Eight key reasons no one uses the intranet
- John Scott
Does your intranet have low adoption? Have the number of users regularly visiting started to dwindle over the years? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Good adoption is never guaranteed, and low intranet adoption is a common problem, remaining a perennial thorny issue for intranet teams.
Strong intranet adoption is important and helps generate value for the intranet. There’s not much point in an intranet that nobody uses. However, the good news is that there are usually several common reasons why an intranet suffers from low adoption, each of which can be dealt with in order to encourage more employees to visit the intranet.
In this article we cover eight common reasons nobody seems to be using your intranet and the “remedy” you can follow to reverse the trend in each case.
1. Employees no longer trust your intranet content
An intranet is only ever as valuable as its content, so when content is irrelevant, out of date or duplicated, then the intranet depreciates in value. And the more erroneous, outdated, and conflicting versions items that employees find, the more their overall trust in the intranet and its content will erode. This usually plays out in the following way:
- Employees start to doubt the good content that is actually there
- They no longer automatically go to the intranet as the “one source of truth”
- Adoption gradually declines over time.
Remedy:
- Introducing a series of content governance measures is the only way to improve content in a sustainable way and re-establish confidence in the intranet as the one source of truth.
- Content governance involves a series of different tactics and approaches which establish clear standards, policies, roles, responsibilities, and processes.
- At the centre of this is clarity over ownership and ongoing reviews of content, as well as effective lifecycle management.
2. The intranet does not help employees get things done
Intranets generate value in many different areas, including:
- Supporting productivity, by helping employees find that they need to support their work.
- Reducing risk and supporting compliance though standardisation and transparency.
- Keeping employees informed through internal communications.
- Driving engagement by fostering a sense of connections and community.
- And more!
All of these areas are equally imporant. However, when it comes to using an intranet, the main reason an employee will visit is to get things done and complete tasks in their busy working week. This is the essential “what’s-in-it-for-me” factor that underpins adoption for the majority of employees. If an intranet is solely focused on communications and engagement rather than supporting day-to-day work, then adoption can suffer.
Remedy:
- Ensure the intranet helps employees get things done and is useful for everyday work.
- Internal comms is essential but balance it out with critical how-to information, links to tools, the ability to complete simple transactions and more to ensure people visit regularly.
- In turn you will drive better engagement with news too.
3. The intranet has a poor user experience
Employees generally have positive experiences of technology outside work through the apps, websites, and social media channels they use every day as consumers. So, when the technology they use inside work fails to meet these standards or their expectations it is a problem.
A poor user experience leads to reduced adoption. Nobody wants an intranet that looks dated, is horribly clunky, or confusing and difficult to use. And they definitely do not want an intranet that has technical issues, for example with slow load page times or regular unplanned outages. Ultimately if the intranet experience is frustrating for users, then they will not use it.
Remedy:
- Ensure your intranet has a good user experience by investing in an engaging design, ongoing user testing, and continuous improvement.
- Keep on monitoring performance too, a factor in adoption that sometimes gets missed.
- When improving the user experience, remember a surprising amount can be achieved by configuring SharePoint or investing in a solution like Lightspeed365 that provides additional design options.
4. The intranet hasn’t evolved over the years
Employee needs and expectations are in a constant state of change and flux – and intranets must constantly evolve to meet these needs to maintain adoption and value. Restructures. New acquisitions. New technology advances (hello AI). New products and services. New ways of working. New compliance needs. New tech experiences in the consumer world. All of these may trigger changes or additions to an intranet’s structure, content, and feature. An intranet that stands still and doesn’t evolve accordingly will effectively decline and lose adoption as the world moves on.
Remedy:
- Ensure there is a robust basis for continual improvement for your intranet, so it keeps evolving, adding new content and features on a regular basis.
- Use a mixture of analytics, user feedback, and stakeholder input to keep on top of employee and organisational needs.
- Consider using a modular intranet solution like Lightspeed365, which has a series of additional intranet features that can easily be added to underpin continual improvement.
5. It is impossible to find anything
A core role of a successful intranet is to help people find the information they need to carry out their role; if it is impossible to find anything on your intranet, then it will inevitably stop getting used. Poor findability is more often a content issue than one with technology:
- It might be that you have too much out-of-date content which means a lot of “noise” clogs up your search results.
- Content may be spread across different repositories beyond your intranet and is not covered by the intranet search.
- A poor intranet navigation will also contribute to poor findability.
Remedy:
- There is usually no single magic ingredient or one tactic that will cure search and ensure people can find what they need, so realistically you will need to introduce a range of tactics.
- Work on a programme of continual improvement for search and findability that spans across multiple areas include improving removing out-of-date content and tightening up content governance to make things findable.
- Consider investing in the search experience – for example introducing the “floating search” widget from Lightspeed365 that can create a more tailored search experience on particular pages.
6. The intranet is not easily accessible from the places people work
Is your intranet easy to access from the systems, applications, and devices where employees spend most of their working day? If the intranet is an extra inconvenient step away to access from the flow of work, this can have a surprisingly significant impact on levels of adoption. For example:
- Nany people work in Microsoft Teams all day and it is the centre of their digital employee experience, but the intranet might not be easily accessible from there.
- Frontline employees may well only have access to a mobile device during the working day, but the intranet cannot be viewed from their mobile device.
- If you are using Microsoft 365 and you don’t use a SharePoint intranet, then people may even have to use additional credentials to log into the intranet.
All of these three examples will negatively impact adoption.
Remedy:
- Remove barriers to usage by ensuring you have a SharePoint intranet that is integrated with other tools across your Microsoft 365 digital workplace.
- Make your intranet accessible from Microsoft Teams using Microsoft Viva Connections or a solution like Lightspeed365 that has a native Teams app.
- Ensure your intranet can be accessed from mobile devices, potentially from within Microsoft Teams.
7. Intranets are not personalised, so it is less relevant to employees
Organisations have incredibly diverse workforces with different needs and requirements. Consider a global or complex organisation with employees across different counties, locations, divisions, roles, brands, levels of hierarchy and years of tenure. Every individual has different professional interests and personal preferences.
When an intranet takes a one-size-fits-all approach it means that the content and experiences it delivers will be irrelevant or of no interest to sections of your workforce. People in the Paris office don’t want to hear about the news for the London office. Ultimately, if the intranet is not relevant then employees will not engage with it and adoption will dwindle.
Remedy:
- Modern intranets use personalisation and targeting based on user profile data in order to ensure relevance and underpin adoption.
- Ensure you are using personalisation on your intranet – even a gentle sprinkle can make a significant difference.
- Additionally, introduce the ability for users to subscribe to different types of content using a feature like the news subscription web part in Lightspeed365.
- Note that accurate and complete profile data – usually from Entra ID – is a prerequisite for success here.
8. Adoption is low and it’s going into a ‘death spiral’
In this article we’ve described a variety of factors that drive low adoption. Unfortunately, when adoption does start to decline, this in itself leads to a further fall in the numbers of people using the intranet. There may be a growing perception that nobody uses the intranet now, so it is not worth visiting there or adding content to it. Stakeholders may feel it is pointless to make improvements to their sites or pages within it. Alternatives such as SharePoint sites or other solutions spring up, further eroding adoption and confidence.
Remedy:
- It’s never too late to improve an intranet!
- Introduce some of the remedies we’ve already pointed out in this article and commit to continual improvement.
- Relaunch and rebrand the intranet to reset and change perceptions. Good luck!
How Lightspeed365 supports SharePoint intranet adoption
There’s one single key to increasing intranet adoption, but a product like Lightspeed365 can make a huge difference by:
- Filling the critical gaps in SharePoint Online to make the intranet the essential place to complete tasks and get things done, for example the “app launcher” – often the killer app on the intranet.
- Making the intranet more attractive, user-friendly and on-brand with additional design options and also elements such as the “intranet tour” to support new users
- Providing additional features that can be easily integrated into a programme of continuous improvement.
- Removing the barriers to usage and access, particularly by making your SharePoint intranet seamlessly available within Microsoft Teams.
- Add features to personalise and configure the experience such as the “welcome message” with a personal greeting or the ability to subscribe to news topics, neither of which are available with SharePoint Online out of the box,
- And more!
Need help with SharePoint intranet adoption? Get in touch!
Is your intranet suffering from low adoption? While the insights in this post may help, sometimes it is difficult to know just where to start. If you’d like to discuss how to reverse your low SharePoint intranet adoption trends, or would like more information about Lightspeed365, then get in touch!
Frequently asked questions
Why does my SharePoint intranet suffer from low adoption?
There are wide variety of reasons suffer from low adoption and usage, and in practice there are usually multiple factors in play. Common reasons include employees losing trust in an intranet because there is too much out-of-date content, a poor user experience, poor technical performance, an outdated design, poor search and findability, an intranet only focused on communications rather than helping employees get things done, and the growth of alternatives such as SharePoint sites.
How can I improve SharePoint intranet adoption?
It depends on what the main reasons for your low intranet adoption are, but usually a variety of approaches and tactics will work. These include applying content governance to ensure all content is up to date, accurate and valuable, working to improve findability, making the intranet essential to getting things done, and improving the user experience. Applying these approaches through a process of continual improvement often means intranet adoption and usage will start to increase.
My SharePoint intranet has low adoption – do I need a new intranet?
Sometimes an intranet reaches the end of its shelf life and it’s time for a new solution. Continuing low adoption can be a sign that you have reached this point. However, low adoption does not always mean an intranet needs to be replaced. There are a variety of tactics that can be employed, and you can also invest in products like Lightspeed365 which extend the features of your SharePoint intranet and allow you to refresh the design.
