What is an Intranet to You, and Why You Are Likely Doing It Wrong

Ah, the intranet. That digital ghost town. A wasteland of outdated PDFs, forgotten announcements, and a CEO blog that hasn’t been updated since the Obama administration. You think you have an intranet? You don’t. You have a neglected, half-baked idea of one. A cluttered, top-down mess of corporate propaganda that nobody—nobody—wants to visit unless they’re forced to.

Let’s get something straight. An intranet is supposed to be the beating heart of your company’s internal life. The nerve center where people actually want to go because it makes their work easier, connects them to their colleagues, and—God forbid—even engages them. But more often than not, it’s a digital filing cabinet shoved in the basement with a busted lightbulb.

The Reality of Your Intranet (And Why It Sucks)

What do you see when you log in? A bloated homepage with too many widgets nobody clicks. A news feed with updates about quarterly earnings that make employees' eyes glaze over. A search function so broken it might as well be a cruel joke. Half the links are dead. The other half lead to documents so stale they might as well be written in Latin.

You built it for compliance, not for people. A place to dump HR policies, IT security reminders, and maybe, if you’re feeling generous, a birthday announcement for Greg in accounting. The problem? Nobody gives a damn. Employees don't wake up excited to check your intranet. They don't browse it for fun. They don’t want to engage with a clunky, slow, corporate landfill of information that’s about as inviting as an airport bathroom.

And let's not even get started on how it functions on mobile. Oh, you didn’t think people would want to access it from their phones? Welcome to 2025, pal.

What an Intranet Should Be (If You Actually Want It to Work)

1. It Should Be a Daily Habit, Not a Last Resort If employees only visit your intranet when they need to download a vacation request form, you’ve already lost. The best intranets are living, breathing spaces where work happens, not just a place where information sits. Think collaboration, conversation, and connection.
2. Make It Stupidly Easy to Use If someone has to click more than twice to find what they need, you’ve failed. Make navigation so intuitive that even the least tech-savvy person in the office can find their way around without cursing under their breath. And for the love of all that is holy, fix the goddamn search function.
3. Kill the Corporate Jargon Nobody wants to read “strategic synergies” or “leveraging core competencies.” They want quick, useful, human-sounding updates. If your intranet sounds like it was written by a robot trying to impress the board of directors, you’re doing it wrong.
4. Encourage Real Interaction An intranet should feel like a company’s digital town square, not a bulletin board covered in dust. Let employees comment, react, ask questions. Give them a reason to contribute. Otherwise, it’s just a megaphone for leadership shouting into the void.
5. Keep It Fresh or Kill It Content that doesn’t get updated is content that doesn’t get read. If something hasn’t been touched in six months, it’s dead weight. Delete it. Ruthlessly. If a policy or announcement is outdated, take it down before it starts rotting. Nothing kills trust faster than employees finding a “new benefits package” announcement from three years ago.
6. Mobile-First, Not an Afterthought People don’t sit at desks all day anymore. They work from coffee shops, airports, home offices, and sometimes even their actual offices. If your intranet isn’t built to work seamlessly on mobile, you might as well not bother at all.

The Bottom Line

If your intranet isn’t helping people do their jobs faster, easier, or better, then what the hell is it for? You don’t need another bureaucratic dumping ground. You need a tool that actually works for the people using it every single day.

So, ask yourself—does your intranet serve your employees, or does it just exist because someone in management said you needed one? If it’s the latter, you’re doing it wrong. Fix it. Or better yet, burn it to the ground and start over. Because nobody wants to log into a digital graveyard.

And for the love of good design, fix the damn search.

Scott

#sharepoint #intranet #modernworkplace #productdesign #intranetfail #employeeexperience