This is how the National Wildlife Federation knew their new intranet was really working

For a while, employees at the National Wildlife Federation navigated the intranet via the homepage carousel. But that changed after a redesign built on what employees said they actually needed. The top referral source became direct links, including people pasting them into Zoom chats, dropping them into emails and telling each other in meetings to go look on the platform.

“I was the first, and still am, the only full-time internal comms hire,” Alyssa Oshiro, director of internal communications at the National Wildlife Federation, told Ragan. “Before I was here, it was just pieces of everyone else’s time cobbled together without clear ownership.”

The NWF didn’t have written requirements for the intranet, so Oshiro ran the organization’s first internal communications survey and built them from what came back.

“The mobile and the search were the primary things staff requested in December 2021,” she said. “The third was, ‘Please stop sending us so many emails. We are drowning in emails.'”

Instead of building an intranet with a narrow function as a resource hub, Oshiro said that she built it around news, filed by enough different people that there’s usually something new sitting on the homepage.

“There are certain people who go and find it,” she said. “There are the people who are on every day, they find something that delights them, or they find something that’s necessary and they share it accordingly.”

During Ragan’s Internal Communications Conference at Microsoft in Seattle this October 13-15, Oshiro will discuss how communicators can redesign their intranets so employees find what they need faster and come back when it matters.

Track where people are coming from

While adoption numbers show that people are using an intranet, they don’t show how those people got there. Oshiro said she keeps an eye on referral sources instead, A change in how people arrive shows whether the intranet is pulling people in on its own or still relying on where she places content.

“In the first one or two years, it would say most users are finding this piece of content by clicking on the homepage carousel,” Oshiro said. “Now, by far and away, the most popular referral source is by direct link.

She added that she doesn’t need to rely on a dashboard to see a difference.

“We know it’s working because on our Zoom channels and in our emails, people will encourage their colleagues to click on the link to the intranet,” Oshiro said.

What to look for when employees say search doesn’t work

When employees say that they can’t find a piece of content on a platform, it sounds like that’s a platform problem. But Oshiro said that more often than not, the content never made it onto the platform in the first place.

“What I’m constantly being surprised about is what isn’t there,” she said. “Oftentimes I’ll hear, ‘Oh, search doesn’t work, I can’t find that thing.’ And nine times out of 10, it isn’t there. It’s stored in a Dropbox file, it’s stored in an email, it’s stored in a PDF or it’s stored in an Airtable database.”

Oshiro recommended the following steps to keep track of where employees run into trouble finding things on an intranet platform:

• Make note of the request, then answer the question. Identifying patterns in what people ask for can show what’s missing.
• Rank the most frequently asked questions. If there’s a resource lots of people are looking for, that’s a sign to float it to an easy-to-find location.

“What I’ve really learned throughout the course of trying to use the intranet as a hub, as opposed to a dumping ground or another email inbox is that digitally native employees are really used to using an intranet,” she said. “They pick it up quickly, it’s fairly intuitive, they post and they comment.”

Make the intranet a default destination

The intranet can only become a default destination if content is posted there in the first place. Oshiro said that leadership announcements are a common instance of where this breaks down.

“I felt as though in the past, when there was an important announcement, the COO or the CEO would just send an email,” she said. “They would go from their brain to employee inboxes directly. A better way is to do a coordinated effort where you send the email at the same time as it goes up on the intranet.”

An email can handle a message that needs to get out urgently, but an intranet post of an announcement is something that can be referenced weeks later. Oftentimes, leaders reach for email first because they think everyone reads it.

“The misconception about email is that as soon as you send it, everyone reads it,” Oshiro said. “That’s an uphill but worthy battle, to get your C-suite past the assumption that A, your email has been read by everyone and B, your email is relevant to everyone.”

Oshiro doesn’t expect to win that argument quickly.

“Sometimes leaders are in an echo chamber. They default to their own preferences, and their preferences are not identical to everyone’s preferences,” she said. “It’s a cultural challenge, but I also think it’s a worthy one. I’ll continue to advocate for the all-staff experience.”

Sean Devlin is the senior internal communications editor at Ragan Communications. You can connect with him on LinkedIn here.