Measuring Intranet Performance

Employee usage

Research has shown that businesses with around 1,000 employees lose an incredible $2.7 million yearly due to inefficient knowledge management. 

And knowledge silos are an even bigger problem for large corporations, with Fortune 500 companies losing an eye-watering $31.5 billion a year by failing to share knowledge. That means that collectively, Fortune 500 companies could save the GDP of some countries each year through organized and up-to-date employee intranets.

So, it’s fair to say it’s well worth tracking how your people use your intranet tools so you can encourage them to use them more.

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Modern intranets like Assembly come with analytics dashboards that make it easy to measure:

• How often do your employees log in to your company intranet
• How long do your employees spend on your internal company website
• Where employees click most often (through a heat map)
• How many comments and shares an employee makes

Intranet performance metrics dashboards also reveal the employees that use your social intranet tools the most – and those who never log on to it. You can then use surveys and the right one-to-one questions to find out what separates the power users from the laggards regarding your intranet collaboration tools. 

Armed with this data, you can adapt your intranet software to suit your people’s needs as best as possible and enjoy all the benefits of knowledge sharing.

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Employee engagement

Cracking the employee engagement code could take your company to new heights. In fact:

• Engaged teams are 21% more productive.
• Engaged employees generate 43% more revenue than disengaged ones.
• Organizations with highly engaged workforces outperform their peers by 147% in earnings-per-share.
• Engaged employees are 87% less likely to leave their job than disengaged teammates.

And your intranet software can help here, too. Measuring which kind of content you post on your workplace news feed your employees engage in and which they don’t will give you real-time feedback on what they do and don’t care about.

Boosting engagement and retention is as easy as doubling down on what your people resonate with and ditching the things they don’t. 

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Efficiency

Empowering your people with an intranet they’ll use is one of the best things you can ever do for their productivity.

Don’t believe us?

Did you know the average worker spends an incredible 20% of every working week searching for information they need to complete their daily tasks? That means the right tools for knowledge management can save your employees an entire working day each week.

To ensure your intranet gives your employees as big of an efficiency boost as possible, track how long each task takes your people to complete. Then you can hop into your intranet analytics to see whether the team members who use your intranet the most get those tasks done faster than their colleagues who rarely log into your internal website. If not, that’s a sign you need to go back to the drawing board about how you structure your knowledge base. 

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Communication channels

If collaboration isn’t a cornerstone of your company culture, your organization will quickly get into trouble.

In fact:

• 60% of people find it difficult, very difficult, or nearly impossible to get the vital information they need to do their job from their colleagues.
• 86% think a lack of effective collaboration and communication is the main cause of workplace failures.
• 36% of people find it so hard to exchange information with different teams within their company that it causes silos.

One thing is clear: if you can find a way to make your people more comfortable sharing their insights and expertise with their colleagues, you can transform your business’s fortunes.

And communication tools like CEO and Executive updates, weekly employee status updates, and an “Ask Me Anything” employee question template can all help here. Together, they can eliminate the avalanche of emails, phone calls, and meetings that have come to define knowledge work in the information age. Freeing your people up from spending most of their time sitting in meetings and responding to emails can do wonders for your productivity and employee engagement. 

So, keep track of how much these features get used in your intranet analytics to ensure your employees are making the most of them – and adjust your strategy if not. It’s also well worth tracking how many emails your people send to their colleagues and the meetings they have with each other. If that remains around the level before you adopted your intranet, it’s a sign you need to train your people to make the most of your intranet.

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Departments vs. the organization

Each of your organization’s departments has its own unique needs when it comes to knowledge management. Take a one-size-fits-all approach to your intranet, and it’s likely to suit some teams and leave others without the key features they need to do their job effectively. 

For example, if your dev team works agile, they’ll need specialist features like a standup meeting, daily/weekly agenda, and team retrospective template. 

Opting for an intranet with a library of customizable workflow templates will go a long way here, allowing you to adapt your intranet to suit each of your teams’ exact needs.

On top of that, you’ll want to track how each department uses your intranet carefully in your analytics to see which teams might not be working as well. And be sure to regularly run staff surveys to give your people a platform to openly and honestly discuss how they feel about your intranet. Segmenting those responses by the department will help you take the pulse of your team's feelings.

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Employee reach

Employee intranets have become their own in the remote and hybrid working age. It’s essential that your employees can always quickly and easily find the information they need to do their jobs when no teammates are sitting across their desks to answer any questions they have.

If some of your staff work from the office, some work hybrid, and some work fully remote, ensuring they all engage with your intranet is crucial. You’ll quickly find knowledge silos appearing if your in-office employees stop adding their insights to your company wiki for their remote colleagues to access.

A company knowledge base only functions if all your employees are fully invested in keeping it up-to-date. Suppose your intranet analytics, staff surveys, and one-to-ones reveal your employees who work from the office aren’t engaging with yours as much as their remote colleagues. In that case, you should act quickly to prevent knowledge silos from forming.

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Costs

A modern intranet is your new digital workplace. Set up the right workflows and it can replace a lot of other software – which can shave a big chunk of your outgoings.

So, once your intranet is established, keep a close eye on how much the other software you’re paying for gets used in your company. Use those tools’ internal analytics and take your employees’ pulse to get a clear picture of which tools your people are regularly using – and which you can comfortably get rid of.

Just be sure you’re not only seeing dollar signs when you’re making these decisions though. Get rid of a platform your people know, love, and use regularly because it can technically be replaced by one of your intranet’s features could affect productivity – not to mention irk your staff.

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