Intranet Launch: Success or Failure?
You have been tasked with the project of putting together your company’s new intranet. After spending X amount of time adding content and designing your intranet’s look and feel, you’re finally ready to launch.
Now you ponder – how do I make this intranet launch successful? After investing so much time into building your intranet, questions you may ask yourself are:
“How do I encourage our employees to start using the intranet?”
“Will the users be able to find what they need on the intranet?”
“How do I mitigate me being only person to training employees on the intranet?”
The best way for your users to get the most out of your Intranet solution, is to provide them with intranet training.
Employee Training: The Secret Sauce
Training has a special place in my heart, as I was a long-time trainer for another software solution. During this time, I saw how crucial training was for successful implementations of software into a company.
Educated users can get the most value out of the product because they know exactly where to find what they are looking for. With the right tools your employees can contribute to the growing wealth of knowledge an intranet can provide!
Intranet Training: Getting Started
From a new client’s perspective, finding the right place to start can be overwhelming. Luckily, starting at the beginning, your intranet homepage, tends to be the best place since it is what most employees will interact with first on your intranet. Therefore, it is the best place to showcase what is available for intranet training. Having some quick links on your intranet homepage to intranet training tutorials is an easy way to get new users started in the right direction.
Last month our Lead Support Tech, Ayendra, wrote fantastic blog on Designing an Effective Intranet Homepage. If you haven’t had a change to look at it, I highly recommend it as a good tool for facilitating employee engagement on your intranet.
Means to Deliver Intranet Training
There are many intranet tools and applications to help deliver training on your intranet, including:
Tutorial Builder
One of the best ways to teach your users how to navigate throughout the intranet is to use our Tutorial Builder application. Tutorial Builder allows you as the intranet admin to customize walk-throughs for your end users to help familiarize them with their new intranet’s features and lead you well on your way to improving your intranet launch.
Your trial of Intranet Connections comes with a variety of pre-programmed tutorials to teach you about some key features within the intranet. These tutorials were all created by using the Tutorial Builder application.The best part about the Tutorial Builder is that it allows you to customize the content you want to introduce your users.
Training Calendar
Since everyone has different learning styles, you may find that some employees would rather have someone show them how to use the intranet than to learn on their own through tutorials. If you find this is the case you can always set up internal training sessions where you guide your employees through the intranet in person. To easily manage registration for these sessions, simply add a link directly from the intranet home page to the Training Calendar application. The Intranet Connections training calendar is so easy to use, any employee can sign up directly from your intranet homepage.
The training calendar allows your employees to view the available training sessions in a simple calendar format and fill out a registration form online. You can then use the application to monitor student registrations, send out automatic confirmation emails, and monitor when the class is getting full.
Form Builder
Lastly, the power of the Form Builder application allows you to create credentialing packages for new employees online to help them get familiar with utilizing the intranet to find what they need. These online forms can contain embedded videos, case studies, images and other tools which can be a valuable part of employee onboarding packages.
The test functionality within the Form Builder application allows you to quiz employees on what they have learned and gather feedback on how you can improve on the onboarding process to make it easier for your employees to find what they need on your intranet.
The Power of Intranet Training
The intranet can be a powerful tool for all of your users and help to increase the efficiency of their day-to-day tasks. Offering training on key intranet tasks can help to build employee confidence, so that they can make the most out of your intranet.
Do you have specific ways you have offered training on your intranet and helped to improve your employee experience? If so, I’d love to hear about them! Please leave your comments below.