Three Tips for a Thriving Intranet
Written May 14th, 2008 by Renae BrowningHere at Baptist Health Care, Pensacola, Fl, we recently rolled out a fresh redesign of our intranet. For approximately a decade we have had some variation of an intranet available to our organization’s staff. With each redesign, our intranet has slowly evolved into the powerful and useful tool it is today. Through this process we have narrowed down what makes a successful intranet to these three areas.
1. Your intranet needs to be a diverse tool. There are so many different capacities of employees within a hospital – clinical, administrative, support, technical, etc. Your intranet needs to be user-friendly and appealing to all employees. From our intranet, our employees can access their payroll and benefit information, their education credits or register for an upcoming training, the employee directory, menus for our cafeterias, our policies and procedures, and our reward and recognition programs to just name a few. Also available our various communication pieces such our daily communication tool (at the beginning of each shift all staff members meet together for a short reading of the daily piece and short discussion afterward), a general communication board with links to various articles, and an internal blog with regularly changing topics. We also link to all of our hospital’s clinical applications from a central web application page. Our clinical staff and even physicians access this page daily to accomplish their work objectives. With so many diverse employees coming together to access the same intranet, we made sure there was something there for everyone.
2. Your intranet needs to be visually appealing. Don’t underestimate the value of your intranet just because it is an internal site. Spending the needed time to design an eye-catching look and feel with a well planned navigation is essential to bringing staff into your site and making it useful for them. The first thing your staff will see is the homepage. Keep it updated, constantly highlighting new features or organizational events coming up. Use colors and designs that follow the branding of your organization. New employees should visit the intranet for the first time with no confusion as to where they are, what can be found there, and that they are part of the organization now. We have a dedicated section on our homepage that shares a message from our president. This message changes periodically and is a great tool for our president to share information with his staff.
3. Your intranet needs to be easily accessible. There is no point in developing a great intranet if it is difficult to access. We purchased a simple domain name for our intranet that employees would not have difficulty remembering. We also make a point of setting all network PCs default browser homepages to our intranet. Information on our intranet and how to access it are shared at all new employee orientations and all current employee forums (quarterly meetings for all staff). Most clinical staff use our intranet daily since tools for their everyday work process are linked from there, forcing their usage.
Intranets are a vital tool for organizations today. We consider ours just as important as any of our external sites. For health care organizations that are large in size and geographically spread out, what better way could there be of bringing together all employees and sharing available tools and communications simultaneously.
May 15th, 2008 at 8:14 am
Makes me wish we could see it! That’s the hard part of benchmarking intranets. You can’t just go take a look. But you are absolutely correct that the same principles that apply to your consumer site also apply to the one for your employees. They will have the same level of comfort, experience and expectation on the intranet as they do on any other site they visit. Too often organizations give the intranet short shrift because it’s “just internal.” Good for you for not doing that!
May 20th, 2008 at 1:08 pm
This is great information for INTEGRIS Health. We are looking at overhauling our intranet. We’re even creating a new position specifically responsible for the intranet. Until now it has been solely an IT initiative but it will soon be a collaborative effort with corporate communications.
Good stuff!