Intranets are powerful social tools. They can empower better collaboration, knowledge management and sharing, and networking across your organization—whether your team works remotely, in the office, or a combination of both.
This can lead to serious benefits for your organization. Not only can intranets lead to higher levels of efficiency and productivity, but they can actually help to drive employee engagement—which makes it easier to keep top talent with your company. For example, according to research from Deloitte, companies that installed internal social media tools (like intranets) experienced a 20 percent increase in employee satisfaction—and a corresponding increase in employee retention of up to 87 percent.
Clearly, setting up a company intranet can be a great move for your business. But how, exactly, do you do that?
Let’s take a look at how to set up a company intranet:
Define your intranet goals
Intranets aren’t just powerful tools; they’re also versatile ones. Depending on your goals, you can use a company intranet to automate business processes, foster better communication between team members, better organize internal documents, host your organization’s knowledge base…there are a ton of possibilities.
Which is why, the first step in how to set up a company intranet? Defining what, exactly, you want your intranet to do.
Think about what goals you’re trying to accomplish through your internet. For example, are you looking for a place to more easily and efficiently share information across your organization? Or is your primary goal to help employees better communicate and collaborate with each other remotely? Narrow in on what kind of functionality and results you’re looking for in an intranet.
Also read: How to improve your internal communication using an intranet
Once you know what you want from your intranet, you can use that information to better evaluate the options on the market—and choose an intranet that’s best equipped to deliver exactly what you need.
Ask your team for input
You might have ideas around what you want from an intranet. But your employees are the ones that are going to be using the intranet. So before you decide on the best intranet solution for your organization, it’s important to ask them for their input.
Connect with your team to get their insights into what’s working with their current workflow, what’s not working, and how an intranet might be able to improve their experience. Then, use those insights to drive your decisions around what kind of intranet you want to set up.
For example, is your distributed team struggling to stay connected throughout the day? Then you’ll want to look for intranets with a robust chat feature. Are your team members spending a lot of time and energy trying to track down documents or other company information? Then you’ll want to look for an intranet with features that enable better knowledge management and sharing.
How you gather input from your team is up to you. For example, you might hold focus groups, send out a survey, or have managers schedule one-on-one’s with team members. Just make sure you gather their input—and use it to inform your decisions around your intranet. That way, when you set up your intranet, it doesn’t just work for your organization; it also works for your employees.
Research and choose your intranet solution
You know what you want from an intranet. You know what your team wants from an intranet. Now, it’s time to get out there and find an intranet solution that delivers on all fronts.
Do your research and see what intranet options are available on the market—and how those options align with your goals. Make sure that whatever tool you choose comes equipped with all the features and functionality you need to empower your team’s best work (and, of course, sticks within your budget).
There are plenty of options to choose from. But if you’re looking for an all-in-one intranet solution that can support all of your organization’s needs? You’ll definitely want to consider Talkspirit.
Talkspirit is an all-in-one intranet solution that gives individual contributors and teams the tools they need to thrive at work—while giving organizations the framework they need to take their company to the next level. Our platform hosts a variety of internal communication features, such as a chat platform, a home page and a newsfeed feature that curates relevant information for employees, a secure drive and library to store and share information easily, as well a project management feature for smoother collaboration. Talkspirit has everything you could want or need in a company intranet—making it a must-try tool for organizations of all types and sizes.
Want to learn more about how to set up a company intranet with Talkspirit? Schedule a demo today!
Migrate your content and information
Choosing your intranet tool is a big step. But if you plan to use your company intranet as a way to organize, store, and share company information, you’re going to need to actually add your content and information to the intranet before it’s ready to roll out.
Also read: 4 best practices to create an extranet
Before you migrate everything to your new company intranet, use this time as an opportunity to really go through all your company information and get rid of anything that’s not accurate or relevant. That way, the only information that’s moving to your intranet is information your team actually needs, wants, or uses.
For example, if you’re going to use your intranet to house your company directory, go through your current contact list and make sure everyone’s contact information is up-to-date—and remove any employees that are no longer with the company. If you’re going to use your intranet to create a knowledge base of all your HR policies and procedures, make sure to have your HR team review those policies and procedures and ensure they’re accurate—and delete any outdated policies.
Once you’ve decided what information you want to migrate to your intranet, assign a team or team member to manage the migration. (The process of getting your information from your current system to an intranet will depend on the solution you choose.)
Roll out your intranet and adapt as necessary
Once you’ve migrated your content and information to your intranet, it’s time to roll it out to your team.
Make sure to have a training plan in place to get your team up to speed on how, when, and in what situations to use the intranet. You might schedule an all-hands meeting to review the intranet, have managers hold smaller training sessions with their team, or create training modules that individual team members can review when it makes sense for their schedule.
Once you’ve trained your team on how to use the intranet, make sure to check in with them at regular intervals (again, through things like focus groups, surveys, and one-on-ones) to get a sense of how it’s going and identify any issues. From there, you can adjust and adapt your intranet strategy accordingly.
For example, if you find that a large percentage of your team is still struggling to navigate your company intranet after 30 days, you might consider investing in additional training. Or, if after 90 days, you get the feedback that a certain feature is unnecessary and isn’t adding anything to your team’s workflow or employee experience, you might consider removing it and streamlining the intranet to focus on the features your team uses on a day-to-day basis.
The point is, rolling out your intranet might feel like the last step of how to set up a company intranet, but it’s not. If you want your intranet to be adopted and utilized effectively, you need to continually monitor how your employees are using it and where they may be struggling—and adjust your approach accordingly.
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Company intranets can have a huge impact on team efficiency, productivity, and engagement. And now that you know how to set up a company intranet, all that’s left to do? Get out there and start setting up your intranet!
Looking for some help? Contact one of our experts to discover more best practices to successfully set up your intranet.
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Author: Deanna deBara
