Internal communication is a company’s most valuable tool, and their employees are their most valuable asset – so it stands to reason that companies would want to capitalize on having effective communications with their employees. This means recognizing and delivering value to your employees – and your company intranet is one tool that can help empower better employee communications and engagement.
Studies show that companies described as “highly effective communicators” with their employees achieved 47% higher returns for their stakeholders.
An integrated digital workplace is key to establishing successful communication and boosting overall productivity within any organisation. Enterprises looking to maximise the effectiveness of their company communications by deploying an intranet solution need to identify their key stakeholders before undertaking anything.
Identifying Your Intranet Stakeholders
Your stakeholders need to be the people who will not only be involved in the creation of your intranet project from a business' operations perspective, but they should also be individuals with their ‘ears to the ground’. For your intranet to be a success, your stakeholders need to have a true understanding of your employees – their needs, day-to-day activities and a clear understanding of what they will find engaging.
Without appropriate stakeholders at the heart of your company communications, your intranet is liable to fall foul of ‘top-down’ communications with dry, uninformative, comms that prove unengaging to your employees… and is the kiss of death to any company intranet.
What to Consider When Choosing Stakeholders
Stakeholder engagement is necessary in shaping the vision of your project, and defining your goals and strategies are critical factors for the success of any digital workplace project. In simple terms, stakeholder engagement refers to the way in which you communicate and collaborate with various groups, how you take decisions and how those decisions impact on the others working in the enterprise.
1. Think About Your Goals
There may be different reasons why you have chosen to deploy an Intranet in your organization, from boosting employee engagement and talent retention, to improved knowledge sharing. Understanding the goals is the first step towards identifying the key stakeholders who have the best understanding of these areas and can help you in achieving those goals in your intranet project. Having the right person with the right knowledge to communicate effectively to your end users ensures you are able to maximise the potential of both your stakeholders and your intranet comms.
2. Get Different Departments Involved
Marketing & Comms, HR and your IT department should all have a major role in managing and leading your Intranet project and need to be a core part of this process.
3. Getting Backing from Senior Management Is Vital
You need to ensure you have the complete understanding and backing of key decision markers within the company (senior management and executives), to truly ensure your intranet project gets off the starting blocks. Not having senior management on board is one of the main reasons why so many intranets fail.
Best Practices for Launching a Successful Intranet
1. Focus on End-User Needs, Not Just On The Business
Every organisation is unique and diverse, comprising individuals from across a broad range of skill sets, objectives, roles and requirements. Therefore it’s important for your intranet strategy to be user-centric and understand what users from all levels will want. Your intranet cannot be solely focused on the needs of your organisation by delivering ‘top-down’ communications. The needs of every user are different and should be reflected in your intranet, catering to the needs of different groups of individuals within the organisation.
2. Offer Personalised Content Based on User Profiles & Interactions
Content targeting and personalization can help in targeting the right people with the right type of content. Make sure to include tagging that can help segment content based on specific topics or geo-location so that specific employee groups can receive relevant content which is useful to them. Custom homepages for new employees can ensure that they can login to view specific employment related content which can deliver all the required information to them in one place.
3. Provide Smooth and Easy Navigation Experiences
Your intranet needs to provide a high level of performance to your users so that they can get the greatest value out of it. This means that your engaging, relevant intranet content needs to be clearly structured and easily navigated. Relevant content buried within sub-sub-sub folders or links hidden at the bottom of long pages make for poor user experience. Unfortunately, most organizations fail to realize this key ingredient required for the success of the company intranet. One of the main goals of intranet is to provide better collaboration and communication and hence quick and easy navigation needs to be a top priority. You need to pay attention to the structure of information architecture, taxonomy of content areas which can make it difficult for users to find the relevant information.
For more information on making your intranet a success, see our blog:
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