For the last seven years we’ve been writing about intranets, and our focus has relentlessly been on how to make the intranet more valuable for staff and the organisation.

Our over-arching statement has always been this:

Staff will use the intranet if it’s useful.

The challenge is to uncover and understand staff needs, and to design the intranet to meet them.

While the intranet must be functional and valuable, there is another softer side to the site. It can present a human face to staff, do much to build and reinforce corporate culture, as well as underpinning broad organisational change.

Presenting a human face

In addition to being useful, intranets can and should be enjoyable to use. Maybe even fun. At a minimum, they should always present a ‘human face’ to staff, one that is engaging and encouraging.

The article Starting to define the intranet brand outlines a simple technique for capturing the overall ‘brand’ of the intranet, beyond look-and-feel.

[CMb 2009-20, read the full article]