“If you build it, (t)he(y) will come.” This is the lesson learned from the 1989 cult-classic Field of Dreams, starring a down-to-earth, dreamboat farmer, played by Kevin Costner. The tagline for this movie furthers the dream saying: “If you believe in the impossible, the incredible can come true.”
The key takeaway here – Dream It + Build It = SUCCEED.
This is exactly what happened when you dreamt and built your intranet, right? Okay, it may have taken a little more planning, a bit more strategy and a ton more ongoing execution than the dream, build and succeed process, but you are getting there. I am here to help with this journey, with 7 helpful tips that will make that dream to drive intranet adoption a reality:
Tip #1: Make Your Intranet Memorable
Google, Kleenex, Xerox, Tylenol, Uber – what do all of these companies have in common? They are memorable. They have actually coined a phrase from successfully naming and creating demand or user adoption of their product. We now say – “Google It”, “Do you have a Kleenex?”, “Make a Xerox”, “I need a Tylenol” and “Call an Uber”. These companies integrated the name of their product with the action or need it fulfills. Take notes, this is an important tip to consider when naming your intranet.
Your intranet name should be memorable, meaningful and resonant with your employees to drive intranet adoption. The generic intranet titles of Connect, T-Web, or <Company Name> don’t inspire action or engagement with your intranet.
Drive intranet adoption with an intranet name that captivates your employees and/or addresses what you can do on the intranet. Our customers have come up with some fantastic names that have led to successful engagement and intranet adoption, such as:
Dwight (Pima Federal Credit Union) – The Employee Know-It-All
The Pantry (New Seasons Market) – describes everything you’ll find on the intranet
Insight (InTouch Credit Union) – describes what you’ll gain from using the intranet
Fetch (San Diego Humane Society & SPCA) – describes retrieving information and resources on the intranet
What you name your intranet is integral to engagement, interaction and ultimately successful intranet adoption. You can leverage your employees and their great ideas by launching an Intranet Naming Contest to get your employees involved and invested in the name as well as on your intranet.
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Tip #2: Make The Intranet Personal
I don’t know about you, but one-size fits all is frustrating. As a 5’11” female, I can assure you, one-size does not fit us all! The same goes for your intranet. Not all your employees will want to view the same content, resources, feeds, etc. Having areas of the intranet that can be personalized to their preferences certainly drives intranet engagement.
Some ways you can allow employees to adapt their intranet experience to their preferences is through:
Personalized Employee Workspaces
Personal Bookmarks & Tools
Customizable Employee Profiles
User Set Alerts & Subscriptions
Open Employee Message Boards
Follow Colleagues Subscriptions
Employee Status Updates
These are just a few ways your employees can customize the intranet to their own preferences and uses. The more employees feel like they own or have a stake in the intranet, the higher adoption rate you will achieve.
Tip #3: Make The Intranet Essential to Work
In today’s knowledge driven economy there are tools we cannot live without to perform our daily tasks, such as email, the internet and the Microsoft Office suite or Google Apps. Why isn’t your intranet one of these tools? You haven’t made it essential to your employees daily work tasks yet, but there are many ways you can.
Our customers that have achieved the highest adoption rates have incorporated the intranet into the operations and daily workflows of their organization. One example of doing this effectively is through Centralized Document Management. Making the intranet the “go-to resource” for all approved documents in which employees are only allowed to utilize the documents found on the intranet makes it essential to daily work tasks.
Another means of integrating the intranet into daily activities is through automating processes online with Automated Approval Workflows. Our long-time customer, Rio Rancho Public Schools, has done this with a forty-part employee onboarding process in which each party is notified of the task they need to complete at the appropriate time to properly onboard a new school employee. To learn more about this, check out our intranet case study featuring Rio Rancho Public Schools.
Obviously using the intranet for essential communications is a no brainer, but not every organization can achieve the transition from corporate-wide emails to online communication. Making the intranet essential to internal communication requires a transition period and retraining your workforce on where to look to find the answers and latest information they seek. There are many tools to help with this on your intranet, such as:
Company News: moving all company announcements, news and information online and central
Event Calendars: plan, schedule and inform employees of events through the intranet
Alerts & Subscriptions: when adding new content on the intranet, set alerts to notify employees
Team/Department Sites: share critical information specific to a team or department only
There is an abundance of communication tools built directly in your intranet, you just need to pick the best tools that will engage your unique workforce, making it essential.
Tip #4: Make Intranet Adoption Easy
Apple is known for designing products that have a sophisticated, clean design but are incredibly easy to use and adopt. Apple’s cult following that tunes in just to hear a keynote address about the new products attracts millions of viewers, which is a testament to the fact Apple has achieved the trifecta of clean, simple and sophisticated design and usability.
How can you do this with your intranet? Through intuitive design/navigation, infallible intranet search and interactive training. The combination of these three can make any employee fall in love and happily adopt the intranet.
Intuitive Menu Navigation & Design
First, intuitive design and navigation. There are many ways to organize your intranet, but keep in mind simplicity is key, less is more and be direct.
With Mega Menu Navigation you can easily expand the real-estate of your traditional menu navigation by up to four times. Your global menu navigation on the top of your intranet should easily direct your employees to the primary areas of your intranet with ease and clarity.
Additionally, you can add a left navigation to your intranet home page, team site or simply any webpage to provide employees access to quick links they use daily, such as a common form, document, site or resource (internal or external to the intranet). Here you can also decide if using a task-based menu is more advantageous for your users (e.g. Complete Your Timesheet vs. Timesheet Form).
Super Intranet Search
Do you remember the early days of internet search engines, when there were no magic algorithms (I may be dating myself a little here)? When internet search seemed as archaic as those automated phone systems that never recognize my voice (e.g. Did you say “Call Bongo, there is no Bongo in your contacts”). It is an incredibly frustrating experience and you end up giving up before completing your intended task.
Unfortunately, many employees have had this experience with poor intranet search. They have given up using search on their intranet all together because it never finds what they need, with countless hours wasted and productivity halted. Believe it or not, accurate intranet search is critical to the success and adoption of your intranet. Not many intranet buyers consider this when researching intranet solutions, but it can quickly be the determining factor between the adoption or rejection of your intranet.
First, outstanding intranet search needs to be accurate (duh!), but it also needs to allow your users to search and refine searches they way they use popular intranet search engines. This can be done with one-click search filters, visual preview displays of search results and advanced intranet options to customize searches. To learn more about revolutionary intranet search, check out our latest release – Super Search.
Interactive & Intuitive Tutorials
Last but surely not least, is helping your employees learn how to use your intranet quickly and memorably. An excellent way of doing this is with interactive tutorials that lead the user through performing the actual task step-by-step on your intranet, not simply by passively watching a video. Interactive Tutorials are incredibly powerful, memorable tools that make learning how to use the intranet and perform tasks on the intranet simple, easy and fun.
Build a tutorial to help employees complete their Employee Profile on the intranet or teach them how to complete a routine Online Form. Interactive Tutorials can be used for simple or complex procedures for end users or intranet admins. The point is leading through doing increases intranet adoption exponentially.
Tip #5: Make The Intranet Collaborative
Have you ever been on the receiving end of a one-way conversation? These conversations make you feel juvenile, useless and quickly bored. This is exactly the way your employees can feel when information is forced on them through the intranet but their opinion, comments and feedback are never requested in return. This one-way communication is a surefire way to kill intranet adoption.
There are endless tools on your intranet that can open that two-way communication channel to build collaboration and community through your intranet. A few powerful and popular collaboration tools are:
Team/Department Sites & Project Management Sites: to create areas were team members and project members have a dedicated space to collaborate.
Idea Share Exchange: a dedicated space for employee feedback on your intranet, your organization and/or other popular employee-centric topics.
Discussion Forums: running conversations on subject matters that interest, influence and impact your organization.
Tip #6: A Dynamic Intranet is Dynamite
Once you have your intranet launched and your employees online, don’t let off the gas! Too many organizations treat the intranet as a project with a start date and end date. Once the intranet has been launched and the basic tools on the intranet are available, they check the project as complete and move on. This is another critical error that can severely impact your intranet adoption.
The intranet should be a dynamic and evolving space for your employees to utilize, learn and grow. This means you MUST HAVE dynamic variables, not just static content, incorporated in your intranet, such as:
Multi-Variable Content Feeds: these feeds keep the content on your intranet fresh and relevant feeding in updates from various areas of your intranet.
Regular Blogging: blogs on your intranet from executives, departments and/or subject matter experts keep your intranet content engaging, dynamic and new.
Online Training: building training directly on your intranet with multi-media resources, online tests and course scheduling allows employees to learn and grow on your intranet.
Keeping your intranet fresh, relevant and dynamic will improve intranet adoption and keep your employees coming back for more.
Tip #7: Make the Intranet FUN!
Team building events, Pulled-Pork Wednesdays, Casual Fridays and Monthly Happy Hours all make the workplace more fun and create a sense of community beyond just working at the same organization or in the same building. Your intranet can be used to do this as well and can have areas dedicated to increasing the FUN in your workplace.
Some simple and rewarding ways to add fun to your intranet is simply through recognizing and rewarding your employees with:
Employee Recognition Nominations & Rewards
Featured Employee Feeds from Employee Anniversaries to Employee Birthdays
Shared Moment of Magic whenever a customer has been WOWed
Other ways to increase the FUN on your intranet and in your workplace is with more fun features and tools, such as:
Buy & Sell Exchange: an internal Craigslist for your employees
Recipe Exchange: for the foodies and experimentalist
Online Photo Albums: to share company events, employee travel photos and more
Incorporating FUN into your intranet is simple and there are so many ways to do this to engage employees and improve intranet adoption. Here at Intranet Connection, we update our intranet with a seasonal or timely intranet design/theme that most times involves Photoshopping employees onto different bodies or objects – all in good spirits and all for FUN.
Further Drive Intranet Adoption
Driving intranet adoption is ultimate the goal of any intranet, but the tips named above are not the only means of driving adoption. Have you successfully improved adoption on your intranet? I’d love to hear about it. Please comment below.
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