If a Gitnux Market Data report from 2024 is to be believed, nearly 2/3 of organizations globally use an intranet to enhance their internal communications.
At the same time, nearly half of those using a company intranet find it difficult to work with.
In real terms, this means people are using intranet, but not doing their best work.
At LiveTiles and Omnia, we have diagnosed many of the reasons why even progressive, high-performance organizations may have intranets that work against them, and in our experience, one theme has come up time and again: a lack of relevance.
As we have stressed, “an intranet for everyone is an intranet for no-one” – and it’s why a company intranet will only achieve every strategic objective you have if it adapts to the individual ways in which employees work.
If you read on, we will explain why you may need to rethink what personalization means in your intranet, and a few ways a SharePoint intranet like LiveTiles can leverage personalization to make your organization’s intranet essential again.
What do we mean by intranet personalization?
At its heart, an intranet is an employee-centric digital tool, which is why one of our favorite definitions of personalization from Forbes reflects that:
“At its core, personalization in a digital experience means ensuring employees feel heard and understood.”
Already, you may know that your company intranet is the product of your team listening to and responding to your employees’ frustrations (it reduces the number of tools they need to use, increases collaboration and makes finding information easier.)
However, whereas a ‘one-size-fits-all’ experience may have delivered those benefits once upon a time, ‘visionary’ leaders in intranet are putting the focus on personalization as the core of a modern intranet. Why?
Why do we need to rethink personalization in a modern intranet?
If we return to the statistics that we started this article with, we learn that intranet usage is widespread among large organizations, yet equally, intranet causes an unacceptably high level of employee angst.
Most importantly, however, when 4/5 employees do not see their current intranet as an indispensable tool to do their work, it shows there is a major gap between what they need to work effectively, and what their intranet is providing.
This is vital to understand because, increasingly, poor digital experiences are causing far-reaching strategic problems, such as low productivity, disconnection, and can even drive employees to quit.
Fundamentally, personalization matters because it enables you to reposition intranet as an essential tool in the context of the individual employee, their role, and their personal preferences.
(Or, in other words, personalization makes intranet relevant again.)
How do the best intranets handle personalization?
For end-users of the best enterprise intranet platforms, personalization has evolved far beyond simple UX tweaks.
A company intranet must allow employees to personalize and shape their individual digital employee experience, including:
- Which notifications they receive, and from whom (opt-in notifications)
- Which links and applications appear on their front pages (quick links)
- Which news items appear in their feeds (custom news feeds, event and group updates)
More importantly, however: this sense of freedom (and maximum relevance) to users needs to be achieved without creating more difficulty for intranet administrators… or result in potential communications gaps for internal communications teams.
It doesn’t take a lot to imagine a scenario in which employees could opt-out of essential communications, or less tech-savvy employees delete vital quick links (one of which is a compliance risk, the other creates a headache for users and admins.)
This is why, in summary, the right balance needs to be found between ensuring administrators can provide essential tools and users have the agency to opt-out of those which aren’t relevant.
That balance can be found in the bedrock of any effective internal communications strategy: data.
The winning formula for intranet personalization – features and analytics
Of course, ‘read’ notifications, mandatory tags and deadline notes can ensure company-essential content is read and policies are complied with.
However, if we take personalization back to the definition we shared earlier – hearing and understanding employees’ concerns – then your internal communications strategy needs to make use the insights that analytics and reporting can give you.
The analytics and reporting tools within LiveTiles Intranet can tell you:
- Which content pieces is being read, and by whom
- Which applications and widgets are being used
- The level of interaction and sentiment of employees in ‘social’ news feeds
Rather than ‘ring-fencing’ the features and information your employees can choose to personalize, using data is a more ‘constructive’ way of establishing the parameters for personalization.
That’s because it allows you to take a reactive targeting experience to your internal communications strategy – removing applications that are non-essential, adding features your users request, and understanding when you need to encourage users to act, rather than compelling them.
It’s the resource your internal communications team needs to be able to listen and act on your employees’ suggestions, and which lets you draw the right line between ‘what you must manage’ and ‘what they can personalize’.
See the power of personalization in LiveTiles SharePoint Intranet
With LiveTiles, you can unlock the full potential of a highly-customizable employee intranet within your existing SharePoint intranet environment.
With a revolutionary Everywhere Widget for users to access their favorite tools and apps instantly, to an Operations Center that allows administrators maximum visibility and certainty over their communications strategy, LiveTiles is the best modern intranet for organizations whose employees expect the workplace to be personalized.
Want to see personalization in action? Simply book a demo to see how you can transform your organization’s SharePoint Intranet with LiveTiles.
