Supercharge engagement across your employee intranet
It might be harsh, but we've all experienced it: Legacy intranet systems are bad at attracting and engaging workers. You may even find that staff actively avoid a traditional intranet, citing outdated content and a clunky interface as reasons to stay away.
If this sounds familiar, your employee intranet is crying out for a glow-up.
A new and improved intranet is a place where your workforce can access the information, connection, and support they need to do their jobs well. It contains engaging, useful content that has employees logging in multiple times a day.
This unified platform, built around the needs of your workforce, can improve internal communications and amplify company culture. It also has a positive impact on employee engagement, satisfaction, employee productivity, and retention rates.
Ready to turn your intranet into an employee magnet? This guide will help you create a modern employee intranet, with all the essential features and tools you need to transform platform engagement and the employee experience.
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How to turn your employee intranet into a hub of engagement
Set the stage: Design your homepage to make the ultimate first impression
Get your intranet experience off to the best possible start by treating your homepage as a digital storefront. Elevate visuals and copy so they reflect the consumer-grade experience employees enjoy on tech tools away from work.
Use vibrant imagery, brand colors, and an intuitive layout to draw employees in. And put the most important information front and center. That might include company news, employee recognition content, or your latest events.
Some other must-have intranet homepage elements include:
- Clear navigation. Logical menu options make it easy for employees to navigate your intranet. Employees should be able to access all communication channels and resources in just a few clicks. You can also add a search bar and provide robust search functionality to help them uncover any and all intranet content.
- Dynamic announcements. Your intranet homepage should feature real-time updates. This makes it easy for employees to get up-to-date news — and it reassures them that your intranet provides relevant, reliable information as standard. Use embedded videos, images, interactive tools, and compelling copy to direct employee attention to your announcements.
- Quick links to essential tools. A good employee intranet platform acts as a central repository for all your digital workplace software. So whether employees want to swap shifts, view their pay stubs, or complete the next module of their training program, your intranet homepage should provide quick links to their most commonly used tools.
Also, bear in mind that your homepage will make zero impression if employees can’t access it. Frontline workers, in particular, struggle to access legacy intranet systems. So ensure your intranet is available on the devices and via the login methods that employees can actually use. That might mean honing or launching an employee app so workers can log into your intranet via their smartphones.
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Make it personal: Tailor the experience for every employee
Imagine you’re a bus driver working for a transit organization and — thanks to your organization’s employee app — you log onto the company intranet using your smartphone.
What do you expect to see on your dashboard?
Are you greeted with details of the next Casual Friday event? A celebration of the previous office lunch? A link to the latest Excel training module?
Or do you see quick links to a shift swap tool and your pay stubs? Do you see the latest route and safety updates — and a post celebrating the driver of the month?
When an intranet dashboard offers a personalized experience, tailored to the role, department, location, tenure, and interests of each employee, you can count on:
- Higher levels of engagement
- Higher adoption rates
- More intranet logins
So when giving your employee intranet a much-needed glow-up, make personalization one of your guiding lights.
Segment employees so they only receive relevant content. Allow employees to customize their intranet dashboard with the widgets and resources they use most. Use AI to surface relevant content and updates based on an employee’s intranet interactions.
Of course, there will be internal communications that are relevant to the whole organization. So there should also be space on employee dashboards for high-level company announcements and mandatory reads. These messages keep employees in the loop and connected to wider business goals.
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Keep it fresh: Ensure your intranet is dynamic and up to date
If we consider the big social media platforms as masters of engagement, it’s clear that up-to-date content is key to creating an employee intranet that your workers want to spend time on. Your intranet platform can quickly feel stale if you fail to maintain the right cadence of effective communication.
So, with that in mind, here’s what you need to do to keep your intranet content fresh.
Post content regularly
A content calendar helps you plan and create content in advance. Seeing everything down on paper, it’s easy to plan a varied mix of engaging content ideas, including news feed posts, blogs, videos, and leadership messages, while leaving space for critical updates too.
Find your comms cadence
It’s a delicate balance. You need to keep employees engaged with the platform. But you don’t want to overwhelm them with information. To find the right comms cadence for your organization, play around with your content schedule and keep an eye on platform engagement.
Like Coastal Medical — an emergency and non-emergency medical transportation organization — you’ll soon find the sweet spot. Their intranet now has a 98% adoption rate and gets 5.7 daily app opens per user.
Harness employee-generated content
You don’t have to leave content creation to your employee communications team. Encourage employees to share their own posts, photos, and Stories to create a sense of community. This informal content tends to prompt the likes and comments of coworkers.
Commit to regular content maintenance
The traditional intranet is a place where resources go to gather digital dust. Fail to update intranet content and employees come to see your content hub as unreliable and irrelevant. So keep track of publication dates and regularly audit old intranet content, updating and archiving content as needed.
Take inspiration from social media managers
Create Insta-worthy internal comms and your intranet will become irresistible to employees. So make like a social media manager and create news feed posts that are quick to access and easy to digest. Use multimedia visuals to stop their scroll and keep any copy concise and to the point.
Bonus points if your intranet has easy mobile access — especially helpful for frontline and remote teams.
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Foster interactivity: Make your employee intranet a two-way communication hub
Two-way internal communication is another intranet essential. When employees can use the intranet to build connections with coworkers and to share their ideas and feedback with leadership, they’re much more likely to hang out there.
As we’ve already mentioned, employee-generated content is a great way to increase intranet engagement. You can support interactivity using the following key features too:
- Engagement tools. Use polls, surveys, and forums to request employee feedback. If you have a willing leadership team, you can also host live Q&A sessions.
- Recognition features. Use your intranet to celebrate employee achievements — and encourage coworkers to add their congratulations too.
- Collaboration spaces. Create social Communities, where employees can exchange ideas, collaborate on work projects, and connect over shared hobbies.
- Gamification. Use progress trackers, badges, and points to gamify the intranet experience. You can give rewards in return for activities like login streaks or survey completions.
Measure and adapt: Continuously improve the employee experience
No matter how much careful thought you put into your intranet software glow-up, it’s rare to get every little detail right, first time. And this is where intranet data proves invaluable.
Analytics are one of the must-have modern intranet software features. They allow you to track intranet and internal communication metrics, including:
- Page views and time spent on pages
- The number of comments, likes, and shares associated with each news feed post
- Employee adoption and login rates
- User satisfaction scores
As well as tracking key metrics, be sure to seek feedback from employees using surveys and polls. Viewed together, this data will reveal which elements of your intranet solution and content offering are working well — and which could use improvement.
You can then set intranet performance goals and identify ways to adapt your intranet to keep ahead of ever-evolving employee needs.
Build an employee intranet your workforce will love
Make your employee intranet more magnetic and it can become one of the most-used communication tools in your digital workplace. To achieve this, you need to cultivate a social intranet platform, bringing it in line with internal communication trends and employee expectations.
Personalized, multimedia content. Opportunities to interact with coworkers and leaders. Visual appeal and an unbeatable user experience. Data-driven platform improvements.
Incorporate these social features into your employee intranet and you create a better digital employee experience. You can count on high levels of intranet engagement, a stronger corporate culture, and a happier workforce.
So what should you do first?
Start by taking a good hard look at your current intranet solution. There may be underutilized features on there with the potential to transform the intranet experience.
If, however, you feel you’ve maxed out your current intranet solution and still aren’t attracting employees to the platform, it may be time for a software switch. The best intranet software providers are built with the modern workforce and the latest internal comms trends in mind.
