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Modern intranets are never complete. There’s always more to do to improve the user experience, drive adoption, make the content better, add new features, drive integrations and make it more accessible. One of the reasons for this is that modern intranets perform such a wide variety of functions and incorporate many features – there is always more you can achieve.
It is also because intranets continue to evolve, ready to absorb new technology advances such as generative AI or the latest tools that have been released across Microsoft 365. Intranets also change over time as employee needs and expectations change too, and new organisational requirements emerge such as supporting hybrid working, or dealing with changes triggered by mergers and restructures.
But with so many potential options to improve an intranet, often the question for intranet teams is “where should I start?” In this post we’re going to explore some common objectives to improve your modern intranet that we commonly find our customers and industry contacts want to achieve.
Modern intranets are alive and kicking
Before we dive into the objectives, it’s important to bust some of the myths around modern intranets. There are some doubters who say that intranets are no longer relevant or that they are even “dead”. Occasionally it’s something you find in marketing material from vendors wanting to sell alternative solutions, but also unfortunately sometimes you hear it from stakeholders inside organisations. Believe us, it is nonsense and is often because a stakeholder has an outdated and uninformed view of intranets as just static repositories of content, that is about fifteen years out of date.
Intranets are very much alive and kicking, despite being on part of the workplace technology landscape for over 25 years. Virtually every large organisation has an intranet, some having invested millions of dollars over the years. Microsoft continues to position SharePoint as “your mobile, intelligent intranet.” And intranets continue to outlive every predicted technology wave that threatens to kill them off for good such as social networking tools, Microsoft Teams and mobile employee apps. One of the reasons they have survived is because they continue to absorb new features and capabilities, and have provide flexible, scalable and adaptable to both employee and organisational needs.
At the same time, its important to acknowledge that many intranets are not great and are generally not a solution that employees love. So, let’s explore some objectives to aim for to make your intranet better in 2024.
1. Refresh your strategy and deliver on new goals
Many teams develop a strategy when they are first creating a new intranet. This is (hopefully) based on user research and engagement so that the intranet is created based on a thorough understanding of employees, their needs and their pain points. While that initially helps deliver a user-centric intranet, the strategy is not always refreshed to reflect new and emerging needs. This means that a strategy can become less relevant as it ages.
If you haven’t checked in with your users and stakeholders recently its worth doing so in order to refresh your strategy and define your specific objectives. Undertaking some user research – even if it relatively modest – can help you to keep your intranet relevant and user-centric.
2. Make your content better by establishing the right governance
Having good quality content is essential for every modern intranet, supporting adoption, value and trust. Every piece of content should be:
- Purposeful
- Accurate
- Timely
- Engaging
- Findable
- On-brand
- In accordance with publishing standards.
Virtually every modern intranet has room for improvement when it comes to its content, particularly when there is a decentralised publishing model when it can be hard to maintain standards.
Having an objective to improve your content and then introducing governance to help keep it that way brings tangible benefits to your intranet with everything from renewed trust to improved findability.
Typical activities to improve content and introduce governance include:
- Having a content audit and removing any old, out-of-date content.
- Introducing content and site review processes using automation where possible so authors review the pages they are responsible for on a regular basis.
- Introducing and defining new publishing standards.
- Retraining content contributors to improve their content.
- Creating a self-serve resource to support editors and authors.
- Revisiting intranet site templates to support good standards.
- And more!
3. Evolve towards being an ‘everything intranet’
Here at Content Formula we’ve recently been talking about the “everything intranet”, a new concept for intranets that guarantees adoption, engagement and value, and an intranet that employees final love.
The everything intranet is a vision for how the modern intranet should now be built. It provides everything an employee needs for their working day – finding information and completing tasks through a consistent, easy-to-use and hyper-personalized experience.
There are various different ways to move towards being an everything intranet, but one of them is to deliver meaningful integrations with leading enterprise systems so that employees can view data and complete simple transactions, without leaving the intranet. It can also involve deploying solutions based on Microsoft 365 such as LMS365 (a learning platform) and Xoralia (a policy management solution) that integrate seamlessly with the intranet to be effectively one experience.
4. Improve your findability
Perhaps the most repeated complaint about the intranet is that they can’t find what they need. A modern intranet should aways help find the content, people, apps, document, information and answers they need to help them get things done and carry out their role. This saves time but also reduces frustration – there’s nothing worse than not being able to find what you need.
Employees find that they need through search, navigation and also browsing particular areas. Even in the most advanced intranets there are always improvements that can be made to improve findability. The good news is that there a myriad of practices that will make findability better, some of which are actually more to do with your content rather than say your search.
Tactics to improve findability on your intanet during 2024 could encompass one or more of the following:
- Revisiting your information architecture and navigation so it is more user-centred, for example based around tasks, using terms familiar to your employees.
- Removing old and irrelevant content so it does not clutter the search.
- Training your content authors to better tag their content to aid filtering and improved search results.
- Gathering search feedback and analysing search metrics to make iterative improvements.
- Using best bets (promoted results) for common search terms.
- Making some custom changes to improve the search experience or integrating results from other repositories.
- Creating structured collections of knowledge so people can find what they need, for example creating a central policy library using a solution like Xoralia.
5. Support productivity and efficiency
One of the jobs of a good intranet is to improve productivity and support efficiency by helping employees get things done and complete tasks quickly and efficiently. However, not all intranets do this as well as they could do and there are usually certain improvements that can be made to help aid task completion.
Aiming to optimise the intranet to improve productivity can be done in several different ways.
One way is to provide “how to” self-service content to help employees complete tasks without having to ask different support functions questions, relieving pressure on busy help desks. A popular format for this is to create a library of “How Do I” pages that provides one source of truth for informative, process-led content in areas such as HR and IT. Providing resources on different resource hubs that also points users to the right contact can also make a big difference.
Another way is to use integrations to help employees complete simple transactions without even leaving the intranet – see more detail above on this in our point about the “everything intranet”. This can raise productivity not only by saving time but by reducing context switching which is inefficient and impacts user focus.
Using an app launcher web part where employees can easily reach all the other tools and apps they need across the wider digital workplace can also be very useful, while improving the findability will always save time in helping employees get things done.
Finally, there are also opportunities to improve specific processes using workflow, automation and more, again all delivered via the intranet. Collectively all these approaches will positively impact both efficiency, productivity and even costs.
6. Drive continual improvement by bridging feature gaps
Intranets are never finished and those that thrive are often driven by continual improvement through a series of incremental additions dictated by ongoing user feedback. One of the great things about SharePoint is that it is straightforward to add new web parts, so you can extend the features of your intranet. There are some excellent web parts that are available out of the box with SharePoint Online. However, there are also some significant feature gaps too.
Our Lightspeed365 intranet product expands the web parts available for your SharePoint intranet. You can drive the improvement required for your intranet to support adoption, value and more through adding a wide variety of different web parts.
Lightspeed365 makes it easy to create a beautiful and powerful employee intranet in SharePoint and Teams.
7. Open up intranet access through Microsoft Teams
Many employees spend their day in Microsoft Teams and it can be very useful for them to be able to access a SharePoint intranet through Teams, meaning intranet content is available more directly in the flow of work. Frontline employees can also view the intranet through the mobile Teams app.
Delivering the intranet through Microsoft Teams is a great way to add value to any modern intranet. This is usually achieved using Viva Connections, which is bundled free with your Microsoft 365 subscription.
Improving your intranet during 2024
There are multiple ways to improve your intranet during 2024. We’ve provided some popular suggestions for high-level objectives that we know can make a difference, but there are many others. The main point is to do something. Technology, organisations and employees never stand still. Inevitably this means that if your intranet stands still it will start to decline in value.
If you’d like to discuss how you can refresh your intranet in 2024 then get in touch!
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