A new financial year is the perfect time to take stock of what you have achieved in the last twelve months and position yourself for greater success next year. Now is the time to spruce up your intranet and remind everyone how valuable it is.
Here are eight things that will give your intranet – and your organisation – a boost.
1) Demonstrate the value your intranet delivers
Even if you are not angling for extra budget, it’s always a good idea to remind your senior team what a great investment the intranet is and the value of effective communications. Book a meeting to present or circulate a report clearly showing how your intranet has delivered outcomes including:
- Cost reductions via process automation
- Reduce time wasted searching for information
- Facilitating remote work for reduced workspace costs
- Effective communication through hybrid work challenges
- Improved Microsoft 365 adoption
If you’re in a meeting, don’t forget to ask questions as well as presenting results. What does the C-Suite want from the intranet? Do they have any requests or ideas? If you DO want to secure budget for a new and improved platform, check out our guide to Building a Winning Intranet Business Case
2) Update Active Directory
Ideally, your on- and off-boarding process keeps AD spick and span, but often when we start working with a client, their Active Directory is in a bit of a mess. Accurate staff details are the foundation of team connection and effective comms targeting.
Are there missing photos? Empty fields? Outdated team structures? Hunt them down and get it sorted.
3) Identify 3 new processes to automate
Shareable articles are great, but process improvements are so easy to quantify. If you are under pressure to prove intranet ROI there is nothing easier than demonstrating time saved by digitising a manual process. Set yourself a challenge to build one new flow before EOFY, preferably one that impacts many people to deliver the greatest cost savings.
4) Conduct a Governance review
Governance is not sexy but it is one of the only things standing between an effective, engaging platform and a sprawling wasteland of irrelevant search results and dead links. Content owners leave or change roles, hot topics come and go, new integrations require additional guidelines… governance is an ongoing activity.
5) Conduct a mobile audit
It doesn’t have to involve specialist UX consultants, you can start by getting out your phone and looking at your intranet.
- Can you access it easily?
- Does it load quickly?
- Can you read it or is the text too small?
- Are you scrolling too much? Is there *wince* horizontal scrolling?
- Are links too crowded?
6) Talk to IT
Go on, they won’t bite. Ask them if they have any ideas for the intranet – integration with other systems, any duplication or configuration issues that are hampering performance. Helpdesk might be hearing the same user problems repeated throughout the organisation or having to help content managers frequently with tricky web parts or missing templates.
7) Ask for feedback
Surveys can be overused but if it has been more than 12 months it might be time for another one. If your intranet pages have feedback capability, review the last year’s worth of submissions and try to identify themes for improvement. It can be hard to read through negative reviews of your platform but this is often the path to the most impactful improvements.
8) Clean up your content
Like keeping your house tidy, regular content review and archiving is more effective than sporadic, ruthless rationalisations, which are often rushed with a project deadline. If you’re on SharePoint Classic, it is likely there is a move to Modernon the cards in the next few years so now is the time to start thinking about what is essential and can be left behind.
With hybrid work becoming the standard, every organisation’s intranet is the central hub of information, social updates, links and resources that keep people connected and productive. If you need any guidance or assistance in planning or building new functionality or content, we are always available to help: Contact Us.
This entry was posted in Digital Workplace and tagged Digital workplace, Intranet. Bookmark the permalink.
