An intranet is a closed-off internal network commonly used by organizations for sharing documents, tools and services internally. Among the most popular intranet solutions used today is SharePoint, which is a Microsoft product. How are these tools linked to KPIs, though?
A key performance indicator, commonly referred to as a KPI, is a measurement of performance, usually used by companies to determine their success in meeting their business objectives.
Often, KPIs are tied to compliance with company policies and procedures, systems, and guidance from the leadership team. Because a company intranet can serve as a repository for all of this information, understanding how employees are using your intranet can give you a good idea as to whether KPI adoption is happening. Read on to better understand how you can use your company’s intranet to drive KPIs and achieve better business outcomes.
How can your intranet support common business goals?
Before determining how to get KPI adoption on your intranet, let’s first discuss why measuring adoption is so important for common business objectives
- Communicating internally with efficiency: You can use your intranet to post e-bulletins, important memos from the leadership team, compliance documents like the employee manual and more. In other words, an intranet lets you ensure you can easily distribute the information you need quickly and easily.
- Finding and sharing information with ease: An intranet can help prevent information from getting lost by giving it a permanent place to live.
- Streamlining your onboarding process: Your intranet can help you connect with new hires, provide them with the necessary documents and maintain ongoing communication to help them hit the ground running with ease.
- Sharing knowledge: Long-term employees with lots of intricate institutional knowledge may struggle to find an outlet to share information, but with an intranet, knowledge sharing is as easy as creating and uploading a document that can be easily accessed by others.
- Instituting version control: An intranet helps with access control by ensuring that one collaborative document lives in one place and that when one person makes changes to it, the updated version is instantly available for everyone.
- Meeting time reduction: Reduce the number of in-person meetings, phone calls and emails between team members by simply sending others a link or pointing them to a folder on the intranet with documents they need to see.
The above-mentioned business goals should be useful when determining how to establish a KPI that makes sense for your organization based on its intranet use or how to develop KPIs that are intranet-supported.
How can I ensure KPI adoption on my organization’s intranet?
Once you know what you’re trying to achieve, the next step is to determine how your intranet can help you reach those goals. No matter what your KPIs include, you’re going to need to measure them. If your intranet platform does not produce metrics — say via a dashboard — you’ll need a third-party program that can produce the necessary metrics. That’s where Tryane comes in.
Let’s review those common business goals from earlier again, this time with adoption as the desired metric
- Internal communication: What are you posting, and is it being read? If only 10 out of 100 possible employees are reading your weekly e-bulletin, it’s time to try something new.
- Information accessing: Are important items like user manuals, documentation and compliance documents being accessed once they are posted? If not, you may want to consider sending additional messaging with a link to the documents so people can get to them without having to dig.
- Streamlined onboarding: Are new hires reading through everything they need to? If not, you’re likely to have compliance problems down the line.
- Knowledge sharing: Is there a dedicated place on your intranet for knowledge-sharing? If so, are your seasoned employees sharing their knowledge there, and are those who could use it actually accessing that area of your intranet?
- Version control: Are documents being worked on collaboratively, or are different people uploading different versions of the same document, creating confusion and redundancy? If the latter is the case, you may need to educate them on the benefits of collaborating on a single document.
- Time on meetings: When you share documents on your intranet that would otherwise be disseminated during meetings, are the recipients actually opening them? If so, are they accessing them once or multiple times? How long are they spending on those documents? This can tell you a lot about who your conscientious employees are.
In addition to supporting these business goals, an intranet allows you to determine who sees what since you can allow or disallow access to certain parts of the intranet. Information security is important. With an intranet, you can share whatever information needs to be seen across the company without worrying about prying eyes outside the organization seeing those documents.
An intranet also fosters a collegial culture, allowing employees one central place to access important information from management, helping them feel connected to those at the top and like part of the overall team. With engagement as a common KPI for companies, that’s a major advantage of an intranet.
How can Tryane help?
Tryane helps communications professionals extract that data from platforms like SharePoint so you can better determine whether
- Your communication efforts are having their intended effects
- Some employees are responding better than others to your messaging
- Different employee groups are more likely to comply with different kinds of requests from your office
- Your efforts are supporting overarching business goals
If you’re looking for an effective way to glean insights into your internal communications KPIs on SharePoint, contact Tryane today to learn more about our powerful analytics solutions.