An outdated intranet that lacks user-friendliness will inevitably lead to poor user engagement. Ultimately, this can result in more time-consuming internal communications, less knowledge sharing, fewer opportunities for recognition and reward, and even a disjointed workplace culture.
The power of user feedback
Even the sleekest intranet is useless unless it serves a practical purpose for the workforce. And the best way to figure out how to improve is to ask the people who use it daily. Armed with this feedback, you can develop a truly user-centric intranet that meets employees’ needs, encourages growth and knowledge sharing, and naturally nurtures a sense of community within the company.
An end-user feedback survey can be a quick and effortless way for busy employees to provide their views. It is fully customizable, allowing you to focus on the areas relevant to your company. For example, your feedback survey might cover how satisfied employees are with the current intranet or concentrate on a specific area of interest like user-friendliness or sense of community.
Crafting your end-user feedback survey
Putting some thought into crafting your survey will help you get the most from it. The aim is to develop a succinct survey that gathers as much helpful information as possible. Keeping it concise will increase the chances of employee engagement, while also making data analysis quicker and easier.
Define survey objectives
Before developing your survey questions, consider what knowledge you want to gain from the exercise. If you are struggling to define a clear objective for your survey, go back to the drawing board and ask yourself what the primary purpose of your company’s intranet is. This can vary from one business to the next.
For example, your intranet’s primary purpose might be:
- To make internal communication more efficient and boost organizational clarity, reducing the need for emails and meetings.
- To create an uplifting shared space for employees where their hard work can be recognized and rewarded.
- To reinforce the company’s core brand, mission, and values.
For example, if your intranet’s main purpose is to facilitate easy internal communication, your survey’s objective might be to discover which collaboration features employees find useful (or don’t) and gather suggestions on how to improve them.
Develop compelling questions
Once you have a clear objective, you can build questions around it. Keep your survey as concise as possible; research by Customer Thermometer found that only 9% of people take the time to answer long surveys thoughtfully, and 70% of people have abandoned a survey before completing it.
This phenomenon, known as ‘survey fatigue,’ can be a real issue when a survey is too long. The longer a survey gets, the higher the risk of respondents getting bored or distracted. As a rule, try to incorporate everything in no more than ten questions (the sweet spot is often four to six core questions). To get the most accurate data from a quick survey, it’s also important to keep individual questions simple and easy to decipher.
You might do this by:
- Using a consistent rating scale for each question.4 (e.g., sticking to a 5-point scale).
- Using plain language and short sentences free from unnecessary jargon (e.g., how important would you say the intranet is for your productivity?)
- Adding open-ended questions that allow employees to make any additional comments (e.g., Is there anything else you’d like us to know?) eliminates the need to cover every minute detail in separate survey questions, allowing you to focus on the survey’s core objective.
Intranet survey template
To understand how well your current intranet is serving your employees and identify areas for improvement, consider incorporating the following questions into your end-user feedback survey. This will provide valuable insights into user behavior, needs, and frustrations, ultimately helping you design an intranet that is utilized, informative, and fosters a sense of connection within your organization.
Intranet feedback questions
- How often do you use the intranet?
- More than once a day
- Once a day
- 2-3 times a week
- Once a week
- Less than once a week
- How easy is the intranet to use?
- Very difficult
- Difficult
- Neutral
- Easy
- Very easy
- Rank the following intranet features in order of how useful you think you’d find them:
- AI assistant
- Social timeline
- Anniversaries and birthdays
- Q&A
- Mobile app
- What other new features would you like to see on the intranet?
- Open-ended text response
- Having been introduced to both options, would you rather stay with our current intranet vendor, or move to (vendor name)?
- Stick with (current vendor name)
- Move to (potential new vendor name)
Analyzing and using the data
Survey data can be used to inform decisions and guide budget allocations to the right areas of your company’s intranet. Depending on the questions you choose to include, you may be left with a combination of quantitative (numerical) and qualitative (written) data.
Each type of data has a unique value:
- Quantitative data can easily be visually presented in graphs and charts, allowing you to track progress and fluctuations over time accurately.
- Qualitative data provides added depth, allowing respondents to explain why they hold a certain opinion without any constraints. Qualitative data can also be analyzed to discover trends and themes; it just takes a little longer and is more open to interpretation.
Using survey data to inform decisions
Once you have collected your survey data, there’s a lot you can do with it. For example, you might analyze qualitative responses to find out which areas your employees think need improving or organize quantitative rankings to determine which new features they want to see. These data can then be used to make informed, strategic alterations to the intranet that will enhance the user experience. Satisfaction can be surveyed again in the future to help you reflect on whether these improvements have had the desired effect.
Using survey data to inform decisions goes far beyond simply making tweaks to your current intranet. While identifying areas for improvement and prioritizing desired features are valuable exercises, the data you gather can be a powerful tool for advocating for a complete overhaul.
Here’s how:
- Quantify pain points: Survey results can translate employee frustrations into concrete data. Showcasing low satisfaction scores or a high volume of negative qualitative responses regarding specific aspects of the intranet strengthens your case for a more comprehensive solution.
- Demonstrate demand for change: By analyzing quantitative data like feature rankings, you can demonstrate a clear need for new functionalities. This data provides objective evidence that employees are seeking a more robust platform.
- Build consensus and buy-In: Sharing the survey results with relevant stakeholders fosters transparency and allows everyone to see the value of a new intranet. Employees feel heard, and management gains a clearer understanding of user needs.
In essence, your intranet survey becomes a springboard for building a strong case for a new and improved platform. By leveraging data and employee feedback, you can champion a solution that demonstrably addresses current shortcomings and aligns with user expectations.
Use percentages to track trends
It’s worth noting that if you’re tracking trends and changes over time, relying on frequencies can be misleading; it’s much more accurate to use percentages, especially if the company is large with an expanding workforce. Calculating what percentage of the total respondents selected a certain response means changes in sample size won’t affect the accuracy of your data.
For example:
One year, 200 of 1000 employees at a company said they used the intranet ‘more than once a day’, meaning that 20% of the workforce selected this response. The following year, the workforce had increased by 500 employees. Internal communications managers were pleased to see that the number of employees who used the intranet ‘more than once a day’ had risen to 250. However, when taken as a percentage of the total workforce (1500), this means only around 16.6% selected this response. So, proportionally, intranet use had in fact, decreased.
The bottom line
A company’s intranet can be a hub for inspiration, knowledge sharing, and effective collaboration between large teams. It can connect multiple offices with remote and hybrid employees for a more united workforce while reinforcing a brand’s mission and core values. Gathering user feedback is an excellent way to inform targeted improvements while showing employees that their opinions are valued.
When creating a survey, remember to set clear objectives, include quantitative and open-ended qualitative questions for a varied dataset, and analyze data carefully using percentage calculations where possible.
These insights you gather from your intranet survey will help you build a case internally for a new or updated intranet. To strengthen your case further, we have created a ready-to-use and personalized presentation that you can deliver to stakeholders. Add data from your survey to build an even stronger argument. Download the intranet presentation.