Access Anywhere
There’s a shrinking separation between the requirements for a good in-office, remote, hybrid, and deskless digital employee experience.
The needs of employees continue converging toward a central point, and for many organizations, that central point is their intranet. Problems arise when that intranet isn’t ready to serve a broad and diverse modern employee audience.
Many intranets (and intranet-adjacent solutions) have been built around the concept of serving one main employee archetype: office workers. Deskless workers often get an entirely different experience if they get one at all, because serving either audience historically required investments in operations, specialized hardware, change management, governance, and infrastructure.
Intranets that are equally accessible to employees in or out of the office require a different approach—one that in-house or legacy intranets often struggle to deliver.
The Inclusive Approach
It’s 2025. There’s no reason an intranet should be harder to access on the go than it is at a desk, and when it is equally easy, you get to usher in a new type of DEX that inspires participation and engagement.
In a recent interview, Allen Kopcic explained how valuable it is to have an intranet that can serve the LOVB team equally in the office and on the go:
“I’ve used a lot of different intranets, and Haystack’s mobile friendliness is key for the type of workforce we have. I come from a background where everyone is working on a computer at a desk all day. In contrast to that, maybe 20% of our internal audience is connected to a desktop device. Most people are on the go, in the field—out at the clubs.
Having a user-friendly internal communication platform that anybody can access from any device is essential.”
Kopcic’s colleague Charlie Erdman echoed that sentiment, explaining that their inclusive intranet became the "main touchpoint for anything anyone has questions about."
You don’t need a team spread across different locales, or roles that take people outdoors for work to benefit from having parity in your mobile experience. Jack Randall explained that even in a company like OpenStore with a mostly office-driven workforce, mobile devices are an effective engagement tool.
“For me specifically, it’s the elegant feature set around posts, and the way you can drive push notifications to mobile devices so easily.”
Having the right tools in hand at all times is helpful for consuming information, but it also makes engaging and sharing information easier.
Accessible Design
An intranet that you can bring anywhere but can’t use easily only solves part of the equation.
Intranet engagement works like a flywheel, and easy access feeds that flywheel at every stage. When discovering and sharing content is easier, employees are more likely to participate. That leads to more user-generated content, which draws more engagement, which leads to more user-generated content.
Ease of Use
Ease of use can be a tricky thing to solve for, because easy is subjective and contextual. Does easy mean “easy for a non-technical person?” Does it mean “easy for people using a wide range of devices?” Or does it mean “minimal steps from ‘A’ to ‘B’?”
Because easy can be so personal and dependent on context, you kind of need to get all those things right at once. Otherwise, you have a context in which it’s not easy to use, and that’s one of the most common barriers to engagement.
Lily Jackson understood the importance this factor played for her team at Riviera Utilities, and worked to find a solution that worked equally well for everyone.
“Accessibility was a major challenge I set out to solve,” she said. “Fieldworkers make up about 75% of our company.”
But crucially, it wasn’t only the mobile aspect of accessibility that Jackson needed to solve. For her intranet to be accessible to a generationally diverse employee community with roles that span from field technician to support rep, it also needed to be intuitive.
“A lot of people on our team aren’t that tech savvy. It’s not that they couldn’t be, they just don’t need to be. So I wanted our new intranet to be something so easy to pick up that people could use without investing a lot of time in learning it. We needed a solution that felt like we were getting ahead of the game, and that was Haystack.”
Read Riviera Utilities’ Story →
Intuitive Experience
It’s a common misconception that ease of use matters most to less tech-savvy people, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Even organizations working on the cutting edge of business technology or scientific research and discovery benefit from simple, intuitive design.
In a recent interview, Wistia’s Inga Höskuldsdóttir explained why her own highly tech-savvy colleagues prioritize and benefit from a thoughtful, easy-to-use interface.
“There’s less patience for clunky user experiences because you’re used to things working quickly and seamlessly. As a team with a lot of creative and tech-savvy employees, we wanted something easy to use, maintain, and update.”
Aaron Callahan echoed that sentiment as it relates to his team at the Boyce Thompson Institute.
“Since adopting Haystack, one of the biggest pieces of feedback I’ve received from my colleagues is just how enjoyable it is to use. They love that they can just launch it and they’re in. There are no passwords to remember or change, and the UI is so clean—it just lowers the barrier to entry for everyone. While researching intranet platforms, ease of use was one of the key factors I was looking for. Without that, you’ll never have high adoption or engagement rates.”
Read Boyce Thompson Institute's Story →
User experience directly impacts the accessibility of a platform. The easier it is to access, the more it gets accessed, and the better it performs.
Easy Administration
So many comms teams deliver less than they’re capable of because they’re held back by their tooling. If that sounds frustratingly familiar, please, quit reading this and set aside a half hour to talk with our sales team. We want to see you win.
Whether it’s delivering a flawlessly branded multi-channel announcement with a few keystrokes, or managing comms for a workforce in the thousands as a team of one or two, a successful intranet empowers dedicated admins to do more with less.
Lily Jackson’s goal for Riviera Utilities was a platform that everyone in the organization felt empowered to use and engage with. Jackson leveraged her intranet’s intuitive admin tools to engage a broad, multi-generational employee community.
"I’m not an HTML designer... I needed something that would be easy to work with on the admin side, and something that wouldn’t require me to spend a lot of time in the backend of the system."
Kayla Bonnin also relied on smart tools as a force multiplier, allowing her to manage both the front and back-end of Everbridge’s internal communications platform, solo.
“Our previous intranet needed people with specialized expertise to manage the backend. This time, it was crucial for me to be able to run the frontend and the backend seamlessly—and I’m not technical. Haystack is easy enough that I feel comfortable managing it on my own, and that was a major selling point.”
Access to Information
Having a platform that is easy to access and use is essential, but what’s on that platform matters just as much. Poorly organized institutional knowledge isn’t just frustrating; it’s expensive. When information is scattered across multiple locations and platforms that don’t connect, it suffers a double blow: Its value drops, and its cost increases.
How does its cost increase?
- The subscription cost of hosting duplicate, triplicate, (or even more) copies of that information on multiple platforms.
- The efficiency cost of time spent digging for information across all those platforms.
- The opportunities missed when employees lack information when they need it most.
All these costs are multiplied by your organization’s headcount. So, while inefficient access and information sprawl might seem annoying but benign, it isn’t.
A successful intranet is a true one-stop-shop for organizational knowledge and resources, no matter where they live. This is a key area where they can make a meaningful, visible impact and deliver an outsized return on investment.
Consolidation and Centralization
In a successful intranet implementation, information from every aspect of the organization is easily accessible to the people who need it. A CEO can instantly access important information about engineering or marketing initiatives, and engineers can access important HR information with equal ease.
You know your intranet is working when people check there before going anywhere else. Mickey DeJong illustrated the value of centralizing organizational resources at Ally Logistics in a recent interview:
“Our greatest purpose for adopting Haystack was centralization. Our forms, our training, how we communicated announcements, promotions—all of that was spread across different platforms. Having a place where people can go to find information, categorize it, share it, or even privatize it allows our communication to be a lot more purpose-driven.
The impact has been huge. We have a saying now: ‘When in doubt, check Haystack.’”
Most modern intranets (some more than others) can integrate with tools you’re already using. This way people seeking information have a deeper well to draw from, and people who use specialized platforms to track and document their work can continue to use those tools without interruption.
Jason Harlander explained why this flexible and comprehensive information access are so valuable for a heavily technical team at Sware:
“Before, we had items stored on Sharepoint, on local laptops, or in people’s heads—all over the place. Having that one central spot where everything’s there, and it’s up to date has been hugely beneficial.
It’s now our single source of truth for a lot of our internal policies—being able to consolidate all that with our content management system, even using the Box integration—everything is in one spot.”
Natalie Fernandez echoed that statement with a similar experience she and the Novo team shared:
“A big chunk of our workforce uses Confluence. Giving people the option to use the tools they love, but then bringing it all together in a place where everyone still has easy access to the information, no matter what tools they prefer, has been huge for our comms strategy.”
Governance
Having a bunch of the wrong information in the right place, or the right information in the wrong place, is almost worse than having no information at all—and intranets are notorious dumping grounds.
A successful intranet has a governance strategy—and critically—tools that make implementing that strategy seamless.
Users of a system will always follow the path of least resistance, and administrators aren’t an exception to that rule. If governance is arduous to maintain, despite best intentions, it won’t be as well maintained as it could be if governance was easy.
Chris Dobbins recently shared some of the tools he finds helpful for making governance a breeze at OpenStore.
“The ability to manage content and avoid having it go stale over time stood out as a really compelling feature set within the knowledge base that we loved about Haystack. Those freshness scores, and expert-certified content were X factors that helped differentiate Haystack from a tool like Notion.”
Permissions
Ensuring the right people have access to the information they need to succeed, while protecting sensitive information is a core benefit of hosting communications on your intranet.
Group-Based Permissions
Group-based permissions are an intuitive way of combining access management with your distribution strategy. For example, sharing a post in a private HR leadership group will be delivered to, and only accessible by, the members of that group. Sharing a company-wide announcement will be delivered to and accessible by everyone.
Third-Party Permissions
Bringing content and resources in from external applications can present a challenge when it comes to information access. Intranets that respect the permissions structure already established in third-party applications make it easy to integrate them while maintaining good governance.
Access to People and Community
Successful intranets are more than just a hub for organizational knowledge—they connect the people that make it all possible. There are numerous ways intranets connect people, but we’re going to dive into a few that stand out.
Onboarding and Growth
Finding and absorbing organizational knowledge is one of the most challenging aspects of onboarding. It’s not just a matter of learning the intricacies of your role; it’s also learning the ins and outs of organizational culture and norms.
It’s common to hear people describe the process of onboarding at a new company, even one with a good onboarding program, as “drinking from a firehose.” While to some degree that is just an inevitable part of the onboarding experience, a successful intranet implementation can have a dramatic impact.
Katie Schoon discussed the impact Fluid Truck’s intranet “TruckStop” has for new employees:
“One of our sales leads contacted me just days after we launched Haystack, saying that his new hire was absolutely overwhelmed with all the information being thrown at her—all the platforms she needed to do her job, all the people that impacted different parts for her work—but after showing her TruckStop (what we call Haystack), it all suddenly just clicked for her.”
Interest and Resource Groups
Finding likeminded people at work can help to strengthen employee engagement and deepen connections. A successful intranet helps ease a major challenge large organizations face, acting as a bridge between people who may not have connected otherwise.
Features like org charts, integrated search, and rich employee profiles make it easy to find colleagues based on their skills, hobbies, interests, and roles—and connect instantly. Those connections can grow into formal interest groups that bring members back to engage frequently.
Employee Resource Groups (ERG)s are another common way a successful intranet can provide employees with a dedicated space to connect, engage, and build relationships.
Collaboration and Mentorship
Some intranets provide scaffolding for employees to access mentor relationships. Senior employees can find opportunities to share their knowledge and skills in order to help others build their own. New hires can find someone willing to guide them through the more challenging aspects of their budding careers.
Availability
The most engaging, easy-to-use, and well-maintained intranet is only valuable if it’s reliably online.
While you may have an IT team up to the task of maintaining near perfect uptime, doing so requires a lot of time and effort. Modern cloud-based intranet vendors usually have Service Level Agreements (SLA)s that guarantee strong uptime.
By removing that burden from the IT team, a successful intranet provides a reliable, durable solution that can actually save time for IT, rather than existing as a cost center.
Meanwhile, the rest of the employee community builds another layer of trust each time they need something, and it’s right there for them.
Access to Employee Insights
Access isn't just about employees receiving information; it's also about unlocking access to their valuable feedback and insights. Employees closest to an issue often have unique insights that can support better decision-making at higher levels.
Building feedback into the communication ecosystem, providing venues for sharing ideas and eliminating barriers, helps make employees feel their voices are heard and valued.
Successful intranets also provide insights into the performance of internal content, giving leadership vital cues as to what resonates with the employee community.
In Summary
Every successful intranet implementation relies on access. Although it isn’t the only component that matters, access is essential to delivering a digital employee experience that exists as an asset, rather than a cost center to your organization.
