Promoting Adoption

What good is an intranet if no one uses it? What if they can’t find things? Even though we’d relied on our personas, and our employees’ card sorting feedback, these were still huge question for us. The majority of our staff was not used to having an intranet just for our agency.

We decided to invite employees to play “Around the intranet in 5 Days”, an engagement game complete with prizes. We designed avatars for each member of our Communications team as “tour guides” for the week.

Meet Cambray, Adam, Jeremy, Suzanne and Emily.

Every day for first week, one of our guides was featured on the home page with a clue to help employees find something in the new intranet. The clue led them to the guide’s “hiding spot” on another page, where they could enter their name in a drawing for nominal prizes to be given away at the end of the week. We checked with our legal counsel first to make sure we were following the state’s policy regarding prizes—we chose gift baskets with popcorn and chocolate, and lunch dates with the Commissioner.

The response was phenomenal – there were a total of 1529 entries, with five winners across the agency. Employees had a great time, and we collected a lot of positive feedback and constructive suggestions when they couldn’t find things. But the real payoff was that 1,529 unique times, employees found a topic on the new intranet.

Best Practice: Beginning on day one of the launch, do something for your staff that’s designed to help familiarize themselves with all the new features of your intranet. Whether you choose something simple or complex, it’s sure to add a little fun and excitement into the mix. You can also use this as a way to gather feedback for improvements right away.

Moving from project into operations

Our intranet has been live for about a month. Home page content changes daily and gets easier every day, especially when we have breaking news. We’ve kept track of all the comments and questions that employees have sent us. We started a tracking document for issues and things to fix, like broken links, missing documents, an extra page needed here and there. And especially we’ve kept a list of all the positive comments and “thank-you’s” that staff have sent us.

We’ve accomplished nearly everything on our project list, and are moving on to the next phase of building functionality, like a dynamic feed to display real-time IT incidents and changes, and interactive online forms. As we complete them, we’ll announce what’s new on the intranet home page, keeping it fresh and alive.

Best Practice: A simple Excel spreadsheet can help keep you track of issues after your launch. Make it a priority to address any broken or missing links, problems with documents, pages or content as soon as possible. This reassures your employees that the content on your intranet is accurate, timely and that you’re responsive to their needs. It can also identify and address any larger functionality problems with your developers while the project is still open. The line between where the project ends and daily operations begin is a gray area, but your team and your project manager can figure that out together.

What we learned

We learned a lot about projects, the technology we use, about our audience and about ourselves. Planning a course with clear requirements and objectives is very, very helpful. Knowing that we can count on our teammates and on our colleagues in other divisions was an extraordinary benefit. And the warm reception and hundreds of positive comments from our employees made it all worthwhile.

Best Practice: Celebrate! Take time to look back at all your hard work and congratulate your entire project team on a job well done! Now, on to the next big project!