If you previously been involved in an intranet implementation project, you might not be surprised to hear that getting employees to use an intranet is one of the most challenging parts of the process.
In fact, you would be far from alone if you hadn’t struggled personally. It’s believed that 9 out of 10 employee intranets fail within the first 3 years.
However, you know how important it is to get it right: not just to boost engagement, but to deliver a wider range of competitive advantages, such as nimbler knowledge sharing, greater innovation, and reduced spend on inefficient systems.
In this blog, we will give a top-level explanation of what we need to rethink about the intranet adoption process – and explain how the right strategy can build a foundation that drives sustained, long-term employee engagement.
Why is intranet adoption so important?
Before we consider how to create an adoption strategy, there is a key question to answer first: what does a successful employee intranet look like?
Different stakeholders and organizations have different expectations, but knowing that most intranet projects fail to launch, the answer to this question puts the emphasis back on adoption.
Anders Fagerlund, Intranet and Employee Experience Expert at Omnia, answered it best in an August 2024 webinar:
“The common denominator for a successful employee intranet is that it is widely and regularly used in the organization.”
Simply put, if it is widely and regularly used, it’s useful.
As basic as it seems, this gives us a guiding principle for the kind of employee intranet we should build to make it appealing for employees to use: a ‘task-oriented’ intranet that’s relevant to the everyday work of the organization’s people.
Is that easier said than done? Not with the right adoption strategy.
4 steps to improve intranet adoption and engagement
‘Strategy’ conjures up thoughts of a painstaking plan built over many months. It can be daunting to think that all the time and effort that goes into a strategy may only have a 10% chance of success.
However, this is largely because too many intranet projects start with the capabilities in mind, and lose sight of their relevance to your employees.
Developing your intranet adoption strategy is as simple as asking certain questions that help you understand what you want to achieve, and becoming more specific until you find the relevant capabilities.
The key questions for your employee intranet strategy are:
- What is the purpose?
- How do you achieve it?
- What are the benefits for the intranet user?
- What intranet capability can achieve that result?
In practice, this can work as follows:
- If you know that one of the purposes is to increase engagement and connection to the organisation…
- You achieve this by making your employee intranet a place to find and communicate with everyone in your organization.
- This translates into a clear benefit – improved knowledge sharing and employee connectivity.
- Finally, it gives you an idea of a capability to implement: an employee directory and dedicated community pages.
Once you have a list of task-oriented solutions – your employee intranet’s features – all that remains to do is to choose your intranet platform, and build the road map to implement them.
Improving intranet adoption with the right software
If you already use Microsoft 365 and SharePoint, you may already know that SharePoint intranet will be the best employee intranet solution to seamlessly integrate within your organizational digital ecosystem.
However, many of the engagement-driving capabilities, such as an AI virtual assistant, an in-depth reporting dashboard, and a real-time employee directory are beyond SharePoint’s native capabilities.
You don’t need an entirely different platform (in fact, an entirely new platform one and training can introduce another barrier to adoption).
However, an ‘out-of-the-box’ solution like LiveTiles Intranet is perfectly placed to provide best-in-class functionality on top of your familiar, existing Microsoft 365 platform.
With that simple decision made, the final step is to build the roadmap.
Build a road map with continuous improvement at its core
As you will know, the roadmap for intranet implementation isn’t a gargantuan effort to have the whole solution, every functionality, and every user ready for launch.
For a successful intranet adoption project, the roadmap is a guide, laying out your most pressing priorities to deliver in the first version, with your lower-priority functions delivered in subsequent versions.
Most importantly, however, that roadmap must be agile and flexible, which can only be achieved by building in a long-term, continuous improvement process. This is also simpler than it sounds, as it is an intuitive process of:
- Evaluating results against set targets (and collecting user feedback)
- Analysing your roadmap in light of the new solutions, and changing priorities if needed
- Improving the solution for design, features and UX
- Encouraging continued engagement, be it with training, internal communications or advocacy from internal champions
With a continuous improvement process built into the adoption strategy, you don’t just help employees engage with their intranet at the first stage – but keep them engaged in the long term.
Need help designing the solution? Get in touch with LiveTiles and Omnia
We hope that this simplified overview has encouraged you to rethink what goes into a successful intranet adoption project, and what methods can drive sustained, high engagement from employees.
The most exciting next step is to see the incredible ways in which a SharePoint Intranet solution from LiveTiles and Omnia can engage employees. From delivering an internal social network for your employees, an AI virtual assistant to find knowledge in your organization’s remote reaches, and a one-of-a-kind internal communications dashboard.
The solution is unique to you, so the best way to see it in action is to book a demo today.
