Want to improve intranet engagement?
Getting your employees to consistently use your intranet can represent quite the challenge. Despite the clear value a modern intranet platform provides, employees are often hesitant to adopt it. This can lead to poor engagement levels. These intranet engagement ideas will help you fix that.
A few of the factors that can contribute to poor intranet engagement include:
- Lack of buy-in from leadership
- Poor intranet onboarding processes
- Insufficient training courses and videos explaining the intranet’s features
- Failure to communicate the value of the intranet platform
- Unclear navigation and outdated content
If you are suffering from any of these challenges, don’t fret! We’ll go over how you can make sure your intranet is set up for success so employees learn to rely on it.
Let’s dive into a few ideas to improve intranet engagement:
#1: Build an intranet launch plan
If you haven’t launched your intranet yet, you should consider building out an intranet launch plan. Think about how you can drive your employees to use the intranet on the day of the launch.
Below are a few factors to consider when launching a new intranet platform:
Get buy-in from leadership
Any internally facing initiative starts with strong advocacy from the top. As such, for intranet engagement ideas to succeed, they need leadership support. If the leaders of your company are not actively promoting the new intranet , you won’t see high engagement levels. Get leadership to become advocates for the new platform and have them emphasize the importance of its adoption.
Promote the launch
There are several actionable steps you can take to effectively promote the launch of your new intranet. This includes sending out emails before the intranet is launched, hosting webinars detailing how to use the intranet, conducting contests, offering prizes, and more.
A few examples:
- Host a competition to name the intranet
- Complete an intranet training course and you are entered into drawing to win a prize
- Offer incentives for employees to join virtual meetings/webinars to learn how to use the platform
#2: Host important content and resources on your intranet
Use the content management system (CMS) within your intranet to build a resource library for your organization. An effective CMS will allow your company to segment access to resources. This ensures that employees are only seeing important information that pertains to their job.
Furthermore, if the intranet becomes the easiest way to find the content people actually want or need to see, they will naturally gravitate towards it. Sometimes the best intranet engagement idea is simply to make your employees’ lives easier by organizing content well.
Also, when content and resources are properly hosted within the intranet, it removes any duplicate file versions. This can help declutter your employee experience.
A quirky example to ensure employees are visiting the intranet daily is publishing your company lunch menu (if you provide lunches) daily on the platform.
In doing this, you can be reasonably sure that employees will go to the platform daily.
Think about what your company’s ‘lunch menu’ is. What piece of content will get employees visiting the intranet every day? Is it a daily newsletter? A weekly agenda? Once you identify what that ‘high-traffic’ item is, you’ll see a spike in recurring intranet engagement.
#3: Replace existing systems
A new intranet platform can replace a lot of old systems and applications that were in place. Your employees may have become accustomed to these old systems and do not want to replace them. When this problem occurs, stress the value impact of an organization-wide shift to the new intranet.
A key step to driving high intranet engagement is ensuring that the majority of your employees are switching over from old systems and centralizing their work within the intranet platform. For this reason, it is crucial to work with a modern provider that has all of the essential intranet features you need to create a single source of truth for your employees.
#4: Hyper-relevant, personalized content
Another way to improve employee adoption of your intranet is by tailoring the content within it to your individual employees. Segment your employees into groups based on their department, office location, projects they are working on, and more. In doing this, you can provide them with highly relevant information and resources that directly pertain to their job.
You can remove the clutter that can often come with seeing countless messages and information that is irrelevant. Employees are much more likely to adopt an intranet that is tailored to their specific needs.
#5: Conduct an audit
The last step in improving engagement is to conduct an intranet audit and make it easier to navigate. To do this, you’ll need to take a complete inventory of your intranet. Oftentimes, your intranet will have been contributing to a large amount of outdated content, unused pages, misplaced folders, and more.
Conduct an audit of the content within your intranet, and use it as an opportunity to make sure you are following modern intranet best practices. Make a list of folders, paths, amount of content in each and log it. Once you have a grasp on which pieces of content are repetitive or unused, remove them. Repeat this process until your intranet is filled with only relevant and current content.
Your intranet should be a place where employees can confidently go and access a resource without worrying whether it is the correct version. Once you complete your audit, you’ll see employees naturally gravitate back to your intranet as content becomes more relevant, current, and easier to find.
#6: Mobile App
With a mobile intranet, employees can manage tasks on the go, access content and information immediately, quickly respond to and collaborate with colleagues, and more. By offering a mobile app as a feature, your employees are much more likely to consistently engage with your intranet.
In addition, a mobile intranet can empower employees to collaborate on the go. By offering a mobile app, your dispersed employees can stay engaged and access content anywhere, anytime.
This is particularly helpful in connecting your frontline employees to the remainder of the workforce. As they previously had no means to communicate with desk workers or upper management, they are now 100% tapped into the workplace conversation.
MangoApps
MangoApps is a modern company intranet and employee communications platform. It provides all the tools leaders and employees need in one place so you can create a unified hub for 100% of your workforce. Unlike other solutions, MangoApps brings all the people, tools, and communications into one central hub, helping employees engage and work more efficiently than ever before. We also have a dedicated CSM team that helps our customers generate intranet engagement ideas to help make the intranet a habit for their employees.
For more information, take a look at our intranet design examples, learn more about our intranet solution, or read customer stories from TeamHealth or Great Harvest Bread.
