Simplicity – Time-pressed employees want a fast and simple intranet and companies with the best intranets are listening to their employees and responding to their needs. Clean look, easy navigation, relevant content. Says JPL’s Frank O’Donnell: “We learned just how strongly employees feel about having an intranet that works for them and their need for speed, fast access, and good applications.” Employees like anything that facilitates speed so they can get what they need and resume productive work. The best intranets feature all of these elements.

Easy Search – Employees want to be able to find things quickly and a good search tool is at the top of their intranet preference list. The People Search capability available in SharePoint 2007 has been a hit in all three best intranet organizations. Many companies have also introduced a “most popular sites” section on their home page to complement their search feature. Says Enbridge’s Andrea Legault: “The people search feature on SharePoint 2007 allows employees to get information about their colleagues in one click and it has greatly contributed to building connections between employees. It’s definitely the top-mentioned item when people are asked what they like about the site.”

Effective Governance – An effective governance structure that provides a unified experience for the user is at the heart of a good intranet, say our contributors. Frank O’Donnell notes: “We have a team leader for our intranet who acts as editor-in-chief and coordinates with the departments and determines priorities for content.” Andrea Legault: “Our site is governed by a steering committee, an operating committee, and a content management team that includes the editor-in-chief, site managers, and content authors, approvers and owners. Site managers work very closely with one another, and the editor-in-chief, to ensure consistency across the site. To instill greater accountability, many employees have this responsibility included as part of their yearly objective setting and performance review process.”

Productive Work-Related Applications – Employees want “killer apps” that help them do their work more efficiently. SCANA's Christy Season: “More employees are using SharePoint for collaborative project and team web sites and the intranet has become more a combination of communications and critical work applications and tools. Employees want to visit the intranet and see links to tools and communications that are tailored to their role and work environment.” Andrea Legault also notes that the upgraded Enbridge intranet home page has an Application Links section “which provides links to frequently used applications and tools in one location.”

Customization – At home, people have discovered the benefits of personalizing a web site to suit their needs. They want that same capability in their intranet at work. Christy Season: “We surveyed employees back in November 2009 and they told us that they are looking for greater customization and personalization on the intranet.”

Collaboration – SharePoint 2007 opened up a whole new frontier for online collaboration and idea sharing and companies are reaping huge benefits from it. Some companies even have subject experts who employees can link with to gain knowledge and ask for advice. Online collaboration will continue to proliferate throughout global business over the next few years. Get in the game now if you aren’t in it.

Meaningful, Attention Grabbing Content – “What’s in it for me?” “What looks interesting to read?” These are questions on the minds of employees as they look at your intranet. Employees want real stuff they can apply in their work. They want headline news. But they are also attracted to material that personalizes the workplace through stories and photos about what co-workers do in their jobs and in their lives. Communicators also liven things up with online polls, blog questions, rating features, teaser headlines and cutlines.

User Mobility – Advancements in technology have made it possible to integrate many kinds of devices and access information from just about everywhere. Mobility is increasingly valued in intranets, too. Andrea Legault: “At Enbridge, we created an elink “lite” version of the site to ensure employees in remote locations have access to the information they need on the intranet. It’s accessible on all mobile devices and provides a quick view of the information users regularly access in their day-to-day work.” Frank O’Donnell of JPL adds: “We have an iPhone app that, for internal use, is designed to provide access to basic information such as people lookups, maps, shuttle bus routes and so forth.”

Two-Way Dialogue – With the ever growing popularity of Facebook and Twitter et al, employees want the capability to use social media tools to talk with senior management and their peers. That’s why executive blogs have become very popular at many companies. Kraft had their senior leaders blog from the corporate officers meeting. Pepsico’s CEO blogged real-time as she traveled throughout Asia. Their insights made interesting reading and many employees added their thoughts and comments to the posts.

A Strategic Approach to Social Media – Social media should not be implemented internally without a well-thought-out strategy. Advises Christy Season: “Don’t provide your employees with social media tools without first having a communication strategy and guidelines in place for using the tools.” And when you implement social media, integrate the tools into a package, like Kraft Foods does, and make them as simple to use as possible.

Learning By Listening – Last, but not least, our contributors strongly emphasize the importance of gathering input from employees in the intranet development process. Andrea Legault says: “Employee involvement has a big impact; employees from across the organization were involved in the planning, design, development and roll-out of our site, helping to ensure that the result was user-centric and took into consideration how employees worked and what information needed to be readily available.” Adds Christy Season: “We have learned that it’s important to involve employees early on in any major changes involving the intranet. We had several usability tests with groups of employees prior to starting our intranet redesign, including a card sorting exercise. We learned what categories employees saw information falling into, which greatly helped us determine the major navigation categories. We also created an employee pilot group to review the site prior to launch.”