When was the last time you felt genuinely excited to use your company intranet? If you can’t remember, you’re not alone. Most intranets today serve as digital graveyards for HR policies and forgotten announcements. They remain static, cumbersome, and completely forgettable.
The Adoption Paradox
Traditional intranets consistently fail because organizations treat them as top-down information dumps rather than dynamic spaces that serve employee needs. Consequently, adoption rates plummet. According to Microsoft’s Workplace Analytics data, companies with poor digital workplace experiences see 45% lower employee engagement scores. When employees find an intranet difficult to navigate, slow to load, and irrelevant to their daily tasks, they simply stop using it. This creates a vicious cycle: low engagement leads to stale content, which then causes even lower engagement. Ultimately, your SharePoint investment becomes a cost center rather than the vibrant digital heart of your organization.
Redefining the Digital Workplace
The transformation begins with a crucial mindset shift: stop building an intranet and start cultivating a Digital Workplace Experience. This goes beyond new templates and involves applying user experience (UX) and behavioral design principles to SharePoint. The goal is to evolve from a static repository to a social and collaborative hub that employees genuinely find indispensable.
The secret doesn’t lie in a hidden SharePoint feature but rather in a design philosophy focused on frictionless interaction and genuine value.
Building an Intranet People Actually Use
So, how do you build an intranet that people love? It comes down to three core principles:
Design for the “Water Cooler Moment”
Integrate social features like Viva Engage communities directly into your homepage. Display recent conversations, praise feeds, and project updates. When employees see a vibrant community of peers, they naturally feel drawn to participate. This approach creates the “social pull” that mandatory announcements can never achieve.
Create Frictionless Findability
Employees typically visit an intranet with specific goals: finding a form, locating an expert, or checking a policy. Implement a powerful, AI-enhanced search experience that understands natural language. Use mega-menus and personalized “My Sites” to ensure the most relevant links, people, and documents remain never more than two clicks away.
Build a Central Operations Hub
An intranet should serve as the launchpad for the workday, not another isolated silo. Transform your intranet into a “single pane of glass” by embedding Power BI reports, Power Apps for common requests, and live Microsoft Teams channels. When employees can accomplish their work without switching between multiple tabs, the intranet becomes the central nervous system of productivity.
From Information to Experience
You don’t measure a successful SharePoint intranet by how much content it contains, but by how often and how willingly your employees use it. By focusing on social connection, intuitive design, and deep integration, you can transform your SharePoint environment from a static page into a dynamic platform that fuels culture, collaboration, and productivity.
The future of the intranet moves beyond simple information sharing—it’s about creating meaningful experiences.
