8 Intranet Design Examples Guaranteed to Inspire Your Employees

Is your intranet design in need of an overhaul? Are dry, information-overloaded and text-heavy intranet homepages killing your user engagement? Look no further. These intranet design examples are guaranteed to wow.

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Great design is a language everyone can understand.

Design has the power to capture our attentions and spark our imaginations. It can translate the complicated or mundane into something simple and engaging. It can move us to action and improve productivity. It can trigger our emotions and alter our perspectives.

However, it can also be one of the biggest challenges of any project.

When it comes to intranet design, the stakes are high. Well-executed design can mean the difference between a business-critical tool that users value and engage with and one that sits on the proverbial digital shelf, doomed to die. It is the dividing line between adoption and abandonment.

With the pressure of delivering a platform for hundreds, if not thousands of users, where do you even start when designing your intranet? Given the subjective nature of design, how do you strike the right note? How do you reconcile different needs, opinions, and tastes?

These intranet design ideas each take a unique business sector, challenge, or need: and translate that into impactful intranet homepage designs that combine functionality, content, and aesthetics in perfect harmony.

Whether you’re looking to improve the design of your existing intranet or you’re in the market for a new intranet solution that can realize your vision, these intranet examples will get you inspired.

Manage your dispersed frontline staff: A retail intranet homepage

Frontline staff are the face of your retail brand and responsible for delivering your customer experience. Yet retail employees often feel disengaged on the job. This makes designing an intranet for the retail industry a unique challenge.

How do you manage and motivate employees who may be spread across the country or even the globe? How do you connect those in your distribution centers or out on the road, who may not have easy access to a computer? How do you ensure consistency in service and brand messaging when stores are cut off from HQ?

When it has a design that appeals to everyone, however, a multichannel communications platform can connect staff with all the latest company developments and updates from colleagues in every region.

Connect to the cause: A nonprofit intranet homepage

Working in the nonprofit sector, whether as a paid worker or in a voluntary capacity, can be hugely rewarding and empowering.

Nonprofit employees make up the third-largest workforce in the US. The sector provides 11.4 million jobs and employs 10% of the nation’s population. There are also 63 million volunteers in the US alone.

However, working in this rewarding industry comes with its own set of unique challenges.

Worthy causes can be emotionally taxing to deal with on a daily basis, resulting in higher levels of staff stress, absenteeism, and turnover. With a focus on driving funds towards the cause, nonprofit organizations will also face financial constraints and offer limited training, development, or benefits compared to the private sector.

To overcome those burdens, it’s critical that staff connect to the mission and cause they’re working for.

Research on volunteer motivations shows that 40% of people who volunteer are driven by the desire to improve things and help people, and 32% do so because the cause is important to them. Sharing of stories and successes, alongside with access to best practices, compliance and regulatory requirements, are all vital for this audience.

Here’s how an effective intranet design can help:

• Sharing stories: a high-impact hero banner for news and the use of employee-generated content such as blogs all help staff and volunteers share experiences and get inspired by the cause they’re working for.
• Rewards and recognition: the power and impact of employee recognition is huge. A rewards widget that enables staff to say thanks and recognize the impact and efforts of their peers boosts morale, community, and engagement.  
• Newsfeed of real-time updates: in today’s social media-driven world, cutting through the digital noise can be tough. Using permissions and built-in intelligence, personalized and tailored content can be pushed to users to keep them updated and engaged.
• Strong branding: an internal brand that aligns with the mission and cause can inspire and create a sense of pride, ownership, and connection to the organization.
• Quicklinks and broadcasts: keeping staff and volunteers informed, safe, and compliant is a priority for any nonprofit. Easy quick access to policies, governance, and information, alongside emergency broadcasts for critical updates, are all benefits offered by an effective intranet design.

Nonprofit intranet design in action: Trafford Rape Crisis

“The overwhelming majority of our volunteers juggle their time at TRC alongside their full-time roles elsewhere, so it’s rare that we all get to meet in person. It can also be a difficult cause to work for. (Our intranet) has enabled us to come together in a virtual space to share experiences, to celebrate successes, to gain support and to connect as an organization. We’ve built an entire culture around this virtual workspace. It’s dramatically helped with morale and volunteer attrition.” – Fiaza Mansoor, Center Manager at Trafford Rape Crisis.

Better experiences for frontline staff and better care: A healthcare intranet homepage

The healthcare sector faces a wide range of challenges, from an aging population to the rise of chronic health conditions. This is on top of demands for increased productivity and efficiency, resource constraints, and a call for digital transformation.

Healthcare staff are often diverse in terms of role and location, including roles such as administrative staff, clinicians, hospital-based workers, and community carers.

This healthcare intranet design sets out to connect hard-to-reach workers, promote a patient-led approach to quality care, and push vital information to support every staff member in their role.

• Task-led design gives staff quick access to essential systems such as HR, Payroll, and scheduling, centralizing all their digital tools and applications, with single sign-on making for a more streamlined and efficient process.
• Pulse survey widgets give grassroots staff a voice, helping management to gauge healthcare employee engagement.
• Forums enable the sharing of ideas and best practices, collaborative problem solving, and staff connection outside of departmental silos.
• Signposting design allows the intranet to serve as the hub or gateway into the organizations’ wider digital workplace. Here, HTML widgets push staff to other services and current campaigns.

Healthcare intranet design in action: Piedmont Healthcare

“We challenged ourselves to find the right intranet platform that would deliver the unique destination our employees wanted. Since the launch of The Village, there has been a significant increase in the number of employees who agree or strongly agree that they receive adequate communication about changes happening at Piedmont and the company’s future plans and directions. Based on the results, we hit the mark.” – Kelli Newman, Director of Internal Comms at Piedmont Healthcare

Capturing the power of the visual: A media intranet homepage

Today’s world is dominated by digital noise.

Thanks to advances in social media and technology in general, we are constantly inundated with information, updates, and notifications. Cutting through that noise to capture—and hold—the attention of our employees is a tremendous challenge.

80% of readers only skim online content. However, colorful visuals increase the desire to read content by 80% and our brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text.

For those operating in a creative industry in particular, text-heavy and document-loaded intranets aren’t going to cut it. Engaging with employees requires speaking in a language they’ll understand: harnessing the power of the visual to capture attention, share ideas, and inspire.

This media intranet homepage design delivers impact through:

• A high-impact, full-width hero banner that uses the entire space above the fold to immediately ‘wow’ and grab attention
• Bold use of color in branding and quicklinks
• A minimalist approach to the overall design, with a limited amount of written content and preference given to images as an alternative
• Mixed media including video, images, and HTML widgets to visually promote key intranet content rather than text links
• Signposting with links to the different areas of the business in the footer, the quick links, the HTML widgets and more, the homepage serves as a ‘gateway’ to pull users in before they journey on

Keep it compliant: a financial services intranet homepage  

At the mercy of regulatory requirements, compliance, continual changes in the market, and the complexities posed by international trading, the financial sector has a difficult path to navigate.

Keeping staff informed, therefore, is a top-ranking priority.

Intranet design in this industry should focus on connecting staff to the information and tools they need, enabling them to perform their roles to the best of their abilities. In contrast to the media intranet design example, financial services will need to present more content up front, and looks shouldn’t trump purpose.

This isn’t an excuse to revert to the text-heavy, information-overloaded link lists of the 1990s, however. Here’s how to navigate the fine line between looks and function:

• A modular widget approach to push multiple important news items to users as soon as they open the homepage
• Use of the mandatory read function to ensure important compliance documents are read and acknowledged
• Quicklinks to third-party systems to allow for seamless navigation
• HTML widgets pull in external content—in this instance, a dashboard for real-time stock and share rates
• A mixture of content types including blogs, news, quicklinks, and video, to present information without becoming too text-heavy

Financial services intranet design in action: Travelex

“The Lounge is relied on for everything we do now. It’s easy for staff to access policies, forms, and information that directly affects them. They’re now better informed, and the time saved not relying so much on email we can now devote to customers. The Lounge has drastically reduced workloads for staff as email communications are reduced, forms are more efficient for managing processes, and colleagues are able to independently find information and tools to do their day job by searching on The Lounge and finding what they need in a matter of seconds.” – Tricia Scott, Global Intranet Manager, Travelex

The power of possibility

As these diverse intranet design examples show, the potential and flexibility of design is unlimited.

The same industry sector or even the same brand can be interpreted in a multitude of different ways, depending on the company culture and needs of the organization. It can be practical and useful. It can be striking and awe-inspiring. It can—and should—be utterly unique.

Design is the sum of a multitude of elements, spanning everything from fonts and colors to widgets, layout, menu, and more. When these elements come together in a strategic way, the result can be remarkable, not only in inspiring and engaging employees, but also in delivering a tangible return on the investment of your intranet project.