A successful intranet is not a one-size-fits-all operation. In a modern world where a typical organisation can have multiple locations, departments, practice areas, markets and even languages, there’s more chance than ever that employees could be swamped by irrelevant and unhelpful information.
Intranet personalisation is the answer, and it can be more straightforward than you might expect.
Why personalise your intranet?
- By tailoring audiences and content, users will quickly and easily be able to find what they need. This can be particularly useful during the employee onboarding process or when organising online information by department relevancy
- This can have flow-on benefits for productivity, and in turn profitability.
- A personalised and relevant user experience can keep employees engaged, which can help your organisation's employee retention rates.
- People will be more likely to see and act on important information, leading to less frustration and driving better communication, and a happier workplace all round.
- With personalisation essentials in place, your organisation can scale effectively and introduce new technologies as they’re made available – AI chatbots being just one example.
So how do you get started with personalisation without getting lost in complexity?
There are two approaches to intranet personalisation:
- Top-down personalisation
With top-down personalisation, administrators can personalise navigation menus and content for users based on user roles or teams.
- Bottom-up customisation
With bottom-up customisation, employees can customise their own user experience by changing settings, customising widgets on their homepage and subscribing to notifications.
In order to provide both top-down personalisation and bottom-up customisation for the most relevant user experience, you’ll of course need the right intranet systems software to support this functionality (here’s where we can help!).
With this in place, there are five other essential elements.
5 must-haves for successful intranet personalisation
1. An understanding of your audience
Understanding exactly what employees require in their intranet and information will help you to tailor their user experience. Analytics can provide insights on the most accessed pages and any content gaps.
2. Essential employee profile data
For example, name, location, job role and key function within the organisation, which will help you to segment users.
3. User segmentation
This might include grouping users by roles, teams, departments or tasks and activities so you can direct information appropriately.
4. Clear metadata
Clear metadata for all content will make it easy to locate, so that people can easily find and direct others to it.
5. A content strategy and framework
A clear intranet plan and intranet content strategy will make it easy to bring the right users and information together on an ongoing basis.
Once you have these essentials and the right intranet platform, you’ll have the flexibility to personalise your content and user experiences in any number of ways.
Let’s cover some of the most useful applications and areas where intranet personalisation can be used.
The potential for intranet personalisation
A dashboard designed for the user
Ideally, each employee can arrive at work in the morning and open up their unique dashboard to see tasks, content, events, news and messages that set them up for the day ahead. This could also include personalised menu links and search results based on the user’s department, role or current projects.
Everything the employee might need for their workday is one or two clicks away.
Individual and organisation-wide messaging
Intranet personalisation allows you to eliminate the confusion and missed communications of traditional email, by providing tailored messaging with clear prioritisation.
Personal messages and notifications could be seen on the main dashboard, for example, with a weekly or daily message from the CEO in a dedicated widget. This makes it easy to see what needs immediate attention and what can wait.
Security and access
Quality metadata on your content will not only enable you to provide personalised intranet experiences for users, but also allows you to tighten up security on sensitive or department-specific documentation if you so choose.
By setting user permissions for set groups or set content, each user sees all of the information they need – and none of the information they don’t.
Choose-your-own experience
Your intranet platform will ideally include the functionality for an employee to tailor their dashboard experience to achieve that bottom-up customisation we mentioned above.
A remote worker might want to prioritise seeing their events calendar, news and their project feed, for example. Meanwhile, a customer service worker might wish to display sales stats or CRM links front and centre.
Forms and workflows
Intranet personalisation can prove particularly powerful when it comes to handling complex workflows and time-intensive forms.
One example is that from the not-for-profit disability service organisation Northcott. Once a Supported Independent Living (SIL) form is submitted within Northcott, it follows a set path and notifies the appropriate people and roles for action along the way.
eLearning & inductions
If you need to train, induct or develop staff, then eLearning can be entirely personalised.
For example, STAR Group’s intranet allows staff to work through General Induction, Manual Handling Awareness Training and General Warehouse Induction courses at their own pace, with results and progress available for administrators to view at any point.
STAR Group’s personalised intranet also makes the most of Elcom’s meta tagging feature to classify projects by section, service, region and status, so that users can easily locate information.
Support and self-service
We’re seeing exciting new changes in the way employees can access personalised IT support and self-service options through the use of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots such as Talla. Users can ask a question, and the bot can pull in highly relevant information based on employee data.
As one example, a chatbot could help to calculate available annual leave and then trigger a leave request for the appropriate team. This type of AI can even analyse employee behaviour or sentiment, and provide recommendations to improve the digital employee experience.
How to find the right platform to support personalisation
You might have found this article while looking for intranet software solutions that will support your intranet personalisation plans. If that’s the case, it’s worth considering Elcom.
This intranet software in Australia provides the detail and functionality to handle even the most complex of organisational needs and provide a seamless, tailored experience for your intranet users.
Request a free consultation and demo to check out the possibilities today.
Not ready to chat, but need some more advice? Check out our free webinar on 'Mastering Intranet Personalisation & Engagement'. We share industry best practices, as well as take you through a hands on demo of key scenarios for personalising your intranet.
