Metrics and Tracking From Your Intranet: How Well Do You Know Your Employees?

Your intranet is more than just a tool to help your employees carry out their work each day. It also produces a wealth of data that you can use to gain insight into how your employees act and think. By tracking and analyzing this data, you can better understand your employees and the ways in which they interact with your intranet system.

Here are three metrics that can provide the most valuable information.

1. Content Popularity

The typical company intranet contains huge amounts of content. But do you know which content your employees use most? Which content encourages frequent contribution? And can you quantify “frequent?” Answering these questions can help drive your future content strategy — you’ll be able to produce content that is genuinely useful to as many people as possible.

If your organization is large, you may want to answer these questions for each department individually. In addition, you may find it useful to identify the most frequently used parts of the intranet; these parts may be your company’s most important, and are certainly areas where your IT department should focus on maintenance.

2. Employee Engagement

How well do your employees engage with your intranet system? Do they use it to help them with their daily work, or do they ignore it and find other ways of completing their tasks? These are vital questions for any organization, as the answers can help define whether your intranet is a success or a failure.

In general, the more time people spend using the intranet, the more engaged they are. This isn’t always true, but there is certainly a very strong correlation between time spent on the intranet and engagement. When employees spend more time on the intranet, this suggests they like the platform and find it useful. In contrast, employees who spend very little time on the intranet probably don’t understand how to use it or find it doesn’t meet their needs.

Check how often people log onto the intranet and how long they spend there. Combine these statistics with opinion polls to find out what employees really think of your intranet.

3. Contribution

Traditionally, most content on company intranets has been produced by only 1 percent of employees, while the other 99 percent consume information. However, this top-down method of communication is changing. Good intranet systems today encourage as many people as possible to contribute

Find out how many people are contributing to the conversation on your intranet platform by tracking clicks and comments on posts. You can then show this information to employees via a Wall of Fame listing the top content generators, which could help to encourage people to contribute as much as they can. You might reward the people who have contributed most in each month or quarter to boost their motivation to share.

Final Thought

Tracking and analytics are critical but often overlooked features of intranet platforms. If you have previously ignored the vast amounts of data that your intranet is generating, now could be the perfect time to get to know your employees better.

Topics: Uncategorized
Daniel Cohen-Dumani

Daniel Cohen-Dumani a Partner and Market Leader of Microsoft Solutions and Services at Withum. He has more than 20 years of experience in the field of computer science and software development. He is a frequent speaker at SharePoint conferences and user groups, and a recognized SharePoint and Office 365 subject matter expert.