A lot of time is spent on planning and designing your intranet, however intranet training is also an important aspect to a successful intranet rollout.
You may have held some internal meetings, completed several demonstrations with different vendors and evaluated many options. Now you have committed to an intranet platform and are ready to launch!
But first, you need to add your content to attract the employees to the site. To do this successfully, you need to organize a team and plan a strategy for administrating the site and for preparing the end users (employees) to use the new tool effectively. Unfortunately, you can’t just hop to cut the cake at the launch party if you want your intranet to have a successful launch and early adoption.
So where do you start?
Set Roles
The first step should be to set roles within your intranet team. Of course this will vary from company to company, depending on their size and needs. But you should still clearly define who will be the global administrator to the site. This includes: section/department administrators, and content producers (users adding/managing content.) This way everyone has ownership of their responsibility on the site and know who to go to when they need help or need to fix an issue.
Another important role to define is who will be delivering the intranet training to the end-users, and who can they go to for their inquiries. This can be a team of admins, or just one person responsible for helping out the employees get accustomed to the software. You will also want your site to look attractive, so you should have a person or team in charge of the site’s overall design as well.
Define Expectations
For each of these roles, they should have clearly defined expectations. This may include:
- Deadlines for creating or migrating your new content for Content Creators or Editors
- Training the end users and others who will be writing content
- To know who to report to and who should deal with questions and feedback
- To know who is in charge of future development and manage good practice
- If you self host, the expectations from your IT team to maintain the intranet
Intranet governance is very important and will include more expectations than listed here, but just to give you a brief review of what you should prepare for a successful launch. Depending on the size and needs of your organization, these roles could be assigned to one or few people, or spread across many in a team.
Training End Users
In order for your Intranet team to be able to meet the above expectations, they will need to be trained. If you are purchasing an intranet platform through a SaaS vendor, they will likely provide intranet training as part of their set up service to get your administrators comfortable with the new tool. This could include a live demonstration, in-house training or web videos.
You will then need to set up and plan for training your employees on the basics of using the intranet (logging in, managing profile, searching for content, sharing etc) and/or other tasks such as uploading content or creating their own content.
We have previously discussed 3 Approaches to Intranet Training that could also help you plan what training method would be best for you and your organization.
Q&A Session and Feedback
Regardless of what method of intranet training you choose to use for your new users, it’s important to continuously touch base with these users to gather feedback and answer questions. You can utilize Noodle’s Question Manager to gather these questions online and save them on the intranet so other users can search and find their own answers.
You can also hold bi-weekly or monthly team huddles to gather feedback for each department or group as to what they think could be improved or what kind of content they would feel is valuable to them. Create a Database form on your intranet to collect feedback and suggestion for users if you are unable to meet in person, or have users that work remotely or in different locations.
Time to Launch
Now everyone is ready to perform their roles and the end users are informed and excited to use your new Intranet portal. The next step will be to plan your intranet launch event. But remember, the learning never stops. So continue to provide learning resources so your users have a resource to look to for information, and to help prepare future new employees to easily adapt to the intranet.