REASONS WHY NOBODY USES YOUR COMPANY INTRANET PORTAL

If your company has implemented an intranet, but nobody is using it, you have missed a great chance to improve employee collaboration and engagement. There is no point in investing in an intranet portal for just seeing the widespread employee usage. Your first task is to know why your colleagues aren’t using the company Intranet. But how? No worries, follow the below explanations as why your colleagues are not using Intranet:-

#1:OUR INTRANET PORTAL ISN’T USER FRIENDLY

Well, that’s exactly one of the major reasons why intranet is not adopted by employees — Not User Friendly! You might have the important resources and forms in the portal, but it doesn’t do any good if people aren’t able to search for the information by their own.

Mostly, navigation titles are vague and are interpreted differently by different type of users. It is recommended to change the navigation titles to more informational and its better to have your top navigation to a mega menu in-order to prevent employees from clicking multiple pages.

So what does it take to make your intranet more user friendly? Just organize the information in a logical way. A trend in intranets, according to Neilsen Norman Group (NN/g), is organizing information based around user tasks. It facilitates learning for users, helping them to remember where content is for future use. Task-based organization is helpful because it is centered around what users do on a daily basis, versus having to know which department owns the content they are looking for. Unlike yesterday, intranets costed a lot, but now, with the improved technology and expertise, it has become affordable to organizations today.

#2:USERS DON’T KNOW TO USE INTRANET EFFECTIVELY

You have loads of info stuffed on your intranet, but what’s the use when your colleagues have a hard time finding it when they need? Prepare Training and Reference Materials to make things easier for your users. Recommended is to have a Video Tutorial for the entire Portal features where it explains to the users how the Intranet is being organized. This will help them to understand the logic quickly and practice them. Train the content owners on stuff like how to upload data and keeping the content standardized. This will help the content to remain uniform and avoid confusion for the end users.

Search functionalities are available on Intranets, but doesn’t mean all the users will be able to find the information they need. Searching in SharePoint isn’t intuitive for everyone. Training Videos or Sessions with best practices can help the users achieve this. This will help to enhance employee engagement and encourage effective use of your company intranet.

#3:ITS ALL IRRELEVANT INFORMATION!

Every day people are hit with irrelevant information through advertisements, junk mail, etc. Do not let your intranet be another source of irrelevant information. Make sure to have only current and relevant information in your portal. Allow your content owners to trim info every once in a while for reducing the amount of outdated data. Create an Archive areas on your portal for docs that are outdated. Encourage the knowledge team to post info which is important to avoid the overwhelming users. Bring in approval buttons for the managers/concerned team personnel for approving the content being posted by the knowledge team members in order to avoid unnecessary content on the portal.

#4: MANAGEMENT ISN’T UTILIZING YOUR INTRANET

If your management isn’t utilizing your intranet, then stop expecting your other users to use it too! Lack of support from your management can break your intranet easily. If company departments are sending out forms through email or OneDrive for sharing documents, you may forget about using Intranet!

Better encourage your management (All levels) to use Intranet Portal as the primary medium of communication and as an information repository. Conduct meetings with content owners and encourage them to get all the content stored on the intranet. Stop your marketing team to sending out internal news through emails and instead create a dedicated Marketing Department Page and make use of it. Your company will be encouraged to access the intranet for any sort of information they require.

FINAL WORDS

You just need to follow the above steps for increasing user adoption on your employee intranet portal. You need to learn why your portal is under utilized and make the necessary changes for increasing employee engagement. An intranet portal is productivity only if the users adopt it. To find the positive return on your intranet portal investment, identify the key issues and make changes to your company intranet ASAP.

Are you curious on how to improve your existing intranet? Talk to one of our SharePoint experts today!