For those of us in the northern hemisphere, spring has officially sprung. The leaves are returning to the trees and the sun is staying up longer. At work, the craziness of Q1 has been and gone, and now it’s time to make sure you’re on track for a successful year ahead. And where better place to start than your intranet?

It’s the perfect time to review and reflect on how your company intranet is performing, and how you can make small changes to improve it. An intranet spring-clean doesn’t need to be a huge undertaking- even just a few simple changes could be transformational for your business.

Investigate

First things first, you’ll need to establish what is and isn’t working within your site. Consulting both qualitative and quantitative data will provide you with a strong basis to implement people-centric changes. So, it’s time to put your detective hat on and find out what your staff really think about their intranet.

• Survey - Create a survey to gauge what your employees love and the stuff that needs some work. Ask a range of open and closed questions regarding the site structure, the content, the effectiveness of tools and the outcomes they facilitate. Do they actually enjoy using the intranet? Is it making their life easier?
• #Channel- GreenOrbit #Channels are activity feeds based on the topics of conversation that matter to your business. Create an #IntranetFeedback channel so that staff can post their experiences and ideas, when and where they arise. This is a super simple way to receive feedback from employees that can be incredibly effective. When it’s time to spring-clean, you can simply visit the #Channel and review the contributions that are already there.
• Intranet Analytics - Validate your employee feedback with some cold hard facts. Which pages are being viewed the most and least? What does the overall site traffic tell you?

Review

Now that you’ve done your research, it’s time to put it to good use. Revise your intranet strategy and KPIs and adjust accordingly. Establish priority tasks and how they will be completed. Once you know ‘what’, move on to the ‘who.’ Who will be responsible for which tasks? Who will need to manage the new content moving forward?

This phase will include removing the redundant intranet content. If you have an existing policy regarding the deletion of digital assets then you’ll obviously need to follow this. If not, archive the old content initially to ensure no information is lost before there is an approved plan in place.

Get Inspired

A large body of the work will come from improving existing items and simple changes- which is great. But don’t forget to be bold. Come up with one exciting, innovative idea that’s going to give your intranet the X-factor and engage users. It might be the introduction of a monthly CEO Podcast, an employee recognition initiative or a mindfulness campaign. Get creative!

Plan Your Maintenance

With your spring-clean complete, you’ll need to figure out how you’re going to keep things tidy. If you don’t already have a maintenance plan in place, schedule how often you’ll need to conduct reviews, analyse stats and meet with your team. By having your #IntranetFeedback channel in place, staff can always contribute their ideas to help continue to improve your site.

By following these simple spring-cleaning tips, your employee intranet will be flourishing in no time. Don’t forget, GreenOrbit customers receive a free intranet health check each year and there’s no better time to use it than now! 

Not using GreenOrbit yet? No worries. You can make a time to speak with one our GreenOrbit Intranet Specialists to discover the benefits for yourself.