5 Things You Must Do for a Successful Intranet Launch
A successful intranet should serve as the single source of truth within your organization, elevating your workplace by enhancing productivity, efficiency, and company culture. Successful intranets are flexible, continuously evolving, and can be used in a variety of ways, including as content management systems, project management tools, knowledge bases, and more – but launching a successful intranet isn’t always easy.
Let’s dive into the 5 things you must do to cultivate your digital culture and employee experience to launch or revamp a successful intranet in 2024. By using these principles of persuasion, you will improve satisfaction and productivity within your organization:
1.Social Proof
Your employees are much more likely to adopt new tools or behaviors when they see their peers doing the same. Showcase success stories, testimonials, and case studies from other departments, organizations, or individuals that leveraged an intranet for a successful project. In case of an intranet revamp, run a pilot project and choose champions from within your organization to lead the initiative, encouraging others to adapt faster. Get your higher-ups, like somebody from the C-suite, to engage with the intranet to set an example for the employees.
2.Creating Connections
Rather than treating your intranet launch as a top-down initiative, involve employees from all levels in its design, development, and evolution. Make employees feel like it belongs to them by emphasizing the various ways they will be able to contribute to it and take ownership of it. Encourage sharing of interests and activities like pets or Halloween costumes to help employees feel connected beyond their day-to-day roles. You could set up an employee spotlight, employee recognition program, or employee surveys to help employees feel more valued in the workplace.
3.Commitment and Consistency
Before you even begin to build out your intranet, learn what motivates and drives your employees, and what their personal and professional goals are. Learn what their challenges are in their day-to-day roles, as well as the challenges their department faces as a whole through employee intranet surveys. Building an intranet that aligns with their intrinsic motivations will allow the platform to be embraced wholeheartedly. By doing so, you can deepen commitment to the intranet and increase the likelihood of a successful intranet launch or revamp in the new year.
4.Authority
Prior to launching your intranet or prior to launching new features, clearly communicate the benefits of each feature and how they will help each employee. Once launched, get your top executives and leaders to share information and build trust on the platform by hosting AMAs or town halls. This should help your users instantly understand the value proposition and give them a reason to engage with the intranet, especially in hybrid-remote work environments that are making it all the more crucial to have an intranet to boost employee morale especially during times of change.
5.Scarcity
Make your intranet irresistible by centralizing resources all in one place and removing them from other sources, making it necessary for employees to engage with the intranet. Make it the exclusive source of critical information relating to their day-to-day roles. You could use it as a hub for policies and procedures, a place for all HR resources relating to benefits, compensation, and vacation, or have exclusive training resources or how-to articles and videos. Make it easy for employees to find everything they need in a single platform, and they will keep coming back to it.
If you attended our webinar live, you’ll know that we snuck in two bonus tips to successfully launch your intranet:
Bonus Tip #1: Continuous Feedback Loop
Even once your intranet is launched, your work is not done. Show employees that you value their input by establishing channels through which they can provide feedback, report issues, or suggest improvements which you can regularly review to make necessary adjustments. Particularly in the case of a refresh, feedback from end users is critical to ensure your revamp is headed in the right direction, meeting their operational objectives.
Bonus Tip #2: Personality
While your intranet should be the single source of truth for all things work-related, it should also be a hub for ideas, innovation, and collaboration. Showcase your brand’s personality and make your intranet a fun place to communicate to drive a successful intranet launch and keep your vibrant workplace healthy.
Consequences of an Unsuccessful Intranet Launch
We often find that organizations that neglect these factors end up launching an intranet that isn’t as successful as it should have been. Some of the consequences we’ve seen are:
- Decreased Engagement: If the intranet doesn’t align with employees’ motivations or show clear benefits, it gets ignored and engagement rates plummet, making it a wasted investment.
- Poor Adoption Rates: Without the influence of social proof or a sense of ownership, employees may not see the value in using the intranet or may resist change altogether.
- Stagnation: Without a continuous feedback loop, your intranet risks becoming out-of-date or misaligned with current business needs, leading to decreased productivity.
- Loss of Trust: Ignoring employee feedback or not involving them in the intranet’s evolution can make them feel disconnected, negatively impacting not just intranet usage but overall morale.
- Missed Opportunities: By not prioritizing your intranet’s successful launch/adoption, you miss out on it being a single source of truth that boosts innovation, collaboration, and productivity.
Work with Klarinet Solutions to Launch Successful Intranet in 2024
An intranet in 2024 and beyond is more than just a platform – it reflects your organization’s culture and values. By prioritizing user experience, you can ensure that your intranet launch is successful, and your intranet serves as a valuable asset for your employees and the organization as a whole.
We understand that launching an intranet is a significant undertaking, which is why our experts are here to help. Get in touch with Klarinet Solutions to come up with a plan to launch a successful intranet, or check out the recording of our webinar, “5 Things You Must do to Successfully Launch Your Intranet in 2024”.
