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warning signs may have been around for a while; nonetheless, it's been firmly established: your corporate intranet is outdated and in need of improvements.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 for 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 enlist 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 in line with your business objectives, you should maintain a flexible approach, as you'll need to continuously seek the contribution of other employees.
Once agreed, make the necessary changes to sysadmins, application administrator access, and review that your People Roles & groups are correct.
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 get 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 quality content isn't being added to your intranet consistently, employees won't view it as a valuable business tool. Read our guide for further advice about content management.
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 prioritise 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, facilitated by a Survey.
5. Design refresh and usability improvements
Improving your intranet's usability should be an ongoing incremental process. Changes to the main menu items, homepage layout/content, pages and design 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.
The intranet’s design should correlate with your company’s branding guidelines, but it is recomended not to replicate the company’s website, as both have differing objectives and goals. Your intranet should possess a unique design to match its employee-centred objectives. A redesign can help to clearly mark a new phase in your intranet's evolution that includes improvements or new functionality.
6. Hit the 'Reset' button
Encourage administrators to enrol on our 'Reset program' to refresh their knowledge or onboard new administrators.
Our video series is designed to cover the fundamentals of Claromentis Intranet management and is a good way to get your team back on board and understanding their responsibilities.
Once they have watched all the videos, they should feel confident in managing the Intranet and passing on this knowledge to their user base to assist with queries.
7. Review strategies that drive engagement
See our article here for advice on how to boost Intranet engagement.
Incorporate as many of these as possible into your review to ensure good adoption rates and continued engagement with the Intranet from your user base.
8. Consider relaunching
From the employee feedback, did many of them know the site was available and how to access it? Consider if it would be worth 'launching' your site again as if it were new, especially if you have changed its design, content or navigation style.
We have launch materials available for your team to use here.
9. Ask Claromentis for help
The Claromentis team are always here to help your Intranet management team with anything.
If you have any questions or concerns about your Intranet, raise a support ticket, and we will assist you.
