If You Build It, They Will Not Come...

There are employees that ‘get it, there are keeners and the curious, but most employees need a little nudge to use the intranet. Firstly, of course, the intranet must offer value – relevant content and tools – before employees will visit.

As I outlined recently in Intranet usage: what is considered ‘good’ traffic?, intranet usage depends on a number of things including:

If however the organization has a healthy culture and places a high value on communications where employees want to the use the intranet (and have access) because the intranet is of value then a large majority of your employees should be accessing it every week.

Here are some examples by some leading companies with great intranets:

Those of course are leading companies with leading intranets built and improved upon over many, many years. The average organization is far behind.

Notwithstanding great content and tools, even great intranets need marketing. Pulling from the best practices of some of the above, and many other trail-blazing organizations and intranet consultants, here are some tips for improving employee usage of the intranet:

1-     Default home page – make the intranet home page the unalterable default home page in every employee browser. Some employees will complain during the first week after the change, but those complaints will disappear quickly if the intranet if the home page is updated regularly.

2-     E-newsletter – send out a weekly or twice weekly e-newsletter to employee mailboxes with news highlights and links to the full content on the intranet.

3-     CEO involvement – publish regular Q&A stories with the CEO, and/or webcasts, and/or a hosted online chat.

4-     Contests – nothing sells like a prize. Reward usage and readers with prizes by hosting online contests or quizzes (polls).

5-     Sticky tools – think beyond news, forms and policies to ‘sticky’ tools that aren’t critical to the business, but will be used by employees such as: cafeteria menus, online classifieds, weather forecasts, employee discounts, etc.

To build an intranet is not enough to inspire employee use. Like most things in business, the intranet has to be marketed so those employees that are not keeners and propeller-heads will come and visit.