5 intranets you’ll fall in love with

An intranet may have many different uses and meanings depending on the company’s objectives and principles, but one notion never changes – an intranet is there to help employees.

If your organization is one focused on empowered employees, global collaboration and authentic culture, then it is safe to assume that your intranet directly shapes your employee experience.

While the mission behind an intranet may be similar, no two intranet platforms are the same. Countless hours of research, testing, and innovation go into crafting an intranet that will win over staff and become a valuable resource that they will love. But how can you ensure that your intranet wins over the affections of your organization?

Whether it be with the right features, the best design or strong initiatives, your intranet should result in a successful, inclusive, and engaged culture. Many of our customers showcase the power and potential of an intranet platform and just how valuable it can be to employees.

Here are a few of our top choices for amazing intranets we love:

Travelex “The Lounge”

Isolated workers are an unfortunate reality when it comes to global organizations. Global organization Travelex created their intranet, “The Lounge,” and with it, empowered staff with the information they need to serve customers efficiently and remain informed of happenings across the business.

As a cloud-based platform offering a range of productivity, communication, and collaboration tools, The Lounge provided a solution to serving and connecting a dispersed, globalized workforce. Travelex used The Lounge for its global incentive program. The RPM league has over 100 teams worldwide, each using ‘RPM World’ on the intranet as a hub for the initiative. Content includes a weekly ‘wrap-up’ video posted by the Communications & Performance Innovation Director, an engagement corner, and tips on how Sales consultants can continually improve. The weekly video has become the most popular page on the site, generating more than 11,000 page views every month.

Hosting all this supplementary material makes the lives of employees easier and makes managing processes more efficient.

Why we love it: The Lounge is utilized not just as a business tool, but as an internal communications platform – connecting employees on both a professional and a personal level.

Interact – Travelex Case Study from Interact on Vimeo.

Acorns “Intranut”

When it comes to creating an internal brand, you should look to align with your external brand – but not replicate it.

Remember, you are looking to create a common identity both internally and externally so that your employees believe in and translate those values to your consumers. However, these are brands for different audiences. Keep some familiar elements, but make them distinguishable.

This may be by replicating your brand colors, for example, but giving your intranet a distinct name. We see this demonstrated here by the children’s hospice not-for-profit organization, Acorns.

The external website and organization’s intranet share some common elements, such as brand colors, the use of the ‘brush effect’ around buttons or modules, and the acorn within the logo. However, the font and typography differ in favor of a more fun, informal, and child-like choice. The intranet name also makes a play on the company name combined with ‘intranet,’ and the use of children’s drawing is more prominent, including as button icons on the primary call to actions on the upper right of the homepage. The result is a focus on the purpose and mission of the organization – the children it helps.

Why we love it: With a design meant to engage and capture their audience, Acorns unites employees behind their purpose in a style that personifies their mission.

Houston Zoo “The Watering Hole”

An issue that we often find in organizations is unnecessarily time-consuming tasks. In any office or department, there are bound to be many low-level functions that, while necessary, take away much needed time from your day.

The Houston Zoo took the grievance out of everyday tasks with their intranet, ‘The Watering Hole.’ By making use of “I want to” tabs on their intranet they combated those time draining tasks like booking absences and reserving rooms, ultimately helping workers focus on their core tasks. Kara Masharani, a web developer at the Zoo shares that, “You can click to do routine tasks, from reserving a cart for a visitor, to ordering new business cards, requesting uniforms, or logging a support ticket with the IT team. Completing routine tasks is much faster and easier with Interact, so we can spend more of our time doing what we love: caring for animals and visitors.”

Making processes more efficient by introducing automation is the perfect way to bring together departments like IT and others and present a much-needed element of collaboration.

Why we love it: A leading example of making it quicker, easier and simpler for workers on the move to do what they need and then be encouraged to contribute.

Piedmont “The Village”

Aside from embracing a name that fully embodies the values behind their organization (‘to make a positive difference in every life we touch’), Piedmont’s intranet takes on the full spirit of collaboration with their intranet ‘The Village.’ With their legacy intranet being overhauled with Interact to deliver on the needs of their staff, Piedmont showed off their growth with a launch event. The launch events were both interactive and informative, merging the best features of Interact with their own creativity.

Engagement was high with more than 1,400 employees attendees across the system. Interactive events included free, branded giveaways and prizes such like an IPad or Samsung table as well as games and contests featured on the intranet – crossword puzzles and word searches that explained new features and encouraged employees to create their intranet profiles.

Piedmont also integrated a number of features designed to educate their staff on the navigation and usage of their new intranet. During the launch, Ludwig, their online tour guide, conducted a virtual intranet tour that assisted staff with navigation and allowed them to find answers to common questions using their question bank.

Piedmont also made use of the new features of their intranet with an educational video aimed at instructing their staff on proper intranet behavior. The launch was a success, with a total count of 5,560 unique visits on The Village.

Why we love it: Interactive and educational features during a grand launch successfully engaged a range of medical practitioners, including doctors and a variety of hard-to-reach audiences.

March of Dimes “Dimension”

With remote workers becoming widely accepted in the workplace, organizations must now focus on ways to connect distributed employees and encourage remote collaboration. Non-profit organization March of Dimes masters this with their intranet ‘Dimension.’

Virtual Communities has been a particularly powerful feature for March of Dimes, who often has nurses working in different locations and isolated from the rest of the organization in NICUs (neonatal intensive care units). The virtual community created by their social intranet allows them to share problems and stories in a way that they were unable to before, opening a much-needed line of communication across geographical boundaries.

March of Dimes emphasizes collaboration straight on their homepage with blogs and forums widgets.

They reviewed their intranet? to ensure that it was purposeful in a variety of ways and that their internal communications tools were working for them. They demonstrated how persistent communication is an ongoing process, rather than a “one and done” action.

This online camaraderie has been essential to many March of Dimes’ workers, bringing together front-line workers and providing the support they need.

Why we love it: A fantastic cause coupled with an ease of communication and information sharing embeds a sense of belonging and involvement in all employees, even when they are away from the organization.

These customer examples are a perfect illustration of why it is so easy to fall in love with an intranet. Employees are presented with numerous features that engage them, connect them, and make their everyday lives more comfortable. Successful collaboration can be achieved as long as you have the right tools. It is imperative that your intranet embodies your company mission, values and principles, then it is guaranteed that your employees will have much to gain.