How to Make Your Intranet a Value-Add for Executive Leadership

Maybe you already have an intranet, and you’re looking for ways to get more value out of it. Maybe you need buy-in and support for a new intranet because you don’t have a system at all, or you’re struggling with an outdated, difficult-to-maintain system that employees rarely use.

No matter what stage you’re at on your intranet journey, focusing on the value it can bring to your colleagues in senior leadership is an important step toward enthusiastic buy-in and sustained engagement.

Communicating and Delivering Value

You can deliver unique and outsized value to the C-suite through your intranet. We’re going to break many of these value-ads down, and categorize them into three buckets that nearly all senior executives care about: bottom-line impact, cultural impact, and organizational intelligence.

Step Zero: Start with Alignment

Before moving on, there’s one paramount action item: connect with executive leadership.

Every organization, and every executive team is different. We’re going to discuss a lot of strategies below—some of them may represent massive value for your executive team; some may not. To ensure you’re truly supporting the executive team’s objectives, you must understand and align with them.

Connect with members of the senior leadership team and get a sense of the core challenges they’re working to solve. Focus on ways the tips and strategies below might benefit them individually, and on the organizational level.

Quick caveat: most senior leaders have precious little free time. Rather than booking two hours to jam out on an informal brainstorming session, consider ways you can gather the information you need asynchronously, or in another time-efficient manner.

With that out of the way, let’s dive in.

Bottom-line Impact

If you want to move your colleagues in the C-Suite, start here. It’s their job to zoom out, cut through the noise, and focus on the things that make a measurable and meaningful high-level impact on the organization. There are numerous areas where an intranet can achieve this, but we’ll outline a few in detail below.

Operational Cost Savings

This is as clear, direct, and “close to the dollar” as it gets. One system or practice costs this amount; one costs this amount. Counterintuitively, the status quo isn’t always the most cost effective option. A modern intranet represents a known cost, but that cost might ultimately be lower than the accumulated cost of maintaining the status quo.

Maintenance and Development

If your current system (or lack thereof) takes the IT team away from their other duties regularly, that’s a noteworthy cost. Finding ways to reduce the need for IT to manage the day-to-day work around your intranet can have a significant impact.

If sharing important updates requires continuous or duplicative effort from the Internal Communications or People Ops/HR teams, that’s another significant cost that adds up over time.

A modern intranet can address all of these issues through automated multi-channel communication, well-designed knowledge management, no-code customization, and integrations with the tools that drive your organization.

For a fun example of a real-life partnership between multidisciplinary department leaders that saved time and ongoing costs, check the InfluxData team’s story.

Software Spend

Intranets can often help you get more out of (or even sunset) ancillary software. Depending on the tools you use, you may no longer need a dedicated mass email service, event management software, or knowledge base, because the best modern intranets already include them.

Look for areas where your intranet might be able to enhance the value you already get from the software you use, or even reduce excess software spend.

Hidden Opportunity Costs

If you were to add it up, the confluence of all these direct monetary costs might already be large, but keeping with the status quo also represents an opportunity cost. The time you or your colleagues spend bending a suboptimal system to fit your organization’s needs is time that can’t be spent on other things that might push the team further, and faster.

Employee Productivity, Engagement, and Retention

There are numerous ways an intranet can support employee productivity, engagement, and retention. While not all of these are as directly measurable or causatively linked as something like software spend, they can have an immense impact on performance.

Centralized, Searchable Information

McKinsey research found that knowledge workers spend almost 20% of their time looking for information. Reducing that number by even 10 percentage points could have a transformative impact, aggregated across the entire organization.

How can your intranet help with that?

A well-organized intranet provides a one-stop shop for organizational knowledge, reducing time spent searching for information, streamlining workflows, and boosting productivity.

While even well-organized intranets still need good governance and structure, recent advances in AI-assisted search, like Haystack’s Enterprise Search, make it even easier for employees to find people, resources, and knowledge with simple conversational queries.

For example, an employee could ask “what is our maternity leave policy?” or “who should I collaborate with on a product marketing campaign for our new X340 widget?" and get a direct, concise response. That rapid self-service experience not only saves time for the employee asking the question, it multiplies across a chain of personnel who would normally be tasked with addressing those questions.

Support Channels

In many organizations, it’s common practice for employees to reach out to teams like IT and HR with one-off questions or support requests. These interactions are especially costly because they expend precious bandwidth from the supporting team, as well as their own.

You can ensure your intranet addresses both of these issues by making information easily accessible and discoverable to everyone, no matter where their work takes them.

Our friends at League One Volleyball (LOVB) recently shared how much a modern intranet can relieve the burden of one-off Q&As from HR and People Ops teams.

Improved Onboarding

The amount of time it takes a new employee to begin contributing at peak capacity, commonly referred to as the “ramping” period, is a major opportunity for impact. According to Gallup research, on average, an employee should be fully ramped within about a year.

Narrowing the delta between an employee’s hire date and the day they’re contributing at the benchmark level can have a dramatic impact on the amount they’ll be able to contribute across their tenure.

But that’s not where the benefits of good onboarding end.

Providing a structured onboarding process for new employees can also improve retention by as much as 25 percent, according to analysis by the Partnership for Public Service and Booz Allen Hamilton.

So, not only will a structured onboarding program narrow the delta between “hire date” to “ramped,” it may even extend the amount of time an employee will contribute at their peak.

You can see an example of an intranet’s impact on the new employee onboarding experience  in a recent story with Fluid Truck.

Cultural impact

Organizational culture influences everything, from the way you communicate to the way you operate.

Modern intranets provide strong scaffolding for organizational culture to take root and thrive. There are countless facets to every culture, and they’re different for every organization, so we’ll focus on some of the core components that remain true for most teams.

Clear, Instantaneous, and Transparent Communication

You don’t have to follow a philosophy of radical transparency to gain many of the benefits of transparent organizational communication. Many times, it’s simply a matter of making information available, clear, and accessible.

Accessibility

A centralized platform for company announcements, policy updates, and strategic initiatives ensures that everyone is on the same page. Language translation support can make this information even more easily accessible.

Accessibility can be supported even further by ensuring employees connecting through mobile devices get the same quality experience. AI-assisted search can make information more accessible by simplifying the process of finding it.

Directness

A well-developed intranet is like a town square that anyone can visit instantly, which makes it the perfect place for the executive leadership team to connect directly with the broader employee community.

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This direct line to the workforce enables executives to share strategic messages, company updates, vision statements, and other vital information with employees without an added layer of abstraction. Clear, direct communication often helps to foster alignment, humanize senior leadership, and establish a stronger connection across the employee community.

Urgent Communication

In situations where clear communication is critical and time is of the essence, a modern intranet can provide a reliable way to reach the right people with the right information, instantly. That could mean sharing accurate information during times of company crises, or sending an all-hands broadcast across multiple devices and channels, including SMS text during a natural disaster.

Secure Communication

Knowing the information they share will remain confidential can empower senior leaders with the confidence to share more information, and share it more often. Your intranet can provide a secure, centralized location for this.

Modern intranets like Haystack have toolkits dedicated to sharing information securely. For just a few examples, employees can be required to authenticate before viewing news, and sensitive information can be shared with digital watermarks to discourage unauthorized screenshots.

Branding and Positioning

You’ve built a brand to be proud of, and it should shine through in all the surfaces where employees interact—whether they’re physical, as in the case of an HQ or campus, or digital.

Intranets can reinforce brand identity and messaging across multiple channels at once, promoting a cohesive corporate culture. As an example, the Plenty team uses their intranet to bring a beautifully branded experience to employees, whether they work at a desk or a farm.

Employee Engagement

Employee engagement has been shown to influence everything from absentee rates to earnings per share, and intranets can play a key role in supporting it. Because each intranet has a different set of features, we’ll cover a few examples from Haystack.

Recognition

There are numerous ways intranets can be deployed to foster a recognition-rich organizational culture. Birthday and work anniversary celebrations help recognize and celebrate the

Peer-to-peer, manager, or teamwide shoutouts make it easy to recognize the myriad employee contributions that drive the organization forward. Badges give a spotlight to important accomplishments.

Community

At its core, every organization is a community, and a modern intranet can help nurture all the unique aspects that make it what it is. ERGs are a powerful way to provide safe, supportive spaces for employees to express their identities. Interest Groups help connect and build communities through shared hobbies and interests.

Organizational Intelligence

It’s difficult to improve if you don’t know where you’re going, or how fast. This is why organizational intelligence is essential for leadership.

In the same way a good Business Intelligence (BI) tool can provide insights on the direction and success of key initiatives at a glance, an intranet can provide a similar insight into the people and processes that drive your organization forward.

Executive Dashboards:

Modern intranets like Haystack can make it easy to create personalized dashboards for executive groups, integrating with BI tools like Tableau and others to bring other key data that drives your business into a centralized location.

Communication Effectiveness:

A modern intranet can help measure engagement and track employee sentiment related to important announcements, and identify emerging trends through tools like surveys. This information can help executives stay informed and address employee concerns proactively.

For a real-life example of this in action, check out how our friends at NerdWallet were able to share helpful insights on communication effectiveness that surprised and delighted the executive team.

Access to all this information can support decision-making processes, empowering the executive team to make informed choices and drive business growth.

Bringing it Home

These are just a few of the ways intranets can be a significant value add for the executive team in your organization.

Remember to start with alignment. Understanding your executive team’s individual and organizational goals can also make finding the right intranet easier, in addition to helping you become a stronger strategic partner.