Intranet basics- tips for communications pros

By Tarun Gill on March 18, 2013 • ( 0 )

INTRANET BASICS

As communication professional, intranet is one of the most potent tools you can leverage to reach out to your employee base effectively. Remember not all messages are appropriate to be sent via email, considering employees on an average get close to 50 emails everyday from everyone, including their supervisors. Chances are important updates may just get lost in those emails.

This is where intranet comes into action and here is how you should use

Intranet is your company internal website- keep it dynamic!

Content is king we all know that, but companies only apply this methodology on their external websites not with their employee intranet. Focus on content and update it every day, it could be just pictures or interesting stories, the idea is to keep employees guessing.

Mix of both business and employee centric content

Intranet should be your one stop shop for all company and employee information. Though leaders at times will push you to host more business content, but we as communication professionals we have to find a way to strike a balance.

Make it usable

Adding employee functionalities can have a drastic effect on the intranet usage. This may include, salary slips, and reimbursement forms, policies, attendance management etc. remember the only way to make it usable is to put content which effects employee life cycle in the organization

Make it visible

What’s the point of hosting content when employees don’t even know what’s there on the intranet? Run campaigns to ensure employees know on new intranet functionalities. This may be as simple as an email or an elevator conversation with a colleague, let them all know.

Make it accessible

In almost all organizations, the Communications team is the business owner of the intranet. Hence it is our responsibility to do User Access Testing (UAT) of all the intranet links. Don’t wait for IT team to do it for you rather leverage IT to find solutions for you if the intranet links are working.

Use it as a voice of employee

Intranet is one of the most apt places to run employee opinion polls. Conduct opinion polls every day on questions related to employees and the company. Remember, the opinion poll feedback is as important as the opinion poll itself. Share the employee feedback with everyone. This will position the organization as a transparent company.