An intranet is a valuable business tool that can be used to significantly enhance your employee engagement. However, many businesses can consider intranet portals to be dull or uninformative. When your employees are unengaged your business is at risk of losing time, money and people. Fortunately, there are steps you can take to give your intranet its mojo back and re-engage your employees in the process. Here are our top five tips:
Keep your content fresh
Sharing regular, informative content is a great way to openly encourage engagement amongst your workforce. This could be the latest company news, information about new-starters, fresh blog content, or industry insights – the important thing is that your employees have something new to engage with every few days. But, coming up with fresh content everyday can be difficult and time consuming, right? Following these tips should make the process a whole lot simpler:
- Create a content plan so that you know what you need to write and share
- Make seasonal plans and be sure to familiarise yourself with notable days throughout the year to keep your content interesting and relevant
- Keep track of company on-goings so you can prepare content accordingly
- Try and have a content pipeline ready one month in advance, so there is a constant stream of activity — long waits between new content will mean you lose momentum
- Incorporate an external news feed or a Twitter feed,to give an area of content that’s always updating with current affairs and news
- Assign a team of ‘intranet ambassadors’ who are responsible for updating the intranet and generating ideas for fresh content
- Have an ‘intranet champion’ in each department who is required to create one fresh blog post per week. This will not only break-up their day-to-day activity, but will help with cross-communication between departments and encourage other staff to read the posts.
Use eye-catching imagery
They say that a picture is worth one-thousand words, so why wouldn’t you support your content with striking imagery?Images, videos or fun GIFs will instantly boost the appeal of your intranet software, as they break up the text and act as a hook for your important content. A bulk of text, with hundreds and hundreds of words, can be overwhelming, so shake up your content by displaying information in an ‘easy-to-digest’ infographic or by visually representing data in graph form.
Be inclusive
The key to a successful intranet is that everyone in the company gets involved. Your intranet should encourage two-way communication between you and your staff. Invite employees into discussion by posting content that makes people think, act, comment, or even just laugh! Your content doesn’t always have to be business-focused; you can have a bit of fun with it. Use your intranet as an opportunity to celebrate an individual or team achievement – this keeps everyone interested and supports workplace well-being as your colleagues will feel recognised and appreciated.
Look at the stats
Learn what your employees are engaging with by analysing the data from your intranet and use these insights to drive future content. Consider what content is most read, or interacted with, update frequency, the layout, and the use of imagery to gain an overview of what performs best in your company. You can also analyse what your employees are searching for to complete ‘needs analysis’, which will highlight what your intranet is missing. This data can then be used to devise a content plan, based on user demand.
Survey your users
This might seem an obvious one, but you can gain a wealth of knowledge by simply asking people what they think. Create short surveys or polls to find out what your employees do and don’t like about the content they’re seeing. Be sure to share the results and implement the changes as this shows that the company listens and acts upon user feedback and requests. Surveys should be completed every couple of months to ensure that your intranet is constantly progressing.
