Is Your Team Interested in your Company Intranet?

Most organizations use top-notch business solutions like Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, or Peoplesoft to help them organize and manage all their business activities. A lot of these organizations still lack collaboration and internal collaboration. Why? It’s simply impossible for every employee to communicate with 500-1000 other employees in an organization—you wouldn’t even know their names!

Imagine everyone’s work being appreciated by everyone at your organization. It’s easy to feel trapped in your cubicle when your ideas and suggestions don’t get recognized, or worse, your manager takes all the credit! This is how a company intranet can play an amazing role in an organization by supporting employee engagement and collaboration. It’s transparent and open, everyone can see all the updates and respond quickly without wasting time with conference calls and hundreds of emails.

It’s far too common that companies have a bad experience after investing a lot of time and money into their intranet. If you’re having trouble getting your team to adopt to using your intranet, here are some possible reasons and remedies:

Improper User Training Issue

About 70% of organizations fail to have successful intranet portal usage because they don’t provide adequate and effective user training. Not everyone is tech-savvy, so even though you have all the information your team needs readily available on the organization intranet, some team members will need to be taught how to find it.

Every SharePoint Intranet Portal, Dock included, is search compatible, thanks to Microsoft SharePoint’s metadata driven search capability. However, this search feature may not be innate to every user and can’t always help them to fetch data when in need.

How can you fix this?

Convincing your users to adopt to using your intranet starts with making sure every single employee understands how to navigate it. Training is the first key to user adoption.

As a user-centered product company, we have worked hard to create a training program that promotes and increases usage of the product we have meticulously crafted. By providing training videos and an online user guide, every member of your team will be confident using Dock.

The Help Tab is found on the Home Page of Dock Intranet Portal – helping employees learn and navigate through different features. You can also see the “Search” tab on the right-hand side.

Another great way to increase user adoption is teaching your content owners the correct way to upload content. Utilizing important features like tagging helps the search feature work better. This keeps your content organized and avoids confusion for your team.

Defining search techniques means searching for file names, phrases, file types or even file authors. Employees need to be taught the search features so that can find all the files they need easily. Aid in these areas and witness the improvements in employee engagement and intranet usage.

Our intranet doesn’t work the way we want it to.

User friendliness – We hear these words from our clients all the time. If the solution isn’t user friendly, no one will care to try using it even if that is where all the organization’s important files and documents are stored.

How can you fix this?

Look for Company Intranet solutions that have easy-to-understand navigation, like Dock’s neat navigation tiles, top-navigation (mega menu), sites and web parts.

The navigation, including the tiles and mega menu, must be informational and so your users can easily figure out what to click.

Another good way to make your intranet portal usage more effective is to include information related to the user’s tasks. Have your managers assign tasks to their users and evaluate them on the user performance. This could be time consuming, but it’s a good way to improve employee communication and collaboration.

Management doesn’t care about the company intranet.

Your senior management was interested in implementing an organizational intranet portal but now they are not using it. And if your employees notice that? They wouldn’t use it either! Lack of support from the top management will ruin your intranet for sure. Using emails and OneDrive to share information and documents will drastically drop the intranet user adoption.

How can you fix this?

Motivate each and every person in your organization to use the intranet as the major source for communication and collaboration. This must be the main source of information. Run contests or awards for boosting user interest. Get in touch with your marketing and sales team and ask them to stop sending out their newsletters through emails. Creating a newsletter page within the intranet will solve this issue. Sending out a notification via your intranet to all the users will encourage them to access the portal and look for information they need.

Unwanted information on my intranet.

Yes, your intranet portal must be aligned with your business processes – which includes relevant information. You shouldn’t talk about oranges when you sell apples right? If you or your team inundate your intranet with unnecessary information, it starts to feel like the junk mails that we receive from outside sources. You don’t want your users to feel that they are using a junk folder, do you?

How can you fix this?

Keep your content fresh and organized so the users can see it easily. If you have old information, you should create an archive folder where all these files can be transferred by defining a policy action feature in SharePoint.

• Define Approval Processes: This will help in filtering unnecessary information to flow into your intranet.
• Encourage Content Managers: Ask them to save information that is relevant to the business 

Verdict

As you can see, there are a lot of reasons your employees aren’t adopting to your intranet. We’re sure if you try to follow those steps, you’ll see positive improvements in your team. Still figuring out how to solve your existing intranet problems?

Learn More: SharePoint is the Top Content Management Solution

Don’t worry, we are ready to help! Get in touch with our SharePoint Experts Today!