13 Checklist For Creating The Perfect Intranet

An intranet is not just a group of functions; it is about employees feeling connected, informed on company news, and empowered to perform their jobs.

Is your intranet up to this standard?

Finding the perfect intranet is difficult. You have to find a solution that works for your budget and pleases everyone, as well as the shiny features, persuasive sales pitches, and, of course, the pressure of finding the right solution. Employees in remote or hybrid workplaces, where everyone requires a virtual/digital headquarters to access documents, people, and news, especially benefit from an effective intranet. An effective intranet may also help employees connect with the culture and a deeper purpose.

Whether you’re acquiring an intranet for the first time, trying to improve your current intranet, or just want to know if your current intranet is as good as award-winning ones, we encourage you to review this checklist:

Perfect intranet feature list.

1. Personalized content

A great intranet keeps employees coming back day after day by providing personalized content in addition to new and frequent content. In addition to removing the ‘noise’ of irrelevant content, personalized content also keeps employees engaged.

2. Powerful search functionality

Employees will lose confidence in their internal network if they cannot locate the data they need quickly. The loss to enterprise firms attributable to employees’ failure to locate and obtain critical information is estimated at around $2.5 million annually. Your intranet should be as effortless as Google to locate and retrieve information. Anything less is a squandered opportunity and money.

3. Opportunity for employees to take action and participate

An intranet has developed a lot in the last 20 years, going from a location for reading to one for accomplishing things. An ideal intranet is interactive and allows for feedback, surveys, and form creation. Your intranet should be able to handle vacation requests, hardware requirements, and benefits enrollment, among other things.

4. Self-service features

There is no time or patience for confusing navigation on an intranet. Make sure you include the content that you know is popular in front or in quick links if you are providing links and content. Another approach to understanding which pages are preferred is to employ task testing.

5. Looks and feels like your company

An intranet should feel like an extension of your brand’s values. The tragedy is that some intranet solutions don’t permit branding elements or personalization, particularly if you have a vibrant work environment. Our customers who customize and personalize to an unprecedented degree are also the ones who maintain the highest engagement and traffic rates.

6. Supports the employee lifecycle

The intranet should help employees throughout their journey and lifecycle (from their first day on the job to their last day). Where are your employees currently getting onboarding material? Where are they finding learning and development opportunities? Is there a place where employees can feel appreciated and rewarded for their efforts? All of these things can and should take place on the intranet.

7. Quiet and useful notifications

An excellent intranet strikes the right balance between notifying employees and irritating them. An intranet that effectively notifies employees alerts them to material they want to know. Employees may choose which pages they want to follow and which they do not by signing up for and managing summary digest emails.

8. Ability to broadcast emergency communications

Notifications are great for keeping employees up to date, but if we get too many notifications, we often turn them off, which can be problematic if there’s an emergency. Using an emergency broadcast alert system on your intranet is the solution. This enables communications professionals to send quick all-employee alerts about important news in a simple and efficient manner.

9. Helpdesk trouble ticketing

A highly adaptable help desk trouble ticket solution in Creative Social Intranet with a lot of metrics that allows to track and follow up efficiently.

With an online trouble ticket system within your intranet, you can,

• Identify Root Cause: Find out the root cause analysis of the problem.
• Approval/Execution: Get approvals or execute the plan, and test the plan in a small group if needed.
• Suggest Resolution: Assess the impact and plan out a permanent or workaround.

10. Minimal visual and cognitive noise

Have you ever looked at an award-winning intranet? An intranet that was recognized for its design, in particular? If so, you probably noticed how easy it was to use. An award-winning intranet isn’t just another pretty face; it also helps achieve high participation and adoption. Look at these award-winning intranets for inspiration.

11. User-configurable links and bookmarks

Employees can be empowered to manage and monitor their own areas of interest by creating a strong user experience for an intranet. To achieve this, pages and content must be bookmarkable so that employees may quickly access them when they need to. This ensures that employees are not distracted or distracted from other tasks, but does not interfere.

12. Collaborative and social tools

Good intranets provide ample opportunity for discussion and engagement. Employees have a real opportunity to connect and learn from one another through dedicated group areas such as knowledge wikis, communities of practice, commenting, and status updates.

13. Distinction between corporate comms and personalized peer-to-peer comms

It’s important to have dedicated feeds for each group so that no one misses important updates. It also ensures that people know who the communication is coming from. To see how we built our own intranet (see our blog post for details), please refer to the link provided. By separating corporate communications and personal peer-to-peer communications, we were able to ensure that corporate stuff stayed up faster rather than getting mixed in with a sea of random nonsense posts from other groups, etc.

The intranet is a lot more than just a bunch of cool features, as you can see. It’s about delivering a world-class employee experience where employees feel connected to one another, informed on company news, and empowered with the knowledge and tools they need to do their job. Let us know how you make your intranet better by checking these boxes!