Your intranet is the online portal for your company. It contains all of the information that keeps your company going from day-to-day. A successful intranet is one that keeps users coming back day after day to stay on top of everything they need to get their jobs done. The problem is, too often intranets are forgotten. Either employees don’t know their intranet exists, don’t know how to use it, or don’t have any reason to. If your intranet suffers from any of these symptoms, don’t worry, Confluence is here to save you.
Let’s look at 5 ways to drive adoption of your company’s intranet.
1. Make your intranet comfortable
Give your intranet a friendly name
A great way to encourage adoption of your intranet is by making it comfortable for your employees to use. Start by giving your intranet a name. At Atlassian we call ours the ‘Extranet’ and everyone in the company is comfortable with referring to it as ‘EAC’. A simple name can make your intranet less daunting and relatable to everyone in your organization.
Brand your intranet
Another easy way to make users comfortable is by branding your intranet. Give it the same look and feel as your web site, or other web properties. If it’s easy to recognize it as a part of your organization, your employees are more to make contributions. Customize the look and feel of your intranet using custom CSS or by using add-ons available on the Atlassian Marketplace such as Zen Foundation, and RefinedWiki.
2. Use your intranet for everyday affairs
Most companies use email as the primary method of disseminating important company information. Not Atlassian. We use our intranet for all company-wide announcements. Any time one of our founders has something to announce to the company instead of an @staff email they publish a blog post in Confluence. Everyone has access to it and valuable discussions can take place in the form of threaded comments.
You can try the same in your company. Next time you send a company wide email, try linking to a blogpost or page that you’ve created in Confluence. After a while, you won’t have to send the email, people will look to the intranet for big news!
3. Make it easy to create engaging content in your intranet
The common saying is people eat with their eyes. The same can be said about content on your intranet. When content looks good, people are more likely to want to read it. Confluence makes it easy to create engaging content. The Confluence editor gives users rich features that make it easy and fast to create engaging content.
Anyone can create a page like this in Confluence, whether a beginner or power user, thanks to the Confluence editor.
4. Make searching the intranet easy
Most likely when an employee comes to your intranet, it’s to find something. Unfortunately in most intranets you are looking more often than you are finding.
It’s easy to find content in Confluence using quick search. Just start typing, and watch as pages, blogs, attachments, and spaces are dynamically recommended. A great tip for making it easier for people to find what they need is to use Google short links for popular pages in your intranet. You can share these links with everyone in your company, to help navigate to important pages faster.
If you are looking for recent content you can browse the dashboard activity streams. Find content that has been recently added, created by your network or has been deemed popular by your co-workers.
5. Pull employees into the intranet with notifications
The best way to encourage employees to use your intranet is to pull them in. People will naturally use a tool when they are drawn in by their peers or their work. There are three ways to to pull co-workers into Confluence:
1. @mentions
They work for social networking and they work in the office.
2. Shares
You can also use the share button to quickly share pages for review and to get feedback.
3. Email digests
Confluence sends a weekly email summary of the most popular content in your intranet. This email is your on-stop-shop for all the latest content in your intranet. It is personalized so you see what is most popular amongst your network and the entire company.
See how Atlassian does it
Wouldn’t it be great if your intranet was as “sticky” as Facebook? Wish no more! Watch as Atlassian’s very own John Rotenstein reveals how Atlassian makes its own internal instance of Confluence so sticky that people “live in it” all day. You’ll walk out with a long list of ideas on how to improve intranet adoption in your own company.
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