There is often a tendency with intranets to overcrowd the intranet home page in an attempt to showcase as many options as possible in hopes that users will find the resources they need quickly. I think a better approach when designing your intranet is to analyze how it’s being used and create task-driven navigation and calls to action (CTA) that speak to the most critical content and features used by your employees.
Highlight the Most Popular Content
With our intranet stats/analytics package and admin section, you can gather some data on which pieces of content or applications are getting the most visits within a specific time period. If you find that these items are not present on your home page, I would suggest you make room for them and highlight them using language that makes sense to your end-users.
For example, let’s assume you are a bank and you process many credit card applications and have leveraged the Intranet Connections platform to make this process entirely paperless with an associated workflow and approval process online. If this is something that attracts heavy usage, why not link to this item from a menu or graphic to the home page using the text – “Process a Credit Card Application”?
On the flip side, if you find you have items linked in your navigation that have little traffic, why include them at all? A better approach is to rely on a powerful search solution like Super Search that will bring up relevant applications or content centered on a simple keyword search for content that is less frequently consumed.
How to Measure Engagement
I recently took in a webinar by Andrew Wright (Founder of Worldwide Intranet Challenge), a leading intranet advisor and analyst of what makes intranets successful. In his presentation, he summarized the strong correlations found between how much time users spent on the intranet, as well as the level of interactivity, to how valuable the intranet was perceived to be. In a sense, this seems almost intuitive. If you’re spending more time using the intranet to perform your job, you’re going to consider it more valuable.
Knowing how many users you have in your organization, you can use the intranet stats/analytics tools in Intranet Connections to see how many users are logging into the software and how often. In addition, you can very easily make use of a Quick Poll or Online Survey to ask users how much time per day they’re spending on the intranet. Wright indicates the average is about 30 minutes per day, so if you find that your staff is above this threshold, it’s likely you’ve managed to implement features and tools that enable them to get their jobs done using the intranet and are harnessing more value out of the platform.
Using Intranet Statistics/Analytics to Encourage Contribution
It’s common across organizations that a select group of employees will produce the majority of content on your intranet (your top 1%). About 90% of your staff will simply browse the portal and consume information providing little added value. What a waste of untapped knowledge and experience!
How do you go about getting these staff members to share their feedback, knowledge, and collaborate to improve your company?
How about recognizing your top contributors and showcasing them to your team? In our intranet stats/analytics package, you can see who your top contributors are, and you can use an Employee Profiles Feed to indicate which employees are your top contributors for the month. You could go as far as offering a financial incentive or other rewards for making this list.
Do you have some staff members who are subject matter experts but are not engaged? How about creating an area in a site, application, or page hierarchy and delegating ownership rights to them to publish content?
Intranet aka The Digital Workspace
Intranets have come a long way over the last decade and it’s no longer sufficient to use them solely as top-down communication channels or static document and policy repositories. They are so much more robust in their feature sets and it’s your responsibility to find ways to leverage these to pull your audience in, drive adoption, allow them to do their jobs more effectively, and have the information and resources at hand to be top performers in your company.
Does your organization use intranet stats/analytics to measure intranet adoption, engagement, and/or involvement? Share with me by commenting below.
