Top Seven Tips For Launching Your Intranet

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Top Seven Tips For Launching Your Intranet

We’ve shared some of our essential top tips that will see you on your way to a successful intranet launch at your company.

Top Seven Tips For Launching Your Intranet

Intranets can bring plenty of benefits to your organization by boosting engagement with internal communications along with improving business efficiency. The key to a successful launch of an intranet within any organization requires careful and meticulous planning to ensure a smooth roll-out.

Top Tips for a successful Intranet Launch

1. Set Clear Intranet Usage Goals

There could be many reasons for deploying an intranet within your company, whether you are using it for external communications to improve customer service, or building internal collaboration amongst your employees. Whatever your reasons for wanting to use an intranet, it’s important to have these reasons listed down so you can design your intranet constructively and help convert your list into concrete usage goals. This helps you to stay on track and assess its performance to make further adjustments in the coming months, as your intranet continues to grow.

2. Use an Employee-Centric Approach

Most businesses use intranet software with the aim of improving collaboration or resource-sharing between colleagues and offices.  By having an employee-centric approach when you launch your intranet and actively involving every company employee from the outset, it will help you quickly and efficiently iron out any issues users may encounter during the launch.  Moreover, by monitoring how employees use your intranet and engage with the content post-launch, it will enable you to further improve your usage goals and User Experience, helping you craft a more efficient, easier to navigate intranet that always delivers relevant employee-centric content.

3. Don’t Set Tight Deadlines

Many companies are too excited at the prospect of rolling out the intranet and try to push things too quickly without thinking properly about content structure or clear usage goals. It’s important to remember that a complete rollout of a clearly thought out intranet can take about 5-6 months and sometimes even longer for bigger companies with more complex usage needs. If you do not give adequate time for the intranet launch, there are high chances of not only running into problems throughout the process, but you will also find that employees will be less engaged with an ‘unfinished’ intranet that has a haphazard launch.

4. Define Team Roles For Your Intranet 

Before the actual implementation of your intranet takes places, it’s essential to set up a steering group and have clearly defined roles for the team.   A leadership-based team can be more effective for building a more engaging, constructive intranet, and is essential in managing any issues that may arise during the launch.  Whether each member of the steering group has been delegated responsibility for a separate aspect of your intranet launch, or you all work together as a collective to implement the launch, it is imperative that each member knows what is expected of them.

5. Conduct Training Sessions 

It’s important to have training sessions for your staff to introduce them to the world of the intranet, so that they get well-acquainted with the concepts in advance. Share valuable and engaging content to make information easier to grasp for the employees in the organization.  If your intranet has department-specific tasks / uses, it’s an excellent idea to have tailored training sessions so your employees can fully get to grips with the features and functionality of your intranet, and know what is expected of them moving forward.  No matter how much hard work you have put in to building your intranet, without adequate training your intranet could become a flash in the pan as users don’t convert to the new workplace processes on your intranet and stick doing their tasks ‘the old way’.

6. Think of Branding Your Intranet

Make sure that your company intranet reflects the branding philosophy of your organization. Having a branded intranet helps in creating a positive impression on the minds of external customers (if your intranet is customer-facing), and makes internal staff feel like it’s their intranet and that they are a part of company that recognizes their contribution and hard work. 

7. Have Clear Content Creation Policies

It’s a good practice to have clear content creation policies right from the beginning so that everyone is aware of what to post and what to avoid. Most intranet software will let you set up a wide variety of user permissions, whether on an individual, group or company level, so you can clearly manage who is and isn’t responsible for content creation.  With regards to user permissions and access rights, it’s a good idea to think about your user profiles and what certain people / departments will need access to (both on a read-only and an admin level) so that you can create varying levels of permissions and assign them as necessary prior to launch.  Always test your user types out before launch so the right permissions are in place.

Want to know more about how you can make your intranet launch a success? Check out our other blog - How to Make Your Intranet a Hit