Tribe does quite a lot of work helping clients develop more effective intranet strategies – as well as building, designing, upgrading and cleaning out intranets. It can be cumbersome but improving your intranet can provide the foundation for a centralized digital communications ecosystem. The intranet can also be a powerful tool for helping to build culture and align employees with leadership’s vision.
Tribe’s approach to intranet strategy isn’t terribly complicated:
While it’s not terribly complicated, there’s a good bit to unpack in those three bullets.
Companies tend to support dozens or hundreds of different tools that employees in various departments and roles need access to.
Since most employees won’t need every tool, and they only need certain information to execute their jobs, we want to serve up the most relevant information right there on their intranet home page. Let’s not force them to wade through 100 OKTA icons every time they need to access Workday or send a ticket to IT.
If change is happening at the plant in Minnesota that doesn’t impact corporate offices in Miami, wouldn’t it be great if communications went directly to the folks at the plant and not the entire company? Most modern intranets are now very good at providing audience segmentation based on personas and permissions. This can make it less likely for employees to have to wade through irrelevant content.
However, to personalize tools and communications this way, we need a pretty detailed understanding of every role within the company along with the kinds of tools people in certain roles might need. Developing this level of understanding requires a bit of heavy lifting. The good news is the number of employees and roles within a company is finite. It can be a big job, but it’s doable.
If we reward employees by making it easier to find and access tools and providing information that’s current and relevant to them, they will be much more motivated to go to their intranet homepage daily – or at least regularly. Of course, this intranet strategy will help them more efficiently execute their work.
The intranet, though, is ultimately a communications tool. And by building dependable daily traffic to the site, we have an opportunity to effectively communicate with employees.
Tribe’s highest goal with internal communications is to align the day-to-day actions of employees with leadership’s vision and business strategy. If we can help employees understand and visualize how their individual roles contribute to the company’s success, they’ll be more engaged in their work and as numerous studies show, the company will operate much more effectively.
As we hinted earlier, since employees in different roles contribute to the strategy in different ways, it’s incumbent on communicators to both understand how each employee segment contributes to success and what they need to know to properly execute their roles. If we’re clear on this, modern intranets provide the tools to make this happen.
Ultimately though, it’s up to us as communicators to ensure that the information that employees find on the intranet is relevant, up to date and compelling.
Interested in improving your intranet strategy?Tribe can help.
