CEC Insider

Frustrated by employees who refuse to use the intranet? Tired of writing news stories that employees never read? Ready to give up on the intranet altogether and revert back to email blasts? (Someone out there raises a hand.)

Believe me, after 50+ conversations with CEC intranet managers, I can tell you that you’re not alone. I’d also suggest that the right approach to improve usage rates takes a page from the Marketing handbook: think of employees as your intranet’s customers, and learn more about what they want from this product. A great technique is a user profile exercise—describing clusters of employees based on how they currently (or could) use the intranet to get their jobs done.

Last week, Rick and I hosted a webinar on this topic, alongside a truly leading-edge practitioner—Jamie Parry, Manager of Intranet and Electronic Media at Chevron. Jamie talked about Chevron’s process for clustering 62,000 employees into 10 primary groups—such as “New Talent,” “On the Road,” and “International: Unwired”—whose goals and behaviors on the intranet are similar. From that analysis, Jamie is focusing on the most important intranet improvements that will drive intranet usage among these groups. Pretty cool, huh? If you want to try something similar, here’s a quick guide to his process:

4 Steps to Build User Profiles

1. Collect Data: Conduct interviews, task analyses, email usage studies, and workplace observations to understand employee needs and behaviors. (CEC members can use this handy interview guide to get started today.)

2. Spot Patterns: Analyze the data to identify patterns of “information behavior” that characterize different groups.

3. Flesh Out Profiles: This is the fun part! Put a face on these different characters, describe their common tasks, and rank the value of different tools in their work lives.

4. Analyze and Act: Now that you have workable profiles, you can start making smart decisions about intranet improvements. In Jamie’s case, for example, he learned that employees who are often on the road needed summarized content available for easy viewing on a BlackBerry or iPhone. Now that Jamie and his team know this, they’ve prioritized developing a mobile intranet site for these employees.

CEC members can listen to the webinar replay and review the event deck to learn more about Chevron’s 10 user profiles. For all audiences, I highly recommend this Step Two Designs article on the subject: “Introduction to Personas and How to Create Them.”

Would this approach work for your company? I’d love to hear about your own efforts to make the intranet more user-centric!