An intranet is only as valuable as its usefulness to employees. Organizations can invest significantly in platforms and design, but if the result doesn’t help people do their jobs, they won’t use it. The emails will continue. The workarounds will persist. The intranet will become another underutilized tool.
Understanding what employees actually need—not what leadership assumes they need—is the foundation of intranet success. This guide focuses on the employee perspective: what makes an intranet worth using, what drives adoption, and what causes employee intranets to fail.
What Employees Actually Need
When employees evaluate an intranet, they’re asking simple questions: Does this help me? Can I find what I need? Is this faster than my current approach?
Research consistently identifies several employee priorities:
Finding information quickly. Employees need to locate documents, policies, and answers without hunting through folders or emailing colleagues. If the intranet can’t beat “asking someone who might know,” it fails.
Accessing tools and systems. A convenient launchpad to applications employees use regularly—HR systems, expense reporting, project tools, communication platforms. One login, clear paths to everything.
Staying informed. Knowing what’s happening in the organization—news, changes, upcoming events—without drowning in email or relying on word of mouth.
Completing tasks. Self-service capabilities for routine needs: submitting requests, updating information, finding forms, booking resources. Tasks that shouldn’t require emailing someone and waiting.
Connecting with colleagues. Finding the right person for a question, understanding who does what, putting faces to names across the organization.
Understanding the organization. For newer employees especially: org structure, culture, how things work, where to go for different needs.
When an intranet addresses these needs effectively, employees use it. When it doesn’t, they find other ways.
Features That Drive Adoption
Certain intranet features consistently correlate with employee adoption:
Effective search. Perhaps the most important feature. When employees know the intranet will find what they’re looking for, they default to it. When search fails repeatedly, they stop trying.
Personalization. Content relevant to each employee’s role, location, and department. Nobody wants to wade through information meant for other groups. Personalization makes the intranet feel designed for each individual.
Clean navigation. Logical organization that matches how employees think about information. If finding something requires knowing the internal taxonomy, navigation has failed.
Mobile access. Employees don’t always sit at desks. Frontline workers, field teams, and remote employees need intranet access from phones and tablets. Mobile-unfriendly intranets exclude significant portions of the workforce.
Quick links and shortcuts. Fast access to frequently needed resources without navigating through multiple levels. The most common tasks should take the fewest clicks.
Current content. Nothing kills intranet credibility like outdated information. If employees find stale content once, they’ll doubt everything they find subsequently.
Integration with daily tools. Connections to email, Teams, calendars, and other tools employees already use. An intranet that exists separately from daily workflows requires extra effort to use.
Common Employee Intranet Failures
Intranets fail employees in predictable ways:
IT focus over employee focus. Intranets designed around organizational structure rather than employee needs. Content organized by department hierarchy rather than how employees look for information.
Search that doesn’t work. Incomplete indexing, poor relevance ranking, inability to search documents—search failures are adoption killers.
Information overload. Homepages crammed with content nobody needs. News feeds that prioritize quantity over relevance. Navigation with too many options to parse.
Outdated content. Policies from years ago, event announcements long past, broken links to moved documents. Stale content signals the intranet isn’t maintained.
Difficult access. Complex login processes, VPN requirements, lack of mobile access. Every barrier reduces usage.
No clear ownership. When nobody owns the intranet, nobody maintains it. Content gets outdated, issues go unfixed, and the platform drifts toward irrelevance.
Ignoring employee input. Building what leadership thinks employees need rather than researching actual needs. The resulting intranet serves organizational priorities but not daily work.
Each failure mode erodes employee trust. Once employees conclude the intranet isn’t worth checking, changing that perception requires significant effort.
Mobile Access Requirements
Mobile intranet access has shifted from nice-to-have to essential. Consider:
Frontline workers often don’t have desktop computers at all. Retail staff, manufacturing workers, healthcare employees, field service teams—they need phone-based access or no access.
Remote and hybrid workers move between locations and devices. A desk-only intranet misses them when they’re working from home or traveling.
Breaking news and alerts need to reach people regardless of location. Crisis communications can’t wait for people to return to desks.
Quick lookups happen throughout the day—phone numbers, quick policy checks, form submissions. Mobile access makes these seamless rather than deferred.
Mobile access means more than a responsive design. It means considering mobile users in content design, navigation, and functionality. What works on a large desktop monitor may be unusable on a phone screen.
Self-Service Capabilities
Employees increasingly expect self-service. Consumer experiences have trained people to complete tasks themselves without phone calls, emails, or waiting. Intranets should offer the same convenience.
Effective self-service includes:
HR transactions. Updating personal information, viewing pay stubs, checking benefits, submitting time-off requests—without emailing HR and waiting for response.
IT support. Password resets, access requests, software installations, hardware requests—common issues employees can resolve themselves.
Facilities and resources. Room booking, parking reservations, equipment checkout—tasks that don’t need human intermediaries.
Forms and requests. Purchase requests, expense submissions, project proposals, approval workflows—processes with clear inputs that don’t require back-and-forth.
Knowledge base access. Answers to common questions, how-to guides, troubleshooting steps—information that eliminates the need to ask someone.
Self-service benefits employees through convenience and speed. It benefits the organization by reducing administrative overhead and freeing staff from repetitive tasks.
Social and Engagement Features
Beyond utility, intranets can foster connection and engagement:
Employee recognition. Celebrating achievements, acknowledging contributions, making recognition visible across the organization.
Interest groups and communities. Spaces for employees with shared interests—professional development groups, hobby communities, employee resource groups.
Discussion forums. Places to ask questions, share knowledge, and have conversations beyond immediate teams.
Social profiles. Rich employee profiles with photos, backgrounds, interests, and expertise—helping people connect as humans beyond job titles.
User-generated content. Enabling employees to contribute content, not just consume it—blog posts, knowledge sharing, best practices.
These features support culture and belonging, particularly in distributed organizations where employees may never meet in person. They’re secondary to core utility features but add significant value when the foundation is solid.
Measuring Employee Intranet Success
Track metrics that reflect employee experience:
Adoption breadth. What percentage of employees use the intranet? Are all groups represented or just certain departments?
Usage frequency. How often do employees return? Daily active users versus monthly indicates engagement depth.
Search success rate. Do searches return useful results? High zero-result rates or immediate bounces signal search problems.
Task completion. Are employees using self-service features? Form submissions, help desk tickets through portal, HR transaction volumes.
Time to information. Can employees find what they need quickly? User research and testing reveal friction points.
Employee satisfaction. Survey employees about intranet usefulness. Ask what’s working and what’s not. Net Promoter Score provides trend tracking.
Qualitative feedback. What do employees say about the intranet? Comments, suggestions, and complaints reveal experience issues metrics might miss.
Measure regularly and use findings to prioritize improvements. An intranet that stops improving starts declining.
Building an Intranet Employees Will Use
Success requires sustained attention to employee needs:
Research before building. Survey employees, interview representatives from different groups, observe how people currently find information and complete tasks. Build for real needs.
Test with real users. Before launch and after, test with employees. Watch them try to complete tasks. Listen to their frustrations. Iterate based on findings.
Prioritize utility over polish. A plain intranet that works beats a beautiful one that doesn’t. Focus first on the features employees need most.
Maintain rigorously. Current content, working links, timely news. Assign ownership and hold owners accountable for their content areas.
Communicate and train. Help employees understand what the intranet offers and how to use it. Don’t assume they’ll discover features themselves.
Keep improving. Use metrics and feedback to identify problems and opportunities. Regular improvement keeps the intranet relevant as needs evolve.
For organizations building on SharePoint, following modern intranet best practices provides a framework for employee-focused design.
Ready to build an intranet your employees will actually use? Let’s talk about what your workforce needs.