Does your intranet suffer from poor adoption?

Is your content being ignored?

Is your technology investment under-utilised?

Do you struggle to prove your intranet's value?

If you’ve answered yes to one or more of these questions, the Adoption Accelerator will help you refocus your intranet, saving you time and money, by optimising your content and technology.

Realigning your intranet strategy around your business goals will make your staff productive, efficient and engaged. Simplifying its design and content focussed on your employees’ needs will also make it easier to manage, and track its performance.

Over 20 years experience solving digital employee engagement problems. Whether working at board level with the world's largest organisations, or not-for-profits, my expertise brings clarity necessary to help organisations focus on what to do next, without being led by technology, and ensuring whatever is produced, simplicity is at its heart.

Adoption Accelerator — Four steps to success

Align

Design &
Configure

Engage

Grow

How does it work?

Whether you’re starting out, or you need help in evaluating your existing platform, the process is the same. Take each step in turn, or use each one independently to focus on your most pressing challenge.

Step 1 - Align

Set achievable goals

Can the business goals of your platform be summarised into one or more benefits? Productivity, Knowledge, Communication, Community, or Collaboration? Knowing which one will prioritise your goals, features, content and staff expectations.

Example — Capability Compass

TO BE REPLACED WITH NEW COPY

Step 2 - Design & Configure

Design for simplicity

What are your users’ motivations in using your intranet? First and foremost, they are consumers of your content. What content will fulfil their needs? In what context do they work? How does that shape what you provide them via your intranet?

TOO MANY QUESTIONS. NEED ITALIC CONCLUSION

Example — Staff personas

TO BE REPLACED WITH NEW COPY

Configure not develop

Your intranet technology platform should be configurable out-of-the-box. Reducing the need for costly bespoke development. This is beneficial since your platform will change, as your needs develop.

Example — Be modular

Quick-to-set-up modular and reusable templates will leave you more resources to focus on improving employee adoption. Given what content your staff need, can it be presented with as fewer templates as possible? Likewise, can navigation and widgets be standardised? Such consistency will reduce the need for staff training.

Step 3 - Engage

Train and feedback

Training staff on how to use your intranet serves two purposes. It will demonstrate its value, boosting its adoption. And, training staff will also provide invaluable feedback for improvements, and future needs.

Example — Ambassadors

Actively listening to users — including publishers and owners — is essential to protect your intranet’s business value. Having a readymade community of intranet ambassadors is key. Made up of experts, novices, enthusiasts, and skeptics from your teams are essential for feedback. They will also champion new needs as they arise.

Step 4 - Grow

Actionable insights

Proving your intranet’s success is critical. Not knowing what works will impede its future growth. However what to measure can become overwhelming. Detracting from how you communicating your intranet’s value.

Example — Insights tracker

Only track insights closely related to your goals. They should be tangible, relatable, and actionable. Analytics provide a wealth of usage data. Surveys, polls, and focus groups, highlight qualitative evidence, staff sentiment, and evolving needs. Understanding the right balance of how to use these tools will help your intranet’s growth.

Get in touch
If you would like to know more.

About Martyn Perks

I have over 20 years experience working with some of the world’s biggest organisations, public service bodies to NGOs and charities. Widely experienced digital business consultant, designer and researcher with over twenty years of improving company operations, productivity, customer adoption, and employee communications. I bring wide-ranging expertise from early-stage research, scenario planning, market benchmarking, product differentiation, business case development, customer segmentation and personas, and journey mapping, to designing prototypes that demonstrate why change is necessary. Get in touch to find out how I can help you with your needs.

Organisations I've worked with

Partners and technology I work with

Get in touch if you are looking to collaborate.

Your questions Answered

Do you work with existing intranets?

Yes. I can help you start afresh, including with a new technology platform.
The process is essentially the same: starting with figuring out your key business needs, defining the right content that your staff value the most, and engaging them with that content.
Finally, be sure to measure your platform’s success. Depending on your maturity, understanding of your needs, and which technology you prefer, selecting the right tools can help you define and design your intranet in the most appropriate manner.

Does everything need to happen all at once in a project?

No, depending on your needs, you could work on your design and content, or skip to measuring and better defining your metrics.

Likewise, all you might need could be an initial review to highlight several options moving forward. As you might expect, there are many aspects to designing and maintaining a well-engaged intranet.

Not everything will be suitable for everyone. The trick is to provide you with good thinking and tools that can match your expectations, team capabilities, and those of your staff.

What time scales are involved?

The approach from align, design, through to engage should take weeks, not months.
Most technology features provided by the platform should initially accommodate your needs to keep complexity to a minimum.
Start simple and be focused, and only over time, by monitoring feedback and successes, should you pursue more complex needs and requirements.
Give your employees access to the intranet to truly understand its potential. It’s challenging to decide upfront on everything from day one with so many potential avenues to explore.

What technology platforms do you work with?

I don’t have a preference for any specific technology.
I work with various platform vendors, such as Microsoft, Google, and others. However, it’s essential to choose the appropriate technology based on your business needs, rather than selecting technology first and then adapting it to your business.
Keeping your platform simple and minimising customisation is beneficial. Most tech vendors provide simple solutions that do not require a significant amount of design or development time.
This allows you to devote extra time to developing your content, assessing its value, and engaging with colleagues.

© 2023 Martyn Perks, London, UK
Contact mail@martynperks.com for further information.
T&Cs