As global organizations scale and are in a bid to increase their digital footprint, they tend to fall short on adopting and optimally using an intranet solution. This, in turn, can have a negative impact on workplace productivity.
Why? Employees struggle with clunky interfaces, confusing navigation, or simply fail to see the value of the intranet. This leads to poor adoption and engagement rates. The cost of poor adoption goes beyond wasted investment.
Teams duplicate work because they can’t find existing resources. Decision-making slows down when information is scattered. Remote workers feel disconnected from company culture and updates. Innovation stalls when collaboration tools remain unused.
Overcoming enterprise intranet adoption challenges can bring measurable benefits. Effective intranet adoption strategies not only simplify workflows but also integrate essential employee productivity tools, helping leaders boost productivity and foster collaboration across departments.
This blog explores the key challenges hindering intranet adoption and how they directly affect organizational performance and growth.
Common Intranet Adoption Challenges
Many intranet failures stem from similar causes. Recognizing these intranet adoption challenges is the first step to finding useful strategies in response. Here is a summary:
User Experience Issues
When your intranet takes dozens of clicks to access basic information or takes time to load, employees will stop using it. What seemed feature-packed may not have been simple to navigate for the users. If it takes you longer to find a document than it would to just email someone to obtain it, it is likely that people will continue to use emails.
Mobile Accessibility Issues
With a growing hybrid work model, employees will increasingly want to access company resources from anywhere. If your intranet is only designed to work on desktop computers or laptops, you are potentially shutting out an increasing cohort of workers. If an employee is working from home or is a field or mobile first employee, the latter can’t use the intranet optimally.
Integration Issues
When your intranet platform exists as an island and is detached from the daily workflows, it becomes a cause of adoption failure. Let’s say your employees are using email, project management, messaging systems, and other tools, and your company intranet does not integrate within these systems, it simply becomes another piece of work the employee needs to remember to access.
Search Issues
The user experience challenge does not stop there. Few things are more frustrating for a user than when they know information exists, but they cannot find it.
These challenges have genuine business implications that often transcend IT metrics.
Reduced Productivity
When employees cannot find the information quickly, it leads to a massive amount of wasted time from searching, asking team members, or recreating work that already exists. Research shows that knowledge workers find approximately 20% of their time is spent finding internal information. Multiply that by the number of knowledge workers in your organization, and the total amount of wasted productivity is eye-popping.
Poor Communication
Without an easy-to-use central “single-source-of-truth” platform, there are important updates employees miss. Different departments are working off of different information. Remote teams may feel even more ignored and disconnected. This disconnection makes it more challenging to make decisions and adds unneeded confusion to the work you are trying to execute across projects and initiatives.
Broken Knowledge
When a cherished and knowledgeable employee leaves the organization, so does their expertise. Without the structure and systems in place to capture and share knowledge, employees constantly “solve the same problem” repeatedly. Silos emerge when file sharing, project coordination, and communication among departments is painstakingly difficult. Cross-functional efforts become cumbersome.
Ineffective Collaboration
Silos arise when it’s difficult for people to share files, coordinate projects, or communicate between departments. Cross-functional initiatives are a challenge. While innovation requires diverse perspectives, facilitating that collaboration is nearly impossible without effective collaboration systems in place.
Increase in Compliance and Security Risks
When employees circumvent clunky systems, it is often to the detriment of the organization and leads to security implications. Employees share sensitive documents through insecure channels. The policies and procedures that have been established within the organization aren’t going to be read just because there is awareness, and because they don’t come up in the search in the antiquated system they are buried in, employees suffer the consequence. These issues expose the organization to regulatory and legal risk.
Ways to Successfully Drive Intranet Adoption
Overcoming Intranet adoption challenges has to be thoughtful and people-based, and not just brushed aside as a technology concern or issue.
Get Feedback and Iterate
Before you start to implement changes, you must understand how employees work in real life. What information do they seek out most? What is the biggest pain point with the system (be it in the process and/or the tool)? Survey every employee, run focus groups, and observe how a variety of people navigate their day-to-day. Design based on the real needs of people and not assumptions.
Simplify The Intranet for Ease of Use
The content that is shared most frequently should be only one or two clicks away once the employee gets to the homepage. Organize everything in a simple user-friendly manner and make understanding the logical grouping simple for the employees – categories should be easy. A strong search engine that understands synonyms and evergreen content is important – returning results that are approximately what the user is looking for is crucial. Remember to take employees through every change in the navigation and layout; don’t rely on outdated feedback.
Build Integration with Existing Workflows
Connect your intranet with the tools employees already use daily. Integrate with email systems, calendar applications, and project management platforms. Allow single sign-on to reduce friction. Bring information to where employees are working rather than forcing them to go somewhere else.
Build Productivity and Collaboration Features As Key USPs
Go beyond static information to provide tools that help people work better together. Implement shared workspaces for teams, document collaboration features, and communication channels that keep conversations organized and searchable.
How Infince Helps
Infince offers an up-to-date intranet platform that helps businesses quickly adapt to the Intranet without the common Intranet adoption challenges.
- The platform’s design begins with an elegant user interface that customers’ employees can use without extensive training. The user interface is clean and orderly, so individuals can find what they are looking for, while encouraging them to use the platform frequently instead of out of frustration.
- Communications boards provide tailored messaging to employees at the right person at the right time. Instead of drowning in more irrelevant messaging, employees can see what matters to them according to their role and their location.
- Centralized file storage and file sharing eliminate the chaos and confusion of scattered documentation and version control. Teams can have the most current files all secured in one location, not only for real-time collaborative efforts but for organized repositories that define and protect institutional knowledge. This in itself addresses the biggest productivity challenge which is wasted time looking for information.
- The app marketplace provides the solution for the commonplace workplace integration challenges. Instead of making employees choose between the apps they use and the intranet, Infince can help consolidate all of what they need in one easy-to-access location.
Try Infince today and explore how you can enhance your business operations and communications.
