Don’t Let Your Intranet and Employee Experience Platform Compete for Attention

Last month I wrote about the state of the intranet industry in 2022 and concluded:

“The entire‘ Employee Experience ’(EX) territory is in tug-of-love between HR Management Systems vendors, Employee Services platforms and Digital Workplace specialists. The ‘big intranet’ is at the heart of it, and companies need to work hard to develop cross-functional insights that deliver the best for their employees. “

This seems to reflect many practitioners who feel the tension between their intranet vision and the ambitions of employee self-service functions, specifically HR, IT and Facilities. I think there is no general solution to the problem. However, intranet owners (especially in Internal Communications) would do well to anticipate areas where decisions made by partner functions will have an impact, which I will explore below.

Employee Experience Platforms are Not Intranets

There was a time when the must-have phrase of any intranet vision was that it had to be a ‘one-stop shop.’ I don’t think I saw that delivered, but its appeal as the default place to go for news, information and services is very strong.

At the same time, HR software vendors (sometimes also labeled HCM or even ERP) are promoting the ideal of an ‘employee service portal’ and you guessed it, that too is meant to be a ‘one-stop shop. ‘ If we didn’t really need a one-stop shop, we certainly didn’t need two!

Both trends try to address a fragmentation issue, whether for information or where to go for services, clearly a useful goal. The problem is – and remains – that no single platform is good at managing content and services. What we found in researching my company’s recent Intranet and Employee Experience Platform report is that the lines are starting to blur.

Big players like ServiceNow, SAP Success Factors, BMC Helix, UKG and Workday are trying to do more about internal communications, notifications and reference content publishing. Intranet-rooted leaders such as Akumina, Unily, LumApps and Microsoft Viva are the opposite of offering ways to integrate transactions alongside content publishing. However, since budgets and greater influence seem to depend on HR, a service -first mindset seems to be taking more action, and this is sounding alarms for internal communicators.

Related article: The Myth of the Digital Workplace Hub

How EX Plans Affect Intranet Vision

If you’re going to a discussion about the role of an intranet in a company that has plans to recreate the employee experience, it’s good to expect that the following may be affected:

1. Search. The intranet and enterprise search platforms are often closely related. If nothing else, the search box is usually visible via the intranet homepage. Adding in other EX systems can break the delivery of an overall search unless you take steps to still index all content. For example, answers previously published in an ‘employee handbook’ section of the intranet can be transferred to ServiceNow’s knowledge base.
2. Reference Content. Often our policies relate to rules in transactional systems, such as limits on cost claims. It’s a good thing if an employee can get all the context they need to complete a form from context help. But sometimes people also want to see ‘all policies on working with external suppliers,’ so you have to keep the same.
3. Traffic on a communication channel. Intranets often work well as a news channel not because people are motivated to go there to read news, but because you can get an employee’s attention on their way to finish another task. If you remove part of the services, you may reduce your ability to communicate.
4. Branding. Intranets are a great way for companies to express their brand internally. In a hybrid-working world, this digital presence is even more important, but the ability to brand EX platforms is likely to be somewhat limited.
5. Usage tracking. Just as search risks are segmented, an EX strategy needs to consider how analytics remains coherent-for example, whether HR ads will be removed from an intranet and made only through a single platform. EX, can you still track engagement or the success of a campaign?
6. Management. Broadcasters, especially for large organizations, often have standards for page layouts, imagery, content analysis and expiration dates. They do everything for a channel that employees feel they can trust. Make sure EX vision maintains this capability.

Related Article: What Does M&A Mean in the Employee Communications App Market for Communications Pros

Developing a Collective Perspective

Primarily, the desire to deliver a simple, easy -to -use set of tools for employees is something to celebrate. But there is always a risk that each support function is digging around ‘their’ vision of the employee experience. Instead, try to approach it as a combined design challenge: get agreement on the EX roll out principles for the overlap points listed above, and then learn how to adhere to those principles.

If stakeholders immediately switch to bidding on features, chances are high that the result will be a long list of ‘must haves’ and – ironically – what employees are experiencing will be a solution that is more complex and separate than to where you started.