By Janus Boye
Frank Wolf, co-founder of employee communication software vendor Staffbase
Intranets have been around since the mid-90’s and during the past decades, we’ve seen quite a few waves of different intranet concepts like the employee portal, the social intranet or even the digital workplace.
According to Frank Wolf, co-founder of employee communication software vendor Staffbase, we are now right in the middle of the next wave with intranets playing an important role in organisations, in particular when it comes to improving the employee experience.
In a recent member call, Frank joined us to explain what is behind this wave.
A previous guest speaker in our intranet peer groups way back in 2015, during the founding years of Staffbase, Frank started by talking about how the intranet has changed, also due to the pandemic.
Why we still need intranets
Let’s start with the evolution of terms: While digital workplace is widely just seen as an intranet 2.0, something happened in 2018, when analysts started talking about employee communication apps, with Staffbase being one of the vendors in that category.
Alongside an intranet (or digital workplace), employee communication apps are a transformational technology, also for the years to come, as they address some of the big unsolved intranet challenges. Think of it as intranets going from a single destination to omnichannel.
Keep in mind that today, many employees are far less in the office compared to just a few years ago. This makes your intranet even more important as a digital home for employees or a “company campus” as Frank Wolf called it.
Still, many of the familiar intranet challenges remain here in 2023. In the call, Frank outlined these three:
Usability; many intranets still doesn’t reach all employees, have an outdated look and feel, are too messy and not optimised for mobile devices
Relevance; intranets remain hard to target & personalise, both engagement and interaction is low, content is monolingual for multilingual teams and they only work for top-down news
Efficiency; intranet often remain disconnected from other channels, they don’t integrate well with other tools, there’s heavy reliance on IT and finally it’s hard to measure success
Later in the call, Frank also weaved in another Gartner quote on the state of intranets today:
“Established intranets often suffer from an overabundance of purposes. You must define the purpose, and do some from the employee’s point of view.”
What is a good intranet in 2023?
According to Frank there are three elements to a good intranet and traditionally an intranet portal would address all three of them:
Front Door, which is all about communication, community, service and information
Library, which is equally documentation and knowledge library
Collaboration, which is team communication, documents and meetings
Today, Frank sees a clear trend towards specialisation, specifically collaboration is no longer in scope for most intranet relaunches. In other words, as it said on the slide that Frank showed: The good intranet in 2023, is interconnected but not one system.
Frank also weaved in this quote from IT analysts Gartner to put things in perspective:
“A modern intranet must offer a primary front door and many side doors for entry.”
Let’s wrap up by looking a bit more at the front door element, which is also the approach offered by Microsoft and followed by Staffbase.
What does a front door intranet do in 2023?
The idea behind a front door intranet is really to be accessible to employees wherever they are on the device of their choosing. Whether through a desktop, an app, in your inbox, on SharePoint & Teams or even as a part of Digital Signage.
Frank listed these 3 key priorities for modern front door intranets
Communication, like when you are announcing changes to the senior leadership team
Employee services, which could be information on how many vacation days you have left
Application and resource access, which is the valuable direct access to other apps and resources when you need them
Learn more about the 2023 intranet trends
Frank also mentioned the free 2023 ‘intranets and EX platforms’ review report by UK-based Clearbox Consulting. It’s an impressive 770-page report which includes reviews of 30 of the best intranet products on the market.
The call also had some Q&A on the future of Yammer. This news came out a few days later from Microsoft: Yammer is evolving to Viva Engage.
The conversation also continues in our future workplace peer groups which meets regularly in Europe and North America. There’s also the Boye Aarhus 23 conference in November, where you can meet peers and learn from the best.
You can also download the slides from the call (PDF) or lean back and enjoy the entire recording below