Back in days of yore, an organisation’s intranet was a repository – files, documents, links to files and documents. Times, thankfully, have changed.
Your intranet is a critical channel for sharing information, encouraging conversation, and bringing employees together. The intranet should be a place of inspiration and discovery. It should blend the practical (policies and what not) and the purposeful (strategy, culture, people) making the working day easier and better. It should inform, engage, and motivate.
To do this you need:
There’s an often-used analogy that building a new intranet is like building a house. Your foundation is the content, everything else just makes it look pretty. You need to have a solid foundation before you can build your house. You can’t just slap a coat of paint (in the form of a new design) on a house and expect it to stay habitable. This analogy works… but it rather suggests that once the house is built, that’s pretty much all the work you need to do aside from changing the odd lightbulb. It also doesn’t work if you’ve got a bunch of shoddy foundations to work with.
I like to think of an intranet like a garden.
Move to a new house and you wouldn’t just jump feet first into gardening, attacking plants with abandon and slapping down paving stones willy-nilly, would you? I mean, you might, but you shouldn’t.
First, you’ve got to see what you’re working with. What’s in the garden already? What needs to go? What needs to stay? What do you pull out, cut back, replant? Do you have the right tools?
It’s the same with the intranet. Before you think about renovating or rebuilding it, you need to know what you’re working with. Take the time to carry out a full audit with clear criteria on what content fits into your content strategy. Do you really need that page of links to pdfs? What kind of content are your visitors really looking for? Do you have 17 pages when one would do? If it doesn’t tell the story you want it to – get rid of it.
Weeds – the bane of every gardener’s life. You pull them out once, you think you’ve got the roots, and yet, a couple of weeks (or sometimes, days) later, there they are again.
If your intranet has been around for a long time, there are bound to be weeds. There will be content there that has been around since time immemorial because no one has ever questioned it. This is the perfect opportunity to rethink your content and question everything. Don’t be fooled, though – once the initial content audit is done, that’s not the end of the work. Your intranet should be regularly weeded to make sure those pesky dandelions don’t come back.
Never ask a gardener when they’ll be happy with their garden or when it’ll be finished. They won’t be and it won’t be (and based on personal experience, they’ll give you a long list of what needs to be done and since you asked, why don’t you put your wellies on and help?)
Jobs might be little ones like weeding (see above) trimming back plants, repotting or replanting. They may be bigger jobs like building a path, a shed, a pergola. A gardener will always have a plan for how they want to develop their garden.
Every intranet should have a long-term plan. It may be that you’re taking a staged approach. You have a launch date and know what you want to have done by then… but then what? Updating little and often (if possible) is the best way to keep your intranet growing, evolving, and avoid it becoming an online filing cabinet.
A garden matures over time. It may be that you’ve spent all spring preening and pruning but that doesn’t mean that by the summer it’ll be worthy of the National Trust. It may be two or three years before you see the fruits of your labour (literally if you’ve planted an apple tree or two!)
Your intranet will also take time – it will take real commitment and long hours of work. It should be something that can grow with your organisation, shift when your strategy does, and above all, reflect the needs of your audience.
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