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8 Steps to Set Up Your Intranet
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90% of intranet projects fail within three years.¹ A phenomenon often caused by poor governance, unclear goals, or a lack of buy-in from leadership.
So how do you avoid these mistakes? And what are the best practices for ensuring your platform succeeds? Follow these 8 steps to set up your intranet with ease and ensure it gets adopted by your teams.
1. Define clear goals
The first thing to do before setting up your intranet? Define your goals! The clearer they are, the more likely you are to find a solution that fits.
Identifying them is very simple: think about what you want to achieve with your intranet, making sure to involve leadership from the very start. For example, are you looking to…
- …keep information flowing within your organization?
- …engage your communities or your network?
- …encourage knowledge sharing and cross-functional exchanges ?
- …bring together your employees spread across several sites?
- …boost your teams’ engagement ?
- …improve the work experience of your employees ?
- …strengthen the sense of belonging to your company?
After some thought, your list of goals may be longer than expected. If so, we recommend ranking them from most to least important, to prioritize your actions as effectively as possible.
2. Identify the features you need
Once your goals are clear, it’s now time to list the features you need on your intranet. Some will be more important than others, so don’t hesitate to rank them by priority as well, taking into account the goals you’ve set.
For example, if your goal is to improve your internal communication, you’ll probably need an intranet with a news feed and a home page to share information easily. Likewise, if you’re looking for a platform to engage a network, your intranet should let you create communities and share content with them in real time.
Also remember to list the admin features you need (user access management, group management, statistics, etc.), as well as your various constraints, particularly around:
- the number of users,
- the platform’s level of security and where it hosts its data,
- the customization options (for example, is the intranet available as a white label?),
- accessibility (must the platform be accessible without an email? For several email domains? Via SSO? On mobile and tablet?).
SSO, what’s that? 🤔
Single Sign-On (SSO) is a single authentication service that lets you log in to several applications by entering your username and password just once. A real everyday time-saver!
3. Ask your future users for their input
Before starting your benchmark, take the time to involve your employees in the project, in order to gather their feedback on the requirements you’ve drawn up. Do they see any criteria to add or prioritize more? Or do they feel, on the contrary, that some features are less important than you’d imagined? This feedback will be essential to align your requirements with the needs of your future users.
There are several ways to gather their input, including surveys, group and one-on-one interviews. As much as possible, try to survey a variety of profiles (managers, employees working in the field and in the offices, subject-matter experts working in different departments, etc.), to get a representative sample of your entire organization.
Take the opportunity, too, to identify the people who seem most interested in the project, and who could potentially become beta testers and/or ambassadors for your intranet. That way you’ll kill two birds with one stone!
4. Choose the intranet that suits you best
Great: your requirements have been validated by all your stakeholders! You now need to identify THE solution best suited to your organization, comparing in particular:
- the features offered by the various solutions on the market (do they match your expectations and those of your future users?),
- the price (per month and per user),
- the deployment time and ease of use of each platform,
- the customer reviews of each vendor,
- the quality of the onboarding and user support.
A true intranet 2.0, Talkspirit adapts to all your internal communication and community engagement needs, and supports you throughout your project rollout. All at a competitive price! Available from €5 per month and per user, the platform includes a news feed, a welcome portal, a module for webinars and video conferencing, chat, groups, a drive, and much more!
Discover our onboarding services
Want to explore the other tools available on the market? Check out our comparison of the 14 best intranets.
5. Create a communication plan
Next comes one of the key steps to setting up your intranet: communication. To make sure it’s done by the book, we recommend drawing up an action plan that spells out:
- everything you’ll communicate about before, during, and after the launch of your platform,
- the dates and format of each communication (is it a written or spoken announcement, in video or slide format?),
- the channels you’ll favor (emails, internal social network, intranet, digital signage in your premises, dedicated event, etc.),
- the people and/or departments in charge of each communication (for example, senior leadership, internal communication, human resources, team managers, etc.),
- the essential elements to prepare before launching your intranet (defining usage guidelines, creating the first groups, positioning the tool relative to existing ones, etc.).
If possible, try to identify a few ambassadors in advance who can promote the intranet within their team, and so boost its adoption. They’ll be your best allies in carrying out your communication plan!
end HubSpot Call-to-Action Code 6. Keep your intranet active
Of course, setting up an intranet doesn’t just mean preparing its launch. It’s also – and above all – essential to keep your platform active on a regular basis, to make users want to log in and encourage them to interact on it day to day.
Read also: The ultimate checklist to engage the members of a network
The best way to do this is to appoint group managers who will be responsible for energizing your various communities. These can be members of the Internal Communication team as well as volunteer employees wishing to manage a particular group.
Group manager, what’s that? 🤔
On Talkspirit, a group manager is a member who has settings rights for a group. They can, in particular, invite or remove new members, manage their access rights, add integrations, or create a chat room dedicated to the group.
What matters is that they keep each group active on a regular basis, in particular through:
- publishing content (for example, best practices or curated articles likely to interest members),
- creating and/or spotting events (online or in person) matching everyone’s interests,
- showcasing employees’ work,
- and a good dose of creativity!
The more your users feel your intranet brings them real added value, the more likely they are to use it. So don’t skimp on this step!
end HubSpot Call-to-Action Code 7. Train your users and administrators
Whatever intranet you’ve chosen to set up, don’t overlook the training part either! Because even if your platform is easy to pick up for the average user, that won’t necessarily be the case for all your employees.
Read also: How to make it easier to adopt your new collaboration tools?
So take the time to train your users and administrators on the main features they’ll be using, by organizing different training sessions if needed.
For example, you can run an admin training covering inviting users, creating and configuring groups, customizing the platform, and creating internal newsletters. Conversely, you might rather show your users how to send a message on chat, how to view information on the news feed and the home page, or how to run a video call.
If you have the time, we recommend creating dedicated training resources that will be stored on your intranet (for example, video tutorials and/or best-practice documents), or simply recording your training sessions so they can be (re)watched later by your users.
8. Continuously improve your practices
Finally, don’t forget: your intranet is meant to evolve continuously. The best way to anticipate these changes is to track your platform’s usage statistics (via Talkspirit’s dedicated module, for example), but also to survey your employees regularly. That way you can find out what they think of the platform, and let them suggest improvements.
Here are a few questions to ask them:
- How often do you use the intranet?
- Which features do you use most? Which ones don’t you use, and why?
- Which groups do you use most? And why?
- In your view, should new groups be created? If so, which ones?
- What do you think of how the various groups are run? Do you see anything to improve?
- Do you feel you receive too many, too few, or the right number of notifications?
- Overall, are you satisfied with the intranet? And why?
Based on the feedback you get, you’ll have several avenues to improve your intranet and the way you communicate about it.
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You now know the essential best practices for setting up your intranet and making your project a success. To keep them in mind, it couldn’t be simpler: download our methodology sheet summarizing the 8 key steps to roll out your intranet platform.
Get the methodology sheet
In this methodology sheet, you’ll find: the 8 steps to set up your intranet, the questions to ask yourself to identify your needs, the decisive criteria for choosing your solution, the elements to include in your communication plan, as well as our best tips to ensure your platform gets adopted.
