10 ways to improve SharePoint intranet adoption
- John Scott
As an Internal Comms Manager, there’s nothing worse than pouring effort into your SharePoint intranet only to find no one’s reading the news or engaging with the tools you provide. You’re not alone.
What is intranet adoption?
Intranet adoption can be regarded as the level and pattern of usage of your intranet. It refers to not only the numbers and proportion of users that are interacting and engaging with your intranet and its content, but also the way they are using it.Adoption covers areas such as number of visits, views of content, uptake of features, reactions to content, contributions of user-generated content and more. Good adoption is not just about maximising the numbers, but also ensuring the intranet is being used in a way that generates value.Why is intranet adoption so important?
Up to 75% of employees report disengagement due to underperforming intranets.
Ten ways to improve intranet adoption
Let’s explore some of the ways that intranet teams can improve intranet usage.
Ensure the intranet helps employees to get things done
Intranets deliver a range of different capabilities and support a number of core processes, such as internal communications. News and messaging are an extremely important part of any intranet, but the real reason most employees visit an intranet is to be able to complete tasks and get things done. Getting the right balance between news content and reference content is essential to underpin adoption. There are several ways to ensure this happens:
- Provide essential “how to” reference content on the intranet
- Include easy access with links through to applications (see below for more on this)
- Use specific integrations that help employees complete common tasks
- Highlight these features and content on the homepage and in your navigation.
By making the intranet the essential place where employees get things done, you’ll not only drive good adoption but also increase the views of news too.
Ensure the content is purposeful and up to date
The success of an intranet and its level of adoption will depend very much on its content. If employees regard content as not useful, neither authoritative nor up to date, then adoption will generally suffer. Most unsuccessful intranets have way too much out of date content that clogs up the search and generally erodes trust in the intranet as a useful and authoritative channel; many intranets that get replaced have reached this state.
Applying content governance to ensure that content has purpose, is up to date, findable and meets defined publication standards helps to support adoption. There are multiple ways to achieve this, including establishing clear ownership for each piece of content, using automation and workflow to ensure regular reviews of content, and establishing SharePoint intranet templates that help content owners create excellent pages.
Avoid site sprawl
Another key aspect of intranet governance that supports good adoption is avoiding site sprawl. When you get too many pages and sites, an intranet gets cluttered and the experience can degrade rapidly with duplication of content, incomplete areas and more. Site sprawl that happens outside the intranet estate in terms of additional SharePoint sites or Team spaces that end up duplicating or being used for content sharing which should be on the intranet, also undermines intranet value.
The best way to avoid site sprawl is to have control over the site provisioning process so approval is required for any new site to avoid duplication or misuse. The Lightspeed365 Site Provisioning feature is an excellent way to avoid site sprawl, providing approval workflow and the automatic creation of any SharePoint site or intranet area, Teams space or Viva Engage group, as appropriate.
Make your intranet accessible through Microsoft Teams
In Microsoft 365-powered digital workplaces, many employees spend much of their time working in Microsoft Teams. Making the intranet available through Teams where employees spend their working day is not only convenient for users but also helps drive adoption.
Making your intranet accessible through Teams can be carried out using Viva Connections. Even better, use the Lightspeed365 feature that helps you create a branded intranet app that sits within your Teams toolbar. If you’re using the Viva Connections dashboard, we also have custom cards that can integrate other platforms to support task completion.
Make everything findable
One of the most common complaints about an intranet is that users cannot find anything or the search is not up to scratch. Having a strong search experience where people can find what they need quickly will drive trust in the intranet and support higher usage and adoption.
Improving search and making everything more findable usually involves multiple tactics from increased content governance to using metadata to improve search results and filtering options. Lightspeed365 features also actively supports better findability and an improved search experience, for example through:
- A powerful people search and accompanying people directory
- A popular “floating search” web part with attractive design options that can deploy a scoped search on any part of page
- A site index that provides an invaluable directory of collaboration spaces.
Use personalisation to drive relevance
Workforces in most organisations are highly diverse. They have different needs in terms of the content they that need and want to see. A modern intranet should always deliver a personalised experience, so content is relevant and valuable; personalisation is now a cornerstone for having decent intranet adoption. SharePoint’s ability to use Entra ID data and leverage Microsoft 365 groups provides many opportunities to drive a more personalised experience to ensure good adoption.
Lightspeed365 features can also enhance a more personalised experience to support adoption, for example by providing subscription options so users can subscribe to the updates that they want to view. The Welcome bar feature also delivers a friendly personalised message to a user and includes useful contextual extras such as the local weather forecast.
Drive a programme of continual improvement
Improving intranet adoption is often based on a programme of continual improvement with a series of iterative changes and enhancements spread over the year. When employees can see and sense that an intranet keeps on getting better and better, then they will continue to want to use it, especially if it is meeting their emerging needs.
SharePoint lends itself to a programme of continual improvement because it is modular in terms of it being easy to add a new content area, feature or integration. Lightspeed365 also supports continual improvement in a number of ways, including offering a new wide set of additional features (web parts) to continue to improve the intranet. The feedback feature also makes it easy for teams to gather input from users in order to identity and prioritise specific improvements.
Make the intranet homepage a personalised app launcher
One popular use of the intranet that almost always drives adoption is allowing the intranet to provide personalised bookmarks to key tools and applications, making it the entry point into the wider digital workplace. Believe us, making the intranet homepage a personalised app launcher really does work in driving adoption! Surprisingly, the ability to do this properly in SharePoint out of the box is missing.
Using the Lightspeed365 app launcher feature provides a convenient interface for employees to access the tools, apps and links they use every day. Users can personalise the apps they see, but intranet teams can also mandate certain apps to be included too.
Ensure the site is modern, eye-catching and easy to use
Intranet design is another important component of successful intranet adoption. Having a clean, modern and uncluttered design that is attractive but also ensures the intranet is easy to use is much more likely to get employees to come and use it. An intranet that is overwhelming, confusing and looks out of date is simply less likely to attract users, even if the content is useful. An intranet also must be accessible to those with disabilities – up to one in four employees can have disabilities, some of which are not always visible.
Ensuring there is a good design which also aligns with your corporate branding and is accessible is not always easy to achieve. Modern SharePoint is quite effective but it not enough; there are compromises you make in terms brand alignment, user experience and accessibility. We designed Lightspeed365 to bridge those gaps in SharePoint with a range of different features that ensure your intranet looks great, is accessible and better aligns with your corporate brand in order to sustain strong adoption. These features include:
- The accordion, helping to improve the layout of different pages.
- The Section+, enabling to use enhanced imagery as background to create eye-catching pages.
- Branding tools, to extend your range of styling options to stay on-brand and even support sub-brands.
- Accessibility tools to drive usability and underpin inclusivity.
- And more!
Keep on working on adoption
Achieving good intranet adoption is never a given and is often an ongoing process. Creating the foundations of a powerful intranet provides the opportunity to drive excellent levels of adoption and value, but you still need to keep up the effort and let people know about the intranet and its benefits.
There are multiple ways to do this including ongoing change management and communications, leveraging local champions to act as ambassadors, using competitions and initiatives to invite participation, and ensuring intranet use and awareness is part of onboarding for new employees. Using these techniques should help you to improve and sustain great adoption on your SharePoint intranet.
Improving SharePoint intranet adoption
Improving the adoption of your intranet requires a lot of different tactics. We’ve covered some of the major ones in this article, so give them a try! An intranet solution such as Lightspeed365 can also make a significant difference in driving adoption. Why not arrange a free demo to see how it can help?
Lightspeed365 was built to solve these exact challenges—boosting SharePoint intranet adoption by making it more engaging, usable, and manageable.
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