The telltale warning signs may have been around for a while, nonetheless, it's been firmly established: your corporate intranet is outdated and in need of improvements. 

If you find yourself in this predicament and you'd like to start making improvements, read our tips to getting your intranet back on track:

1. Redefine Intranet Roles and Responsibilities

This is an important first step in getting your intranet back on track as it ensures ongoing maintenance and updates are systematically implemented. Without a clear definition of intranet roles and responsibilities organisations are simply relying on the goodwill of a small number of employees. It's also important to get early adopters on-board as their positive attitude and participation will positively affect the intranet's perception among end-users.

When assigning roles and responsibilities try to enrol the assistance of management-level employees as their endorsement will give your intranet a much needed boost too.

If roles and responsibilities were previously defined, it's necessary to identify the reasons why this set-up failed so that you can quickly rectify similar issues that arise in the future. Don't forget, as your intranet evolves over time in-line with your business objectives, you should maintain a flexible approach as you'll need to continuously seek the contribution of other employees.

2. Identify Strategic Business Goals  

In effect, a primary requirement for intranet success involves the alignment of your strategic business goals with your intranet's plan and vision.

When starting this improvement process to getting your intranet back on track, discuss with your management team the organisation's strategic direction to enable you to position the intranet as an aid to reaching strategic goals. As your organisation evolves the intranet strategy should correlate and attempt to support the forthcoming business changes.

3. Develop and Outline the Intranet's Content Strategy

If good quality content isn't being added to your intranet consistently, employees won't view it as a valuable business tool.

The initial part of your content strategy correlates with the previous step 'Redefine Intranet Roles and Responsibilities' as it involves the selection of content champions. Content champions are selected from across the organisation and are often chosen to represent the various departments and business units.

Overall, your content strategy should take into account your business objectives, culture, audience, content distribution and ongoing maintenance and governance.

Developing a content strategy will ensure a steady flow of relevant content is being added to your intranet - combating the 'outdated intranet' perception.

4. Talk to Employees to Discover Intranet Pain Points

Discovering employee pain points will act as a compass to achieving a user-centric intranet and will solidify it as an important business tool. If you miss this valuable step, you may end up implementing time-consuming changes that are neither relevant nor helpful. Try to find common intranet pain points perhaps experienced by a large number of employees and carefully prioritize your improvements.

The process of finding employee pain points should suit your particular organisation; it may entail face-to-face meetings or emails. A manageable approach is to segment employee pain-points and improvement requests by department.

4. Design Refresh and Usability Improvements

Improving your intranet's usability should be an ongoing incremental process. Changes to the top-level menu structure, company links area and search features like 'best bets' and 'alternative suggestions' are key areas.  The intranet design is a critical aspect of gaining user adoption and a redesign should be implemented to help guide employees in the fulfilment of daily tasks.

Again, the intranet’s design should correlate with your company’s branding guidelines but not replicate the company’s website, as both have differing objectives and goals. Your intranet should possess a unique design to match its employee-centered objectives. A redesign can help to clearly mark a new phase in your intranet's evolution that includes improvements or new functionality.