Maybe it is a small world after all, but doesn’t it sometimes feel too…big? Organizations benefit from the connectivity of the huge, worldwide internet – but the people who make up your team need the chance to connect with each other, too.
A great intranet can make all the difference. With remote work rapidly becoming the new normal, and a workforce spread across countries, or even continents, a well-designed, human-centered intranet helps your team build community together, wherever they are.
So, what is a human-centered intranet , anyways?
Put simply, an intranet is a private, internal web platform, designed to support employees across a company.
This might include:
- an internal communications system
- document sharing
- training manuals
- and more!
There’s no limit to what an intranet can do for your team. Too often, however, the unlimited potential of a company-wide intranet can be overwhelming. With many possibilities and too little planning, you might get the opposite of what you wanted to build: a clunky, out-of-date digital labyrinth everyone avoids like the haunted 10th-floor bathroom.
That’s where the human-centered part comes in.
When you put your people at the heart of the systems you build, your people will use them.
It really is that simple!
Building an intranet for my company’s remote team
When I first started at AMP Creative as a People Ops Generalist, I immediately saw the potential benefits of a well-designed, human-centered intranet.
AMP has a 100% remote workforce, dispersed coast-to-coast. And with the Covid-19 pandemic raging, it was clear that remote work was here to stay–both for us and a huge segment of the global economy.
But a distributed workforce can and should still be a connected workforce, and that means our digital workspaces are more vital than ever. A human-centered intranet should help team members collaborate from afar, and provide a genuinely useful, genuinely intuitive digital environment that works for everyone.
With those goals in mind, our team got to work building one.
Here’s what I learned along the way.
1: Invite stakeholders to the table before you build, while you’re building, and happily ever after.
Rather than steamroll ahead with our own ideas about what team members might want from an intranet, our People Ops team identified key partners before drafting designs.
We partnered with IT from the very beginning. Not only did this ensure watertight security, it also achieved buy-in from some of our most critical stakeholders. The timing proved ideal since IT was rapidly adapting its policies and protocols in the wake of the pandemic and needed to securely distribute that information to employees.
Having a centralized intranet where employees can easily find all these new documents is imperative for the operation and safety of all parties.
Logan Eaton, AMP’s IT Manager
The benefits for teams don’t stop at IT. For Helena Abernethy, Marketing Operations Specialist, the intranet was an elegant solution to keeping important marketing information centralized and readily accessible, reducing time-consuming email exchanges to locate various links and documents.
“I’d been wishing for ‘AMP pages’ of some sort, which people could be directed to for different needs,” Helena explained. She created a site in the intranet for the Thought Leadership team, which neatly catalogs all relevant information and resources. “I’ve heard positive feedback from our team members—and also found myself having to respond directly to requests much less frequently!”
Next, she’ll add a marketing site to highlight AMP’s social media outreach and invite contributions from team members – an innovative method for cultivating cross-team creativity throughout the organization.
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Keep seeking out feedback
While our intranet is now up and humming, that doesn’t mean we’re done growing its benefits for our team.
Building a suggestions interface into the platform is key to keeping your intranet useful for the whole company. “Employees are our clients,” my fellow People Ops team member Vik Marcussen explained. “We have a feedback form because we’re building this for people – we need to know what our people want.”
While you’ll likely field some comments about stuff you can’t change (for us, it’s our weirdly-spaced webpage margins 🤦…), you’ll always keep an open line of communication with the folks whose input matters most.
2: Create an intranet that looks, sounds, and feels like the people who make up your company.
It’s no secret that the more you invest in your people, the better things go for your company. Creating a human-centered workplace culture helps to retain great employees, build morale, and foster the kind of growth that lifts everyone up.
As the central digital hub for your team, an intranet can and should do the same.
When designing a platform that reflects your company’s specific culture and values, you have a unique opportunity to reinforce your organization’s story in a shared language. There are so many ways to do this, from incorporating branding into the interface design to inviting employees to share their unique expertise.
I celebrated the launch of the intranet by curating a staff cookbook, where employees could share their family recipes with their colleagues. And Helena, who in addition to her marketing savvy is also a self-described personal finance nerd, built a personal finance page from scratch, where she shares insights from years of comparing tax software and cell phone plans. “I wish we had one for auto maintenance!” she told me with a laugh. I’ll take pasta carbonara over a carburetor, but I’ve got a feeling someone here at AMP is up for the challenge…
Investing in your people means investing in all your people: a navigable, accessible intranet provides clarity and guidance to all employees, which has crucial benefits for DE&I and fosters collaboration between remote workers.
Raffi Ferreira, AMP’s vILT Project Manager & Producer, noted, “Our new intranet serves as a streamlined bank of resources and pertinent information. It enhances employee engagement and connectivity of distributed employees.”
Regardless of the name at the top of the org chart, it takes everyone on the chart to create a thriving company. Building an intranet that invests in all your people will pay dividends for a long time to come – and you might even get some pasta carbonara tips along the way!
3: Think of your intranet as bigger than a single leader, and lasting longer than a single employee’s tenure.
Just as investing in your people means all your people, investing in today’s company means investing in tomorrow’s. At its most essential, an intranet serves as a repository of a company’s collective knowledge, making it accessible to anyone and available to everyone. For that reason, a collaborative, multi-leader approach will reflect more than a single vision – and ensure that information stays relevant and grows over time.
While I had the idea for an intranet for AMP, I knew I couldn’t go it alone. My first step was to partner with my colleague Vik, who’d recently been transitioned into a new role as Facilities Experience Coordinator. Vik made himself indispensable from the jump, drawing on his experience as a project manager and caring for critical details I surely would have missed.
I may be his team lead, but handing Vik the baton on this project allowed him to tap his full potential, and resulted in a truly collaborative product designed for longevity.
As a People Ops professional, my success hinges on my ability to create foundational systems, not be an individual problem-solver. I can’t be the problem-solver for all of our employees! An intranet is a place for our community itself: a place where employees can access information, get questions answered, and learn from each other.
There are a million places online to find information, entertainment, and communication; your team deserves a place that’s built just for them.
When you create a genuinely intuitive, human-centered intranet, you’re really just carving out a corner of the big, connected world, and shaping it into a small one, after all.
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