Why Intranets Succeed—Reason #1: Teamwork
A modern Intranet can completely transform your digital employee experience (DEX) overnight—but transformation alone doesn’t guarantee success.
Transformations can land anywhere on the spectrum from overwhelmingly positive to, well, abysmal. Since we’re in the business of delivering those overwhelmingly positive DEX transformations, it felt imperative to help more teams get there, whether they use Haystack or not.
This series digs into some of the most common reasons intranet implementations go really well. We’re lucky to have friends in a variety of truly extraordinary organizations who are using their intranet (Haystack) with tremendous success. So, as we dive into each topic, we’ll break down some real-world examples of these concepts and strategies in action.
This first entry is all about teamwork—but not in the vague and aspirational sense. We’ll cover actionable tactics and strategies for building collaboration with key stakeholders toward mutual benefits, goals, and investment in the program’s success.
Sound helpful? Great. Let's get started.
Successful intranets form a partnership with IT.
And good partnerships are equitable.
Your friends in IT are instrumental, irreplaceable partners in an intranet’s rollout and continued success. They play an essential role in the strategic and tactical elements of any well-functioning system.
If you’re evaluating a new intranet, bringing your IT colleagues in early on is crucial. Their expertise and input at the beginning stage can save your team time, effort, and money.
As JD Norton, Senior Director of Global Communications at Thumbtack shared:
"Our IT team was an incredible partner throughout the procurement process. They were involved from the opening of our RFP all the way to the end, because if it didn’t work for IT, it wasn’t going to work for us."
The early development stages are also the perfect time to uncover ways your new intranet could be a massive value-add for the IT team, instead of just a resource drain.
Jennifer Gibson shared her own experience teaming up with her colleagues in IT at InfluxData, not only to ensure a smooth rollout, but to find ways their intranet could make life easier for them.
“Our IT manager really loves Haystack,” she explained, noting that he participated in its initial implementation and remains an administrator. “The IT team has dedicated pages with resources for the team that are easy to create. Now Influxers don’t need assistance with the platform.
It’s such a relief to have this off IT’s plate. With our old intranet, I was constantly asking our IT manager, ‘Do you know how to fix this?’ and we’d end up digging through forums, Google, and Reddit together, trying to find a solution”
The InfluxData team’s dedication to working together resulted in a solution that exceeded everyone’s expectations, and actively reduced workload and bandwidth demands on IT in several areas.
In many cases—especially in the case of a build-your-own solution, IT bears the brunt of the implementation and ongoing maintenance challenges, but doesn’t get to enjoy many benefits. This leads to a lopsided dynamic that isn’t often sustainable.
Whether you’re looking for a new DEX solution, or working to improve your current one, it’s essential to consider the IT team’s experience, both as administrators and users.
Your content team is everywhere.
You don’t have to do it all yourself, and you shouldn’t.
In most successful intranet implementations—the ones that really stand out—content is a team effort. While internal communications teams still often own the overarching content strategy and KPIs, there’s a major advantage to leveraging content partnerships from across the organization. Here’s why:
1. Inspiring a diverse collection of champions ensures your content mix will be more comprehensive, more authentic, and more reflective of everyone’s interests, knowledge, expertise, and personality. That authenticity and relevance go a long way when it comes to platform engagement.
Ben Hall explains how he established this strategy early on in the implementation of his team’s intranet:
“From the beginning I was really keen on developing champions from various departments so there are multiple voices being heard. The worst thing for engagement is to log in and have a platform that’s just talking at you from the top-down, rather than something you’re actively participating in.”
2. Engaging and relevant content attracts users and makes it easy for them to see the value of your intranet. Different perspectives help broaden the range of content you can provide.
When someone interacts with great content and becomes inspired to bring their own content into the mix, it can generate a flywheel effect. The diversity, volume, and relevance of your content mix increases, attracting more people to engage, and in turn, more people to create. At this stage, the value of your intranet becomes clearer to everyone, every day.
Kayla Bonnin described her process for rolling out Everbridge’s intranet, MyBridge, and how this strategy helped her boost both content engagement and production:
“My team, Internal Communications, owned the overarching project, but we had over 45 champions building MyBridge with us.
At first, we were asking people to participate. Now, new champions are coming to us excited, saying they think their department, organization, or group needs a space. So, we work with them to establish that plan and structure. MyBridge has grown so much, and it’s exciting because that growth shows how engaged people are with the platform.”
3. Diversifying content production can also dramatically reduce demands on the comms team. Comms teams are undisputed champions of delivering more with less—but even the most productive communicator has their limits.
This is another area where your content partners can help you deliver an outstanding experience that would otherwise be impossible. Chris Michael deployed this strategy to great effect at Plenty:
“When it comes to creating posts, I’m a team of one as an internal communicator; however, over the past six months, we’ve worked to build our author community: The Inside Plenty Insiders. It’s a mix of representatives from different beats across the organization.”
The People team needs a trustworthy source of truth.
Your intranet can provide that, and much more.
HR and People Operations teams need an accessible, un-missable, trustworthy source of truth that is easy to maintain. Your intranet needs magnetic content. This is already the foundation for a great partnership.
While the employee handbook, PTO policy, and important announcements like open enrollment might not scream edge-of-your-seat excitement, they are the sort of mission-critical content that reliably draws in users from across the organization.
Even though the content People teams share is crucial, sometimes it lacks visibility, whether that’s through a lack of exposure, or a lack of searchability, or both.
Without a strong foundation of governance in place, it becomes even more difficult to connect the workforce with those resources. Your intranet can provide a reliable way to manage and promote important resources to the appropriate audiences.
Must-Read Resources
Some HR resources and announcements are so important, you need a way to confirm who drafted them, and who has seen and acknowledged them. If your intranet has tools like content certification, analytics, and read receipts, this can be tremendously helpful for the people team.
As your intranet becomes the hub for critical documents and resources, it naturally gains more traction, and your collaborative partnership with the People team deepens.
If all the people team cared about was documents and compliance, you’d already have the scaffolding for a great partnership established, but there’s another key way your intranet can add shared value.
Onboarding and Introductions
People teams also need a way to bring new members of the organization up to speed, and help them build the interpersonal connections that will be the foundation of their best work. This is a key area where your intranet can lend a hand, and build on the teamwork you’ve already established.
Andrea Larsen, Director of People Operations at LOVB uses their team's intranet to help bring new people into the fold and streamline their onboarding experience.
“Something I highlight when I’m doing orientation for new hires is the directory, the employee map, and the org chart. Those features make Haystack such a valuable resource and reference, because new hires are not only able to quickly put faces to names—they’re also able to click into someone’s bio and learn that they train quarter horses, that they love to read, or that they’re an Excel expert.
Having all those things in one place, in addition to being able to locate people on the map and see their time zone is really valuable.”
Showcasing Recognition
Shoutouts, birthdays, and anniversary celebrations are all great ways to build value for the People team with your intranet. There are few things more magnetic than being recognized for great work.
As Curative’s Joan Phan explains, bringing recognition into their intranet not only makes it more visible and easier to give, it also offers the opportunity to tie it to organizational values.
"We’re also using Haystack to encourage more employee recognition. I like how we’re able to associate our organizational values with the recognition we give. Haystack continues to be a critical tool for accomplishing that."
Executive leadership needs impact and insight.
A good intranet can deliver both.
As culture leaders, the executive leadership team sets the example for the rest of the organization. When they’re excited about your intranet—when they really use it frequently, and for important things—the chances of long-term success skyrocket.
One of the best ways to earn their engagement is to provide a secure, direct line to the entire workforce, and a way to measure impact.
Asynchronous Address
It’s important to be able to speak to the team directly, but in organizations with employees across multiple time zones, or even continents, that isn’t always possible to do synchronously. You can team up with your colleagues in the C-Suite to deliver asynchronous video addresses that still encourage conversation through comments and reactions.
Several Haystack customers use this strategy.
JD Norton shared why this works for Thumbtack: "Our CEO will publish a story where people can react, and leave comments. You can’t really do that with email.”
Katie Burkhart shared this about her strategy at Life Link III: "If our CEO shares a program update and you’ve got a question, you can just ask away. When you don’t support those conversations, you can end up with communication breakdowns."
Read Life Link III's story -->
Fostering Transparency
In many cases, executives seek transparency, but without a secure venue, they’re not empowered to share some information—even if it might be helpful.
An intranet can provide that for your executive team. You get magnetic content that is valuable for everyone in the organization, and they get a way to share it securely, and broadly across the workforce.
Jack Randall shares an example of this strategy in action at OpenStore:
“After our board meetings, our CEO and executive team walk through the same, unedited slides exactly as they did in the board meeting. We also share questions and feedback that the Board members wanted to dive deeper into. After our weekly All Hands meetings, we make the slides and recording available on Haystack, so that people who missed it can get up to speed."
Quantifying Value
Analytics can be an immensely powerful way for your intranet to quantify its own value, but also to provide objective measures in other key areas. For example, polling employees on important topics that impact them, or gauging their feedback on major announcements.
With a modern intranet, it’s easy to measure things like readership and engagement on announcements, or town hall attendance.
Mickey DeJong shared this about her strategy at Ally Logistics:
“A big concern for leadership before Haystack was whether or not people were reading or receiving important communications. Now we can see exactly how many people have logged in and seen a message, and resend it to the people who haven’t seen it. Being able to follow up and keep a pulse on our organization has been really helpful.”
End users want something that works.
And that’s surprisingly uncommon.
End users are another key player on the team, and perhaps the most important, because if they don’t use the intranet consistently, it may as well not exist. You can have all the cross-departmental collaboration and teamwork you want, but without the broader group of end-users on your team, it will be difficult to gain traction.
There are a few core factors end users care about, regardless of what type of organization they work in.
Accessible Anywhere
Work rarely happens in one place anymore, so In-office, deskless, remote, and hybrid employees all need a solid mobile experience. The easier and more convenient it is for them to interact with the system, the more likely they are to do that.
As Lily Jackson explains, it’s just as important for Riviera Utilities workers out in the field to be connected, and a solid mobile experience makes all the difference.
“Mobile has been really helpful to us. All of our trucks are equipped with an iPad, so even if people don’t have a company phone, they can still access Tailgate.”
Read Riviera Utilities' Story -->
Efficient and Easy to Use
Having an intranet with mobile access is helpful, but if the underlying experience is poor, it doesn’t matter how many surfaces you can provide. Not only that, if you’re working to establish usage habits and engagement across those key departmental partners, a poor user experience will be a major hindrance.
Try getting the people team to host documents people can’t find through search, or the CEO to deliver a video presentation that doesn’t load for half the team, and see how long it takes before your partnership breaks down.
Andrew Callahan perfectly summed up how this works at 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 →
Christin Hynson explained how important ease of use is to content creation, and building a company-wide content team at InfluxData:
“I’m a fan of how easy it is to create content in Haystack. We don’t have to train anyone,” and “It’s so intuitive, you can just add people, and they can create content immediately.”
Customer Success dedicated to your wins
Because when your wins are our wins.
At Haystack, we’re fortunate to have an incredibly dedicated customer success team who will stop at nothing short of their customers’ wild success.
While they have deep expertise in the Haystack platform, they’re also excellent strategists who have helped hundreds of organizations craft and execute winning intranet strategies.
Turning it back to you
Are there any aspects of teamwork we missed? There really is no limit to the amount of teamwork and partnerships you can establish.
What opportunities for teamwork do you see in your own organization? Even if you are a comms team of one, your intranet success team is larger than you think.
Whether you’re already an intranet expert, or you’re just beginning your journey to a better digital employee experience, we hope this resource will help you earn buy-in and engagement from your colleagues across the organization.
