Best practices for successful intranets at multi-location companies

The best intranet platforms are far more than just a repository for people to figure out what days off they have this year and details on their health insurance plan. They function as places for internal communicators to post content that supports strong company culture that can span wide distances.

Dispersed organizations, especially those with offices in multiple states or countries, can benefit from an organized intranet strategy that showcases individuality within different parts of the company, but marries that with a unified sense of company identity.

Karen Testa, director of global communications at Bell Flight, told Ragan that her company uses its intranet platform as a way to bring together its offices across the world and showcasing culture sharing under the company’s banner. She added that the comms team works intentionally to ensure that the intranet serves as a place for employees to not only get important organizational news, but also to see what their international colleagues are up to.

“While our headquarters and the majority of our employees live in the United States, it’s still important to highlight the efforts of our international teams,” said Testa. “We use our intranet as a unifier.”

Best practices for a successful multi-location intranet

Testa gave Ragan several recommendations for a successful cross cultural intranet platform. They included:

• Make it interactive. Blog posts and pictures are great, but when people can participate in the content themselves, there’s a little more incentive for them to click and stay — regardless of where they are. It can even be an educational opportunity to teach employees about far-flung parts of the business. “We did weekly quizzes during Safety Month and a 90th Anniversary quiz to test employees’ knowledge,” Testa said. “Those have been very successful.”
• Updates from HQ are great, but don’t overdo it. There’s undoubtedly a lot of important news and employee initiatives that come out of a company’s home base. But internal comms pros need to remember that when you want to cultivate a sense of unity via the intranet, spread the love around and feature multiple offices regularly rather than just primarily using HQ and sprinkling in others. A content calendar can help create the proper cadence. “Be inclusive in stories about people to feature global locations and non-U.S. news,” Testa said. “Just because we are headquartered in Texas does not mean news doesn’t happen in other places.”
• Find the right people to translate your message when needed. Many international companies will need to translate their messages from one language to another for maximum impact. Testa recommended that internal communicators have translators they trust on deck to help get the job done. This can be the difference between fostering invaluable trust across a company and getting a message garbled by lackluster translation. “On confidential or quick turn announcements, we use our own employees in Canada to ensure that messaging for non-English speaking readers and viewers is accurate and will resonate,” Testa said.
• Special commemorations can help unify people. Special events like company anniversaries or holiday celebrations are great ways to showcase how different locations in the same company can rally around a single focal point. In 2025, Bell Flight celebrated its 90th anniversary. The comms team wanted to make sure it was an event that each office of the company could share in, no matter its location. “This was a great opportunity for us to bring our teams together in a united celebration,” Testa said. Some of the initiatives it unrolled on its intranet ahead of the commemoration included:
  • An interactive world map with all Bell Flight’s office locations and a small write-up about each.
  • A call for employees to submit photos on the platform about how their offices and teams were marking the occasion.
  • A post encouraging employees to share their stories of their employment at Bell and what it means to them.

Source: Bell Flight

• Study your locations and tailor your tone for each location. When possible, comms pros should slightly adjust messaging for different office locations, recognizing the cultural differences between them. Testa added that her team did its research on how each office would mark the anniversary and worked to tailor its language accordingly. Testa said that this customization and helps drive engagement no matter where they are. “Educate yourself on each global location’s specific work and their previous accomplishments,” she said. “Tailor your messaging to include language that highlights their work and wins.”

Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications. In his spare time he enjoys Philly sports and hosting trivia.