The 3 Biggest Intranet Challenges (And How to Overcome Them)
As an internal communications executive, you need to make sure that employees understand your company’s priorities and goals. Intranets, also known as internal sites, are central hubs for knowledge sharing that can help you achieve this mission. While running an intranet often requires a great deal of technical expertise, time, and resources, choosing the right platform can save you all of this effort without compromising your company’s security requirements.
There are important considerations when building an intranet for your company. Read on to learn how you can overcome the three biggest challenges to running a successful intranet: protecting data, updating content, and maintaining organization.
The 3 biggest intranet challenges
Challenge #1: Security
Here are a few security obstacles that executive teams frequently encounter while building intranets and how to address them.
User access
Intranets contain sensitive company information such as financial data, employee records, and proprietary knowledge. Enabling single sign-on (SSO) functionality limits website viewership internally within your company. Employees can log on to your intranet with the same credentials they use to access other company tools, which minimizes effort and potential time wasted on failed login attempts.
Pro tip: Squarespace Enterprise can integrate with your company’s existing SSO technology through built-in integrations with the most common SSO solutions, or with a custom integration if your company uses another provider.
User education
Employees may unintentionally expose company information to external audiences through their online behavior. For example, an employee may be fooled into opening a phishing email designed by a malicious hacker to retrieve sensitive data. Educate your employees about cybersecurity best practices, such as identifying and avoiding phishing emails and safeguarding their login credentials.
Regular software updates
Hackers can exploit software vulnerabilities to gain access to company data. Conducting regular software updates and security patches across your entire tech stack is essential to keeping your intranet secure. Companies should have a smooth process in place for deploying updates to ensure that any vulnerabilities are addressed promptly.
Data backup and recovery
In the event of a cyberattack or system failure, having a data backup and recovery plan may prevent information loss. It’s important to choose an intranet platform hosted on a private cloud with full redundancy.
By implementing these measures, you can create an intranet that is more secure, reliable, and supportive of your internal communications needs.
Challenge #2: Updating content
You want to make your company’s intranet a compelling resource for employees, and the best way to do that is to make sure content is up to date. It’s important to add new content regularly to keep employees engaged (especially remote employees). Of course, with the wrong platform, updating intranet content can be a slow and resource-intensive task. This makes agile content updates one of the main barriers to building an effective intranet.
Here are four areas to consider when coordinating your team’s intranet content publishing process.
Content ownership
Multiple team members across departments should be responsible for creating intranet content, according to their areas of expertise. This helps to give your intranet a wider range of material to better represent your entire company. Designating an employee ambassador from each department to post progress updates not only streamlines the process for communications teams, but it also ensures that intranet content is accurate and authentic in tone.
Pro tip: With Squarespace Enterprise, you can set contributor role permissions, giving collaborators across your company the correct level of access they need (without giving them unchecked administrator privileges).
Content management
Intranets can quickly become cluttered if there’s no effective content management strategy in place. You’ll want to arrange content in a way that makes it easy for employees to find what they need. Website templates are a powerful tool that can guide your team in building out your intranet content. Templates give your team an out-of-the-box framework to use for adding content updates logically and attractively.
Content metrics
It can be difficult to measure the impact of updated content on employee engagement and productivity. Without feedback on what’s working and what’s not, it’s challenging to determine what content is most effective and where you should focus your team’s efforts. Page views, time spent on page, and bounce rates can help you better understand what intranet content resonates with employees.
Establishing clear roles and responsibilities is key for intranet content creation. It’s also a good idea to create guidelines for content quality and relevance, provide training and support for contributors, and establish metrics for measuring the impact of your internal content. By implementing these measures, you can ensure your company’s intranet remains up-to-date, relevant, and appealing to employees.
Challenge #3: Organization
Running an effective intranet relies on thorough organization and an appealing user interface. A poorly designed intranet can make it difficult for employees to find the information they need when they need it, leading to frustration and decreased productivity.
Here are the primary reasons why intranet organization can be a challenge and what you can do about it:
Information overload
Intranets can quickly become overwhelming if too much information is presented in a confusing manner. Without a clear structure, employees may struggle to navigate your intranet and find the information they need. Just as Squarespace templates support content creators in publishing content, they can guide employees who visit your intranet in finding the content they need. Templates can establish a clear hierarchy of information, with content grouped into categories and subcategories that make sense for readers.
Technical challenges
Organizing an intranet often requires technical expertise, especially if it is built on a complex platform or requires custom coding. Development access is often a barrier to updating intranets with fresh content. As you’re looking for an intranet platform, you’ll want a solution that gives your team the power to make updates on their own schedule without relying on additional support or special training (like Squarespace Enterprise).
Maintenance
Organizing content on your intranet is not a one-time task; it requires ongoing maintenance. Be sure to establish an internal process for reviewing and updating your intranet interface regularly, and make adjustments if needed based on feedback.
Internal sites are powerful tools that help employees find the resources they need and keep them working toward a singular company mission. Making the right intranet platform choice can help internal communications executives overcome the typical challenges intranets face.