I’m a strong believer that Corporate Communications should lead a company’s intranet strategy.  Unlike other possible leaders in IT, HR, or the business units, communicators highly value—and are measured on—employee engagement.  The intranet has quickly evolved into a key instrument to achieving this engagement through functionalities that promote connectivity, collaboration, and productivity among employees.

That said, in most organizations, the Communications function has yet to embrace the mindset and activities necessary to transform the intranet from “digital landfill” to “employee productivity tool.”  Communicators may say they want the intranet to boost employee productivity and engagement, but then focus on superficial fixes, primarily improving the intranet’s function as an internal news distribution service.   Sharing internal news is important, yes.  Optimizing the intranet to do only that, however, is short-sighted.

How do you know if your heart is in the right place, but your activities are not? Ask yourself, “Do we…

• Focus improvements on the “look and feel” of the intranet—such as logos, layouts, typefaces, buttons, boxes, menus, etc.?
• Rely on annual “intranet satisfaction surveys”?
• Track and depend on broad metrics such as clicks and views on news stories?

None of these activities are inherently bad.  In fact, the above three things could be progressive and helpful to the intranet’s overall health and improvement.  But, and here’s the kicker, these activities often help make the intranet look better rather than work better.

If You Answered “Yes” to the Above Questions, You Likely Have These Bad Habits:

1. To be sure, aesthetically pleasing web pages are now expected by employees, so it’s wise for companies to improve the look and feel of the intranet.  Yet, if the content on the intranet is not useful or findable, improvements to the look and feel are a waste of time.
2. Annual surveys to gauge employee satisfaction are too infrequent, Communications-biased (e.g., questions like “How often do you read our news?”), and generate “wish lists” of features that no one knows if employees will use once implemented.
3. Broad metrics tell you what employees are doing, not what they are attempting to do on the intranet.  See the difference?

To Break Your Habits, Think Like a Marketer.

The best Communications teams we’ve seen have overcome these bad habits by doing one simple thing: they change their mindset about who employees are.  They’ve stopped thinking about employees as a captive audience and started thinking about them as customers of the intranet.  They’ve stopped thinking like journalists pushing stories and started thinking like marketers devoted to three new, cyclic (you don’t do these once) and absolutely essential activities:

1. Employee research to pinpoint employees’ information and tasks needs (check out a previous post about creating employee profiles)
2. Iterative design to incorporate employee feedback to guide intranet design
3. Ongoing evaluation to continually test and learn (oftentimes in focus groups of different employee groups around the company)

Communications role in leading intranet strategy is not a fad.  As the function is increasingly tasked with helping others to communicate around the organization, the intranet will be employed as a key tool to enable that communication. Functions that wrestle with and overcome this ferocious challenge will reap the benefits of a highly engaged, productive workforce.  And who doesn’t want that?

Here’s a recap of how Communications role on the intranet is evolving:

CEC members, you can jump start your intranet leadership by visiting our Intranets & Internal Social Media Topic Center.

Non-CEC Members and Members alike, I swear by these two blogs for their intranet-related advice. Check ‘em out.

• Column Two by StepTwo Designs
• NetStrategy/JMC by Jane McConnell