Intranets are the unsung heroes organizations. While the glory goes to iOS apps and new websites, with slick full-screen videos and high-quality web design
… it’s the intranets where actual work gets done.
And yet, organizations often rely on outdated intranets with web 1.0 UX designs when an upgrade is long overdue.
Today, we’re going to look at the business case of investing UX dollars into internal technical assets, and why organizations can run these projects while achieving a positive ROI.
Why Intranet at All?
This is the constant pushback that design teams get when it comes to internal assets. The argument goes like this:
“Why invest in an internal tool when we could spend that money on [external goals, e.g. customer acquisition, customer experience, membership user flow, etc..]”
And those external goals, particularly for businesses with bottom line targets, are hardly unimportant. But having an intranet can help you hit them.
Generally, intranets are built to deliver x3 core benefits:
- Streamline internal processes
- Improve internal communication
- … Which collectively reduce the cost of business functions.
Having better information flow internally is a good thing to do, and businesses who have invested in intranets have made the bet that better communication = lower operation costs.
And that’s where our story gets interesting.
Why Not Invest Further?
If an organization has an intranet, they’ve already decided that communication is worth some investment.
So the only argument against additional investment is that better communication has a diminishing return. Essentially, some communication gets you X efficiency, and better communication won’t get you 2X the efficiency.
And there’s some truth to this.
Getting two things to 80% is usually better than getting one thing 100% perfect.
But intranets today, with the shifting demographics of the workplace, are failing to deliver that minimal viable benefit. And here’s exactly why they need a UX facelift.
Better UX will improve employee efficiency.
First, UX is more than just a website redesign.
It’s how information is organized, searched for, consumed, and distributed – all of which are core functions of an intranet. A UX redesign can help organize and optimize your intranet organization, and make sure that the right user can find the right stuff at the right time.
Because think about this.
~20% of every day is employees looking for information to do their jobs.
That means that even a small improvement in navigation, organization, or dissemination of information can deliver huge dividends.
It’s simple: less time on the low-value elements of their jobs means more time doing the high-value parts.
Better UX Improves Employee Compliance
Have you ever tried to get employees to a system or process that they don’t like or is hard to use? Compliance becomes incredibly difficult in those settings.
And if your staff are responsible for raw data generation, for example imputing sales numbers, logging support calls, documenting processes/projects, or tracking their own time/activities, then getting compliance is incredibly important because that data gets fed up the organization to make major strategic decisions.
So it’s in the best interest of the organization to make that activity as easy and straightforward as possible, to get the cleanest, most complete data and make the best decision.
Having a well-designed intranet that makes processes easy to follow and operations easy to complete inevitably drives up user adoption, inevitably cascading up to business decisions higher up the organization.
Better UX Improves Employee Retention
51% of employers say that poor technology makes it difficult to retain employees, and 76% of millennials say they would take a lower-paying job that they like, over a higher-paying one they don’t. And intranet won’t solve these hiring and retention problems single-handedly. But what employers are learning is that there is no silver bullet.
Employee retention in a combination of lots of things, including the technology that staff need to use.
For organizations hiring high-value employees, for example, a university looking for a professor, where the cost of hiring is can be $5,000+, every new hire is a bit hit to the bottom line.
By taking an incremental approach to employee retention, organizations significantly reduce their hiring costs. Improving the internal and customer-facing technology that you’re using can and should be on that roadmap.
And because the intranet usually touches every team, improving intranet UX is an easy place to start.
Final Thoughts
Intranets have, for too long, been neglected due to the divide between customer- and user-facing technology.
But in reality, the organizational bottom line doesn’t care what side of the table the technology is on.
Internal tools, in general, and informational / communication tools like intranets in particular, can deliver significant benefits to an organization.
By making information and communication simple, fast, and easy in a tool that works like every other digital tool your staff is using in their own lives, a well-designed intranet can:
- Improve employee efficiency
- Drive employee process compliance
- Lift employee retention.
Each of these areas delivers enough ROI to justify a UX intranet project. Combined, they make investing in intranet UX the easiest decision an organization can (and should) make.
