3 steps to maintain a healthy intranet

SharePoint Collaboration Consultant and intranet expert Susan Hanley.

You’ve made the investment to create a company intranet and now comes the tricky part – making it successful and maintaining that success.

Microsoft SharePoint Collaboration Consultant and intranet expert Susan Hanley has three must-do tips to maintain and sustain a healthy intranet.

Forget about refreshing your entire intranet. With these three steps you’ll never need a refresh to update your intranet because it will be a vital communications hub for your employees to access what’s important to them and your organisation.

1.    Commit to governance

The best way to kill an intranet, Susan says, is to have a poor governance plan. If content is not regularly updated, and always up to date, the problems will keep cascading. Susan likens it to an orange. What would an orange smell like if you leave it and don’t touch it? It would eventually stink.

“Your intranet gets really smelly when the content is old, and not just old, but when you put content in, update things and don’t delete the old content, that means search is going to find everything,” Susan said.

“So if multiple versions of documents are floating around and come up via search, that’s what’s going to make your intranet much less useful.”

Susan says there is no such thing as truly durable content, all pages need to be reviewed and old versions of documents must be deleted to avoid discovery in searches. You don’t have to worry about document versions if you use built-in versioning – but does everyone do that? One way to help make sure pages get updated is to expose the date when the page was last updated. If the date is more than a year old, it’s probably time to see if it needs an update.

“Content should always be current because that’s what builds trust in the intranet – and ensures that it delivers ongoing and sustainable value,” Susan said.

It’s important to hold people accountable to ensure the intranet remains up to date. That can be done with the help of analytics, another of Susan’s tips, but more on that later. Define roles and responsibilities to always keep the intranet updated. Make it part of a job description, add it to performance goals, and give people time to maintain content. At the end of the day, it will save time because employees won’t be searching old content or seeking help when they can’t find what they need.

“If you’re not going to commit to the care and feeding of your garden, then don’t bother putting a garden in because you’ll not get much value,” Susan said.

“This is not extra work, it’s a reallocation of the way you were doing it previously. If you commit to keeping the content up to date, you will gain the time back for other things.

“This is why a governance plan is so important. The whole organisation clearly benefits when content is managed so recognise and demonstrate the importance of having up to date information for employees.”

2.    Publish content people care about

It doesn’t matter what great yarn you might publish on your intranet if it’s not of interest to your people. Employees come to the intranet to get work done and to find out what they’re interested in - so target information to them. Maybe it starts with apps for submitting timesheets, or apps that display progress against sales targets or personal performance goals, or for submitting vacation leave. These are all reasons employees will go to the intranet and while they’re there, they have an opportunity to read the latest company news and other information.

“It’s not about what you want to tell, it’s about what consumers want to learn,” Susan said.

“Make sure that critical content is published on the intranet in a prominent place. Target the information to me based on something you know about me.”

Of course, there’s a place for corporate news on the intranet but ensure you make it worthwhile. Start with a catchy title – something that describes an action or summarises an event. A post titled “CEO weekly update” probably isn’t going to inspire many to read more but change the title to “We’ve won a global award” and people will likely be interested to read on. And remember not to ramble. People usually want a succinct summary – up front at the top of the page.

“A healthy balance of ‘me’ and ‘us’ helps create a more meaningful intranet for everybody,” Susan said.

“And while I’m there with all the apps I need, you can throw in some news and I might actually look at it.”

If you’re not sure what counts as news in your organisation, stop and think about how you currently communicate to your people. Do you send emails with staff updates and new starters? How do you recognise employees? These can be simply turned into news stories and published on your intranet.

Another tip Susan shared is to do a weekly digest of “3 things you missed”. Publish a weekly update digest and send via email (if you’re still using email internally) with posts that point to content on your intranet to consolidate the most important things you’d like everyone in your organisation to know. It will become an easy go-to to find out the latest news. Make this list concise, short, and targeted. Many organisations see a very low “read rate” for organisational news sent via email. Try publishing on your intranet and using email as a secondary channel.

“And then if I miss your email or if I delete it or forget to read it, it’s available to me when I’m searching the intranet,” Susan said.

“Give the people what they need and what they want and what’s personal to them.”

How do you know what people need and want? That’s where analytics come into play.

3.    Use analytics to find out what works

What communication channels are actually reaching employees? What content are people engaging with? Without analytics, you’ll never know.

“What channels are the most effective? That’s the most important contribution that analytics can bring to the table is which of the methods that we’re using is actually reaching,” Susan said.

“Not only which method is reaching, but is there a certain type of content that gets read on different types of channels so we have a clue about what works in our organisation? Is it the message plus the medium or it the message alone or some combination thereof?”

It’s also important to know if who is sending the message makes an impact – the CEO, corporate comms, internal comms. Does adding a photo or video boost engagement?

Susan says analytics are vital to help to identify where employees spend their time.

Analytics are also needed to discover what people are searching for on the intranet. Zero search results could mean that content is named incorrectly or content that people want is missing.

“Analytics give you data to demonstrate where you should be investing your time and investment. Without analytics, content placement and management is going to be about someone’s personal preference or politics,” Susan said.

“The only thing you can argue politics with is data, having the data to tell you where to focus your energy.”

Susan again uses the analogy of a garden to tend to an intranet.

“Care and feeding requires not just putting content in but aging content out and you can’t do that without the data to tell you what’s old or no longer useful,” she said.

“We’re basically trying to say; ‘Get the weeds out of your garden and focus on what’s making it useful and engaging to the consumers’. The people who are going to come and look at your garden, you’ve got to tend to it because if you don’t it will be full of weeds. The best way to do that is to learn from your data.”

People will use and return to the intranet if it helps them get work done.

“If you’re going to invest in it, it means you’re going to have valuable content on it and that content needs to be maintained,” Susan said.

Download Susan’s free resource on planning governance for a Microsoft 365-based intranet and try SWOOP Analytics for SharePoint intranet for free today.