How your company values are affected by your intranet’s information architecture
Cristian SALANTI
Operational Comms, Employee Experience, Intranet, Digital Workplace, M365
This is the promise of any intranet solution provider. And the dream of any intranet manager, CHRO, or CEO. And yet, while a new intranet always delivers an improvement over the previous state of affairs, it often falls short of expectations.
Below are the Google reviews of a leading British bank. Their values are respect, integrity, service, excellence, and stewardship.?
You can bet this bank has all the platforms in the world, and yet they fail to meet the expectations of a significant percentage of their customers.
The problems that you see in these reviews are in fact shared by the entire retail banking industry, which requires effective internal communication to deliver its services.
All the values that require good operational communication and collaboration are at risk. And there are some other values that are also affected.
Let’s take a few examples of company values and see how they are negatively affected by your intranet’s information architecture.
Excellence
Can an employee quickly and thoroughly explain to his customer all the details related to a product and the associated transactions? Does the intranet surface the Why and How of any relevant topic for an employee? If not, the quality of both internal and external services will be affected.
Service
An employee is under continuous stress due to the continuous avalanche of information and changes. How often will he or she properly connect with the customer and deliver on the promises an organization makes?
A good information architecture makes finding information easy. Also, recent changes and best practices are easily picked up as this kind of information is embedded with other types of information the employee is actively searching for.
Sadly, it is seldom the case. Most intranets consist of disconnected silos, focused more on the information producer or the category of information (news, regulations, eLearning, employee catalogs) and less on the employee tasks.
Flexibility
Employees are overwhelmed with information. When it comes to answering a customer specific question on a newer product or of an older product that was recently changed, if the employee does not find quick enough the correct information, he or she might deliver the wrong information to the customer. This happens when the sections that contain the product information or specific operations do not contain a section with recent operational changes.
Innovation
It is one of most frequent and desired value. Yet in many cases it fails to work properly if the company is not able to manage them properly.
IMO, there are two cases here.
1.??????Big innovations that take the form of new products (or features), services. In this case, the intranet must asynchronously connect the sales and operation teams with the product and support teams with.
Very often it doesn’t do a good job and the communication happens mostly over Teams and email, which are both less efficient and effective channels.
2.??????Small, incremental improvements. Here are two stages where the intranet plays a key role:
a.??????Collecting innovation by better connecting the employees with the subject matter experts. These employees might have ideas or insights that the headquarter guys might miss.
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Sadly, most intranets do not facilitate this kind of connections, in most cases an employee on the front office would not know who the product manager or the process owner is.
b.??????Managing small, increment improvements in software tools, procedures, or better practices.
This has to do with the (in)ability of the intranet to surface these types of information.
Simplicity
Often you come across basic tasks that in theory should take minutes and in practice they end up taking half an hour or more. This happens because the specific tasks are not properly addressed within the intranet, because the information about them is scattered between different repositories or just published in the newsfeed or sent as an email to all employees.
Indirectly affected values
The quality of your intranet implementation indirectly affects other values. Think of respect, honesty, trust that are affected when an employee cannot get an answer to an enquiry because the supporting employee is overwhelmed by others that have similar questions that could be published on a FAQ section. Every time when operational miscommunication happens, such values are affected.
Missing information
It is not only the architecture of the existing information that is causing problems. Often, there is critical information that is missing entirely from the intranet.
Whether we are talking about a product or an internal service, every topic has a ‘Why’. This is one of the pieces of information that is almost always missing and that can make the employees perform their tasks timelier, faster, and better.
Also, specific support channels and feedback mechanisms at topic level are frequently missing entirely. The employee is being provided instead with list of names without specific responsibilities which makes getting support or sending feedback a lot more cumbersome.
Culture is less about task mechanics and more about how people interact with each other.
In a world where information is basically dumped on the employees, please consider developing a task-oriented information architecture for your intranet. It will make your colleagues happier and more productive.
Please let me know in the comments section below what your thoughts are on this topic.
BTW, I post stuff like this each week, but if you don’t follow me, you probably won’t see them - Cristian SALANTI . You can contact me for a free consulting call and take a chance to see the digital workplace from a completely new perspective.