A common question we hear is “How can I get more of my employees to use the Intranet?” Here are a few tips to help with this issue.

Use Social Tools to encourage Employee Involvement

When managers hear the words Social Intranet they start to smirk. Visions of employees chatting away about Saturday night and posting pictures of their cat come to mind.  Of course this isn’t what Social Intranet means.

The term Social Intranet, in our opinion, is really just an Intranet that is taking advantage of popular social consumer applications and readapting them for a corporate environment.  This creates a familiar function that the staff can understand, since most use them in their own person life. Social Intranets encourage interaction and engagement by creating an environment where people feel they are a member of the site, not just a user.

Make an Exceptional User Navigation

In most cases the user interface is the last thing companies think about when deploying an Intranet. However, it should really be the first thing to consider. If you want your staff to spend part of their work day within the Intranet, the user interface has to be intuitive, and easy to use.  Also keep in mind that attractive design and intuitive navigation are two very different things.

Create New Content Daily

Many Intranets contain information that is outdated by the time it’s posted. Think of your Intranet as a daily newspaper for your company.  Make sure that the news is up to date.  Your staff will disregard the Intranet if you don’t keep the information current.

Find out What they Want to Know

Not only does the content have to be timely, it also has to be relevant. Cover the topics that people are interested in.  How can you figure out what people are interested in? Ask them! Many intranets have survey and polling capabilities built in. Use these features to find out what people want to know or what users feel the Intranet is lacking.

Power to the People

The company’s web master can’t possibly create and post all the data that should be on the Intranet. In many cases, this is the main reason why Intranets fail.  By the time the webmaster posts content to the Intranet, the information is out dated.  To resolve this issue the content creation must be decentralized so that people throughout the organization with information that would make interesting and valuable reading, can post it themselves. Of course, each department will need to set permissions and establish procedures for posting content.

Build a Social Network

A major worry for companies is that too much fun means not enough work.  However, the most successful Intranet deployments are the ones with the most employee interaction.  People need to feel connected with their colleagues.

Companies should create a place for each department’s social network. Here employees could post birthdays, recognize service awards, introduce new hires, and even have monthly photo contests. This will create an Intranet that is alive rather then static.

Be Transparent

If you want employees to use the Intranet, truthful information is important.  No one will come back to a site that is a whitewash, except maybe to ridicule it. Be direct and forthright in your communication, and people will respect and appreciate it. That may mean posting the bad news as well as the good.

Post Important Information only to the Intranet

Frequently, a company will create an informative white paper or report and post it to the Intranet. The problem is that it may have also been sent via email to the entire company, removing any motivation to visit the Intranet. You can change this dynamic by developing a new habit.  Post the document only to the intranet site and then notify people that it’s there. This will encourage employees to visit the Intranet site more regularly and alleviate the burden of excess email attachments.

Notify Users about New Content

Set up an automatic email notification system to let your staff know when new content is published.  Even better, allow the staff to choose what they care to be notified about, and when they wish to be notified.

Create an effective system for showing “What’s New”

It’s important to have an effective “What’s New” page that lists all the new information that has been posted to the site in the last 24 hours. It will become a great time saver for your staff and provides a better user experience.

Monthly information searching contests

Our company and many of our clients hold a “Monthly Information Search Contest”.   A piece of information is hidden somewhere inside the Intranet.  It could be a graphic, a chart, a word file or anything else that can be stored on the Intranet.

The first person to locate the information is awarded a prize. What usually happens as a result is that while searching for the target, staff members get caught up in reading other information, become more familiar with how to use the Intranet, and discover useful information that they will go back to later.  This is just one example of how companies can encourage employees to interact with their Intranet.

About Vialect

Vialect is a software company with a big idea. Our product Noodle will enable any company to harness the knowledge of employees thus increasing the corporate wisdom within the enterprise.

Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration

Portlets are small boxes that pull new content from applications within Noodle. They can be added to any page within Noodle.

Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration

A quick overview of the applications within Noodle.

Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration

Training a new employee can be an expensive and time consuming task.  The quicker you can get a new employee up to speed the better off your company will be…

Noodle Knowledge

The benefits of Intranet training are near limitless with the ability to reach employees whether they are across the street or across the world.  Noodle provides effective employee training tools allowing your business to customize the experience and cater to work groups or individual needs.

Gear Content to User Work Groups

Management can quickly create programs by organizing multimedia content and linking them from a single page portal.  A seamless launch of applications aid in training users.  Incorporate a Calendar so employees can follow the same schedule, sign up forms  and detailed instructions to complete and check off assigned tasks.  Noodle’s  Document  Manager has sub-folders to group training videos, handbooks, policy outlines and much more.  Reports can provide progress evaluation.

Make Experts out of Users

Content is current, updatable and relevant.  Create a forum for interaction allowing users to share experiences and tips.  Lead discussions and compare thoughts.  Offer quizzes to test knowledge and insure the information was retained and can be applied to the workplace.  Then, showcase the skills of employees in your Company Headlines. Provide certification and reward for completion.  To highlight a job well done assign a new Expertise.

Schedule Flexibility and Access to Materials

Self-paced multimedia instruction engages users and allows them to learn at their own speed, skimming areas where they are strong and investing more time in their areas of weakness.  No time is wasted retraining.  Users can track their status and move forward quickly becoming more efficient and effective learners.

The material is there to refer back to at any time

Effective Intranet training can increase memory retention, refresh course material and keep employees up to speed.  Material can be printed at their discretion.  Save time by including a question manager to highlight frequently asked questions categorized by departments or subject.  Offer highlights in an easy training company newsletter.  Make it fun, rewarding and interactive.

Use your Noodle to lower the cost of training an employee, When you measure output simply and visibly, the numbers will speak for themselves.  Allow employees take initiative to strengthen their talents and build corporate wisdom.

Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration

Now that the summer is just around the corner, there is no better time to review your Intranet strategy.  Summer tends to be a slower time for business because of vacations and postponed projects.  For the next couple months people are out of the office more, decisions are postponed and the office tends to have a more relaxed vibe.

This is a perfect opportunity to look at your Intranet and the processes that accompany it.  Here are few suggestions on how to review your Intranet strategy.

Survey Says

The users are the most important part of your Intranet.  The people that use it every day to find important information and obtain corporate wisdom from it’s contents.  Create a simple 5-10 question survey to ask questions that will help point you in the direction of what areas are working and what areas are not.  The survey should me mandatory for all employees who access the Intranet.

Stats

Ensure you have a good look at the stats for the Intranet.  Key metrics to look for are:

What pages are being accessed the most
What pages are being access the least
What features are popular based on traffic
What department is getting the most use from the Intranet

Who are your champions?

By looking at your stats and the results of your survey you should be able to find out who your champions are.  Champions play an important role in improving your Intranet and getting more people involved.  They are a valuable resource that will help your Intranet be successful.  Think of them as your Intranet ambassadors.  Have them write a page or blog about why they use the Intranet and how others can benefit like they do.

New Technologies

Summer is the best time to look at the market and see what new technologies or features are available for your Intranet.  For example micro blogging has become very popular with Intranets or integrate a group chat tool for a few months to see what works and what doesn’t with your user base.  Using the results of your survey and stats will help you decide what new features you should try.

Putting it all together

As Fall approaches you will need to use the data you have collected to update and optimize your Intranet.  The survey will tell you what is working and what is not.  Anything that is not working needs to be removed or updated so that it does.  Your Intranet champions will have been interviewed and encouraged to evangelize the benefits of the Intranet and you will added few new features and technologies that will help your company experience the benefits of a finely tuned Intranet.

This process should be done every year to keep your Intranet a value creator for your company.

Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration

We are looking for a few guest bloggers to create content for this blog.  Topics are open and the main categories being Enterprise 2.0, Intranets and collaboration.  This could translate into a full time blogger position for Vialect.  Please use our contact page to get in touch with your topic ideas.

Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration