An effective intranet analytics strategy is crucial to the success of modern intranet platforms such as SharePoint, Plone, Confluence, Liferay and ThoughtFarmer.
Implemented effectively, intranet analytics can provide actionable insights into employee behavior, for example around internal searches, content interaction and usage by individual employees, teams and departments.
Businesses use this data to boost employee productivity, to ensure that content is compelling and relevant and to empower employees who deserve it.
Boosting Employee Productivity & Engagement
It’s often the case that intranets can sprawl extensively as teams and departments add new sections and sub sections to their infrastructure.
This has the unfortunate, unintended consequence that employees get lost when trying to find and discover content.
According to Interact, around one fifth of business time is wasted by employees searching for information to do their job. This translates to wasted clicks and a reduction in workforce productivity.
Intranet analytics can help identify those wasted clicks and searches. According to IDC, ineffective information access costs organisations an annual productivity hit of up to $14,000 per employee.
An intranet analytics audit would focus on identifying and refining failed search queries to save employee time and boost productivity. Refining 10 failed search queries, for example, equates to saving around 15 minutes of employee time.
Getting employees engaged with company culture via intranets is a fundamental objective for many companies.
Gallup research shows that increased engagement leads to higher earnings per share, and that actively disengaged employees cost the US between $450 billion to $550 billion each year in lost productivity.
Companies can use intranet analytics to identify employees using the intranet less than five times per week and subsequently take action to help them become more engaged with the culture and business to boost workforce productivity in the long term.
Making Content Compelling & Relevant
Employees often don’t engage with content because it simply isn’t compelling or relevant. Intranet analytics can be used to identify things such as videos viewed in 20 seconds or less.
If employees aren’t watching the videos, then it might be worth replacing them with more interesting content.
When using intranet analytics, it would be wrong to automatically assume that content isn’t being viewed because it is not compelling.
It can also be the case that announcements and videos are not viewed for the sole reason that they are not positioned effectively, without employees realizing it.
Intranet analytics can be used to flag this to staff and subsequently help them position content better.
Empower Employees Who Deserve It
Analytics is playing an increasingly important role in HR departments, which are under pressure to make more data-driven decisions about their workforce.
Intranet analytics is helping management and HR teams to identify evangelists, pinpoint collaboration efforts and praise go-getters.
For example, decisions can be made to provide teams with more resources based on intense sharing activity and engagement around large projects.
Analytics & A Successful Measurement Strategy
The best practice is to establish a measurement strategy around critical success factors. Agree on intranet analytics data, such as the number of created new docs, page contributions, user interactions, total page views and logins, and communicate this to the workforce.
Then, conduct a quarterly audit of how the intranet is being used and make data-driven decisions to boost productivity and motivate the workforce.
There is no doubt that the intranet can be a powerful tool when utilized to its full advantage. Many companies neglect to use the data that can be drawn from intranet analytics to measure how their employees are working.
A better understanding of the intranet is the first step towards a better understanding of employee motivation, which, in turn, can increase productivity and collaboration.
