How to launch an intranet in a way that brings the highest possible ROI to your organization?
If you are in the process of launching your first intranet or replacing an existing solution, this intranet guide will help you prepare for the process and implement a successful project.
While every organization is different and may have different business needs, the following steps apply to every organization and are a one-size-fits-all intranet roadmap for launching a social intranet platform.
Learn about why large organizations choose Haiilo intranet!
What is an intranet?
An intranet is a private, secure network used by companies to share information, tools, and resources among employees. It plays a crucial role in internal communication and collaboration, and boosts productivity, making an intranet launch a key step in improving workflow.
Understanding how to launch an intranet involves creating a platform tailored to the specific needs of the organization, ensuring ease of use and accessibility for all team members.
How to launch an intranet: Step-by-step
A streamlined intranet launch communication plan is often necessary for a successful intranet implementation. The below steps will cover the entire intranet roadmap. We will walk you through the intranet launch process, covering key details on how to launch an intranet, from creating an intranet structure to ensuring it meets your team’s needs.
Whether you’re exploring how to build an intranet from scratch or enhance an existing one, this comprehensive guide will help you successfully create an intranet tailored to your company’s goals.
Phase 1: Intranet Pre-launch
There are certain steps to go through before you launch your organization’s intranet. Let’s take a closer look and go through the entire intranet roadmap.
Step 1: Define your intranet goals
During the pre-launch phase, it’s important that you define intranet goals and expectations.
You can define your intranet goals based on the current challenges your organization faces. For example, if you know that employee engagement is low at your company, one of the goals can be to increase employee engagement.
Furthermore, many employees today face challenges caused by information overload. According to Gallagher, it’s the number one problem in internal communications. Workers spend hours every week looking for information they need to do their jobs. According to McKinsey, an employee spends roughly 2 hours per day searching for information. That’s a lot of wasted productivity. So another example of a goal may be to boost employee productivity by improving information search.
Some other goals can be to increase the sense of belongingness in the workplace, improve the digital employee experience, or improve the overall organizational alignment.
Step 2: Buy or build an intranet?
Now that you have set your goals, it is important to decide whether you want to build an intranet in house or buy an off-the-shelf intranet solution.
Building an intranet refers to developing a custom intranet solution from scratch, tailored to specific business needs, rather than opting for a ready-made intranet platform This process often requires significant time, resources, and technical expertise.
Because of its cost and complexity, most organizations choose not to build an intranet from scratch.
An important consideration in the build or buy intranet debate is that building a custom solution such as SharePoint, can, according to Nielsen Norman, take at least fourteen months (sometimes even years), with a commensurately slower time to value.
However, when companies realize a need for a solution, very few can afford to wait for months for company intranet implementation.
On the other hand, ready-made intranet platforms can be implemented within days or weeks, depending on the company size.
Step 3: Choose the right intranet provider
If your decision was to buy an intranet, in this intranet pre-launch phase you need to evaluate different intranet vendors and choose a solution that is the most likely to help you achieve the set goals and objectives.
There are plenty of different solutions out there so peer review sites such as G2 or Capterra can help you find the best intranet providers that meet your expectations.
Some other helpful resources to help you with research are ClearBox and SoftwareReviews reports. The former focuses purely on the functionality of intranet software, while the latter takes into consideration the customer experience and the relations providers build with their customers.
Phase 2: Intranet Launch
So what should the intranet launch phase look like? Do you have a solid intranet launch communication plan ready?
Now that you have chosen your intranet provider, it’s time to prepare for the launch. This phase focuses on the deployment stage—making the intranet accessible to employees after development. It involves planning, communication, and user training to ensure successful adoption. Let’s take a look at the important intranet launch steps.
Step 1: Branding
Hopefully, your intranet vendor allows you to brand the software to match your organization’s visual identity. You should be able to at least adjust the colors and use your company’s logo in the intranet.
Matching your intranet’s brand identity with the organization’s corporate brand can create a greater sense of belongingness to the organization and create emotional connections which, in return, usually results in higher user adoption.
Step 2: Integrations
U.S. employees change through an average of 13 apps 30 times per day, according to Asana’s Anatomy of Work Index 2021 report. And 26% of surveyed employees say app overload makes them less efficient at work. So integrating your intranet with other tools employees use is critical.
Off-the-shelf intranet solutions come with pre-built native integrations with the most popular workplace technology on the market, which provides flexibility to shape your platform the way you want. They also offer open APIs if you need custom integrations. Some may even go a step further and influence their product roadmaps based on your integration needs.
When it comes to intranets, most organizations require integrations with Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace.
Step 3: Roles, permissions, and workflows
Role-based rules and permissions are an important part of the intranet launch phase. Setting up appropriate access controls is critical for ensuring that only the right people have access to the right intranet functionalities.
For example, you probably don’t want to allow anyone besides internal communications departments to publish content, while you may only want to allow your IT department to delete or deactivate users.
In this step, it is also good to define and set up workflows and approval processes to streamline your internal comms campaigns and make your team more efficient.
Ideally, your intranet provider integrates with your LDAP and Active Directory so that setting up all of these rules and role-based permissions is easy and follows your company’s hierarchy and structure.
Step 4: Content calendar
Before you even launch your intranet, it would be good to have a content editorial calendar for at least one month ahead.
Make sure that your intranet content is engaging and personalized based on employees’ job functions, departments, locations, languages, interests, and other criteria.
Remember that digital personalization in the workplace is critical for high employee engagement, so I hope your social employee intranet vendor allows you to create and distribute hyper-personalized content.
Also, it is important to use different content types and formats to test what makes employees tick and engage. For example, you can create internal company podcasts, post polls, publish employee-generated videos, or simply send internal company newsletters with important updates.
Something most internal communications professionals find extremely valuable today is AI-powered content creation. Platforms like Haiilo use generative AI to help IC departments write content 10 times faster!
Step 5: Intranet implementation
Contrary to what you might think, it’s best to start with an intranet implementation phase such as training and onboarding prior to the launch. It’s important to plan training sessions for the entire workforce.
These sessions may be different for some specific roles and job titles, but the ultimate goal should be for everyone to get familiar with all the features and functionalities and understand how they are of value to them and their daily work. You can start with the core group, the admins and content creators, and progressively expand your training sessions to end-users.
Internal storytelling is a great strategy to use here. For example, you could have your own employees share their stories about how they use a specific feature or functionality in a way that allows them to be more productive.
And the best part, running and getting onboarding doesn’t have to be limited to internal comms or HR. You can have your first adopters and ambassadors share their own experiences and best practices, or hold formal training sessions.
Step 6: Intranet launch communication plan
Putting together a clear intranet launch communication plan is essential to ensure a smooth rollout and adoption across an organization. It involves several key steps:
- Identify your audience: Tailor communication for different departments and user groups.
- Set clear goals: Align the launch with your intranet goals to highlight its benefits.
- Develop messaging: Create a consistent, engaging message to promote the intranet.
- Choose communication channels: Use email, meetings, and internal platforms.
- Provide training: Ensure employees understand how to use the new system.
Whether through a well-written intranet launch announcement email or team meeting, employees need to learn and understand how to use the new system. A clear and well-executed intranet launch roadmap ensures widespread use and a successful launch.
Step 7: Internal marketing
So how to successfully launch an intranet and ensure great user adoption? In the average organization, 31% of employees don’t use the company intranet at all, according to Enplug, which makes it difficult to leverage the benefits of an intranet.
Historically, low intranet user adoption has been one of the biggest challenges for organizations. Besides just poor user interface and lack of overall value, poor internal marketing is usually a big culprit.
On your intranet launch date and during the following months you should have a clear internal marketing strategy to catch employees’ attention and get them interested. Without their buy-in, your project is most likely to fail!
You can have a mandatory webinar or podcast about the new solution. You should leverage your digital signage so that the intranet is always on top of your employees’ minds. To motivate employees, you could think of how to add gamification to the entire process, recognizing and rewarding those who are the most active users of the intranet.
In your internal newsletter, you can consider implementing a section designated to intranet best practices – tips and tricks to help your employees get the most out of this new solution.
Last but not least, make sure that you use multichannel communications to reach employees on their favorite communications channels such as Slack, MS Teams, email, SMS, or others.
With Haiilo, managing your content calendar is easy and fun! 👇
Phase 3: Intranet Post-launch
After you launch your intranet, it is important to stay on top of the usage to keep the momentum and drive higher user adoption.
This is what you should do in the post-launch phase.
Step 1: Analytics
As soon as you launch your intranet you should stay close to the data and metrics and map them to the previously defined goals and metrics.
Ideally, your intranet solution should give you valuable insights about intranet usage, readership, engagement, and other activities.
By analyzing your intranet data, you should be able to understand what type of content best resonates with your internal audiences. These insights can help you better segment your internal audiences, create better content, and increase overall engagement.
Some social intranets and enterprise social networks come with built-in employee surveys to measure employee engagement, eNPS, and other important people-related metrics. The most advanced solutions won’t give you just raw data but also valuable recommendations for improvement that can help you find anomalies and prevent high turnover and low engagement.
Step 2: Feedback
Three weeks after the intranet launch date you can already start collecting feedback from your employees.
Use company-wide surveys to ask your employees about their intranet experiences. Here are a few questions you can use to get valuable input.
- How frequently do you use our newly implemented intranet?
- How satisfied are you with the value our new intranet provides? Please explain.
- Do you find it easy to locate necessary company information, documents, and people?
- Do you find the content in our intranet engaging and relevant?
- What kind of content would you like to see more of?
- What is your favorite thing about our new intranet?
- What is your least favorite thing about our new intranet?
- Was the intranet training valuable to you?
- Do you have any other comments or recommendations for improvement?
Intranet benefits: Why launch an intranet?
An intranet offers many benefits for improving employee communication and collaboration. Key intranet benefits include:
- Streamlines internal communication for better organizational alignment.
- Boosts employee engagement and productivity, driving collaboration.
- Facilitates employee recognition, improving morale and retention.
- Centralizes knowledge management, making information easily accessible.
- Integrates key technologies for seamless workflow.
To sum up
In conclusion, launching an intranet requires careful planning and alignment with your organization’s intranet goals. Deciding between building a custom solution or opting for a pre-built platform is crucial for success, and following the above steps on how to launch an intranet ensures a smooth rollout. By having a clear intranet launch communication plan, you can achieve a seamless intranet implementation process.
Check out our report on the synergy of multichannel communication and employee listening, featuring Forrester!
