why you need to change your current intranet or internal comms method
• What will be delivered or improved
• Proposed timeframes and phases
• Team members roles in the project
• Strategic business benefits fulfilled
• Long-term vision

Social Features not being Fully Adopted

Enterprise social networking tools bring many benefits to an organization, but employees can be apprehensive when they’re first introduced. A lot of this apprehension can come from a lack of awareness in the purpose of  enterprise social networking. If this is the case, lead by example - start by using the enterprise social network to post updates regarding projects you’re working on and offer praise to other employees who’ve assisted you.