Since 2010, 12 out of the 50 winning organizations in our Intranet Design Annuals have had 2,000 or fewer employees, with one, Accolade, with just 200 intranet users. (See the end of this article for the list of these winners.) Comprising 24% of this winning set is not too shabby for the little guys. But organizations with fewer than 1,000 employees often forgo creating an intranet. Many small organizations make do with email, Yammer, and a file-storage system. And these can work quite well in the short term. However, as more information is added and time passes, relying on such tools to access a company’s knowledge repository can get very ugly and disjointed. The lack of a global-search feature and not knowing who uses what or when a document can be deleted can significantly impact the employees’ productivity.
The cost of purchasing, deploying, and maintaining big solutions such as SharePoint is prohibitive for smaller organizations. Since 5 out of the 12 small organizations in our 2010-2015 Intranet Design Annuals do run on SharePoint, we know this can be done successfully. Still, other “out-of-box” intranet solutions may be cheaper and lighter, and more attractive to small organizations. But, no matter what you read, always keep in mind that no good intranet is truly turnkey. Design, development, customization, maintenance, and governance are required elements for any intranet design.
If there is one conclusion from the thousands of intranets we’ve analyzed over the years, it’s that an unmodified turnkey user experience will be substandard, no matter where it’s used. Every company is special, and therefore no one intranet design will be effective everywhere right out of the box. You can, however, look for software with an initial design that is a good basis for customization without the need to change everything.
The number of employees is only one factor that should contribute to making a good decision about whether to have an intranet. Even if you have only 25 employees, an intranet may provide substantial benefits if any of the following are true at your organization:
- Multiple office locations
- A substantial percentage of the workforce working remotely or from the road
- Planning to hire many new employees
- High employee turnover
- Mergers and acquisitions
- Poor internal communication
- Clogged email inboxes
- Confusion about where to locate the most updated information, policy, customer information, sales decks, legal requirements, industry guidelines, announcements, and so on.
Multiple Office Locations
When all employees work in one office building together, a specific culture forms. This culture may include coffee-room banter, common jokes, bonding over lunch, and sometimes even yelling over cubicle walls. But once there are multiple offices, the communication needs to adapt. An intranet can help solve this problem, and can encourage employee communication through social features and team spaces. (In fact, research on inter-employee communication shows that people communicate more with other employees on their own floor than with employees on a different floor in the same building. That said, we still don’t feel that having office space across multiple floors is enough to recommend an intranet.)
Employees care about their workspace and want to know what is happing there. Information that applies to a particular location—such as a conference-room scheduling, the cafeteria menu, or a (physical) publication library—should be easily accessible and up-to-date. An intranet is a one-stop location to find all of this information, either personalized to the logged-in user by her role, or accessible via a menu link for each office location.
Workforce Working Remotely
Speaking in person can be productive and encourage collaboration. Online wall feeds and other social tools can also do this. But open communication about a particular project or topic is not always well suited to a wall feed. Intranet systems can provide better collaboration tools, and easily link to other information, documents, and people working on that project. For example, at Huron Consulting Group, consultants were often working at client locations, but needed to find information about other consultants. Huron’s intranet made this information easy to access everywhere on the site.
Lawyers and senior managers at Bennet Jones LLP frequently worked from home, especially in the evening, on weekends, and when they traveled. They used their intranet then to access the latest legal rulings, policies, and more—keeping their business moving after hours.
National Geographic Society encouraged mobile use of the intranet from remote locations, when traveling on business or even between buildings on the organization’s main campus (in Washington, D.C.). The mobile site offered access to the employee directory, news, and social features.
Hiring More Employees
New employees usually don’t know how things get done at the organization they just joined. They need to learn people, processes, tools and terminology. Figuring out where to go to look for these things can waste a lot of their time and elongate their onboarding process. A good intranet can help new hires learn about the organization in an efficient way. In fact, many intranets provide sections such as New Employees and Onboarding to help new hires become productive more quickly. Information here can make them feel more confident in what they are doing. It can also help break the ice when trying to get to know new coworkers. Even if it is a small company, unless you all see each other each morning and have the opportunity to introduce new employees in person to every colleague and process, doing it on an intranet can be very positive.
High Employee Turnover
When people leave a company, their knowledge leaves with them, unless it has been documented and is accessible, findable, and usable by other employees. If the information is in the departing employee’s email, local computer, or scattered on various network drives, only the most motivated coworkers will be able to pull it all together and decode the personal notes.
An intranet can make sharing knowledge easy and systematic, and accessing that knowledge a day-to-day occurrence.
Mergers and Acquisitions
When companies merge and are acquired, the business needs to find methods for streamlining processes, identifying and getting to know people to work with, eliminating duplicate processes and effort, and communicating to all. Keeping disparate systems can foster an undesired “us versus them” and “this is how we do it” attitude. Unifying systems and processes, and taking the best from both (or multiple) businesses can result in a better system—a better intranet—that promotes unity and core business values and goals.
CenturyLink, resulting from Qwest acquiring USWest in 2000, combined the two company’s intranets soon after the merger. Over the years the intranet design was iterated, and databases and templates created better consistency across the site. Information-rich content exploded when nonprogrammers could add content. In 2010, CenturyLink’s intranet, designed after identifying the content most often accessed by users, was one of winners of our Intranet Design Annual.
Poor Internal Communication
Employees need a place where they can methodically share information in a secure and findable way. Employees should be aware of what they should share, and have tools and methods for communicating information about projects, policies, or teams, as well as news, and announcements.
Announcements and news keep employees abreast of happenings, and can foster a feeling of excitement and unity. They can make people feel respected, as though they are important enough to the organization to be informed about particular efforts. Employees often begin their workday on the homepage of their intranet to read the news and get a pulse on what’s happening at the organization and in the industry as a whole. In fact, reading corporate news is the second most popular task users do on most intranets. (Do you know the most popular? The answer is at the end of this article.)
Clogged Email Inboxes
In the absence of a good intranet, employees often turn to sending mass emails about every topic—from a new president to free soft pretzels in the break room. There is so much wrong with this, and users in our studies often complain about too many emails. The perceived urgency of the medium can distract from employees’ true priories, too many emails are time-consuming and stressful to act on and even file, important information can be lost or difficult to locate, and it is easy to find the wrong information and miss a later email with the changed or corrected information.
Because of the distaste for misused email, one of our Design Annual winners, Klick Health, focused on creating an intranet system composed of task-tailored tools that would address all of the company’s business requirements in one place, and thus eliminate much of the emailing that was being done before.
Bennett Jones LLP encouraged users to think of the blogs on their intranet as a substitute for email conversations. In a legal environment such as theirs, people can read blog conversations around important cases, new legislation, best practices, and new precedents. These are fully searchable and entries never disappear.
Feedback from a user of Accolade’s intranet was that the intranet allowed him to email less, see what his colleagues are working on, scan corporate news, find needed information, and connect with colleagues.
Confusion About Where to Locate the Most Up-to-Date Information
File-sharing solutions such as Box, Dropbox, Egnite, and Google Drive are popular and have many helpful features. But finding the right, most up-to-date information is still an issue with most file-sharing systems. Confusion about where to locate the most updated policy, customer information, sales decks, legal requirements, industry guidelines, announcements, and so on can be incredibly time consuming and detrimental. A good intranet can help employees avoid these pitfalls. Another user of Accolade’s intranet noted that the intranet enabled him to share information in a very simple way: he did not have to send documents anymore or save them on local storage; rather, information was saved and accessible in one place. The intranet also made it possible to target information to a specific audience.
Combining information in one tool means creating an IA and search for that tool. While neither is a fast or easy endeavor even at small organizations with little content, it is worthwhile to make important information accessible and searchable.
Going Forward
Consider your current tools and systems and their relationships to employee efficiency and business needs before you embark on the process of creating an intranet. If you decide to have an intranet, don’t choose the tool first or the features first. Write goals that align with business goals and employee needs. Then get buy-in from stakeholders.
List of Small-Company Winners
2015
- Accolade, 200 users
- Klick Health, approximately 400 users
- Saudi Food & Drug Authority, 2,000 users
2014
- National Geographic Society, approximately 1,500 full-time employee users (plus numerous contractors, interns, and international partners)
- triptic, 20 users
2013
- Acorda Therapeutics, Inc., 350 users
- Luzerner Kantonalbank AG, 1,000 users
2012
- CenturyLink Business, approximately 2,000 users
- LivePerson, Inc., 550 users
2011
- Bennett Jones LLP, 925 users
- Mota-Engil Engenharia e Construção, S.A., 500 users
2010
- Huron Consulting Group, approximately 2,000 users
For more information about excellent intranets at small organizations buy our report:
Best Small Organization Intranets 2010-2015
Answer to our riddle: What’s the most popular feature on most intranets? The employee directory is the killer app, and finding information about employees is the most common task.
