The intranet isn’t about posting company news. It’s not about pushing your company’s history and culture. It’s about making people’s work lives easier.

Why intranets fail

Intranets fail and, all too often, it comes down to a fundamental problem: the intranet is serving business objectives rather than user needs. It’s viewed as a place to push company news and hold internal documents, rather than something that is truly useful.

I think that the primary focus of the intranet should be on making people’s working lives easier.

You give them something that helps them out – they’ll keep coming back. In this post I want to talk about how including useful features on your intranet can be key to its success.

Pull people in

These useful features can now form the basis of your intranet. This might be booking time off, logging their expenses, whatever it is, it needs to be a useful tool that gives people a reason to need to use the system.

You can think of this in the same way that a supermarket thinks about its shop layout: people go in for essential, low markup, items like bread and milk, but will pick up a premium chocolate cake whilst they are at it.

In the same way, staff will access the intranet for the useful tools and read a company news article or reply to a forum post as they are passing through. Eventually, they might become regular contributors to the forums and start sharing your news pieces with their colleagues.

Giving them a reason to use the system, like recording expenses or booking meeting rooms, is a great way of pulling users onto the system.

An example

We often adopt this process with new rollouts of Twine. When a new company adopts Twine, we’ll tweak it, or sometimes develop completely new modules to ensure that the intranet is is a useful tool for those users.

You can see this with the work that we did Shell Ideas360. Ideas360 is a global competition that connects students to develop ideas that tackle the pressures on the world’s Food, Water and Energy resources. They needed an online space where entrants could communicate and collaborate. With our standard intranet offering, that’s pretty straightforward: we’ve got a forum area.

And the forum is great for discussing ideas and meeting teammates – definitely a useful tool. But when they have found their teammates and want to talk in private, the forum isn’t so useful. To keep people coming back to the portal, we needed to design a tool where they could collaborate privately.

So, we developed a new module: Teams.

Teams is a module where students can create their own areas and post ideas, links and information privately. Anybody can set up a team, and they can invite anybody they like to it.

Teams was the useful tool that was missing from the base product. The students needed to communicate privately, so we gave them a tool to do that. It drew people in and kept them coming back. This pulled them onto the system, regularly checking their messages from their team (we’ve now added email alerts, another way to pull them on to the system).

Once the students were on the system, students would view news from Shell, contribute to wider forum posts and tune into hangout events.

Stay skeptical

Your users will have a sceptical attitude to your intranet. You should too.

Starting with user needs rather than company needs means that you’ll have a system that people actually want to use. If you tailor the tools and content on your intranet to address these needs first, you shouldn’t have any trouble getting traffic.

With Twine you can mix and match the features that you want to include, and omit the ones that you don’t. It’s free 30 days too, so go check it out.

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