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Five ways to use an intranet for internal communication
Most organisations put more effort into external communication than internal. The imbalance is expensive: internal communication quality shows up directly in production processes and quality of work.
Praval Technologies2 min read
Most businesses place more emphasis on external communication than internal. The latter is under-accounted for, and it gets expensive over time. Where internal communication is smooth, production processes and quality of work both improve.
Intranets began as message boards with document sharing. Modern ones, especially those built on SharePoint, do considerably more.
What an intranet actually is
A private network used within an organisation to share information and resources among employees and other authorised users. Unlike the internet, it is only accessible to the organisation that owns it, which is what makes it the right place for material that should not be public but should be easy to find.
Five uses worth building for
Company news that is actually read. Targeted to audience and role rather than broadcast to everyone. An all-staff post that is irrelevant to most of the staff teaches people to ignore the channel.
Knowledge people can find. Policies, procedures and how-to material with real search and clear ownership. Unowned content is worse than no content: it's wrong and trusted.
Collaboration in context. Team sites, document co-authoring and discussion attached to the work rather than scattered across email threads.
Employee self-service. Leave requests, IT tickets, expense claims and HR forms in one place, so the intranet is somewhere people go to do something rather than to read something.
Measurement. Analytics on what is read and what is ignored. Without it, internal communications is opinion.
Benefits
Faster access to information, fewer repeated questions, better onboarding, and a single record of what the organisation has decided. The compounding one is onboarding: a good intranet halves the time before a new person can work without interrupting someone.
What separates one people use
Ownership and currency. An intranet is not a launch, it is a running commitment. And the ones that fail almost always fail because nobody owned the content after go-live.
Recognise any of this in your own estate?
Start with the problem rather than the technology, and we will tell you honestly whether it is ours to solve.