Monitoring intranet performance is critical to its success and establishing the value of digital workplace solutions to your employees. However, intranet metrics rarely come with hard and fast rules, or present a one-size-fits-all solution to measuring the effectiveness of your intranet.
The business case for developing a robust set of intranet metrics and KPIs is straightforward – by demonstrating your intranet’s effectiveness, you improve the likelihood that senior management will continue to invest in it.
But on a more fundamental level, the time spent unlocking valuable insights into intranet performance will motivate intranet users to optimise parts of the system they’re responsible for, driving forward a culture that feeds on continuous improvement.
Therefore, an essential component of intranet management is to introduce the software alongside an intranet analytics plan of action, and that you start monitoring performance from day one.
Deciding what you will measure is critical to determining the progress of your intranet platform over time.
It’s important that you focus on a range of metrics to develop a complete picture of how your company intranet is performing, including employee engagement levels, intranet content readership, and overall productivity.
Here are the intranet metrics you should be measuring to assess the health of your system:
Whether you use built-in or third party metrics – such as Google Analytics – you need to establish simple usage metrics including unique visits, intranet user numbers, bounce rate, and average time spent on your intranet.
Take the time to understand the context of these statistics. For example, are visitor numbers artificially high because your intranet homepage autoloads each visit?
You can easily measure how many staff are accessing your intranet. But how many are actively engaged with intranet content and internal communications posts?
Measuring employee engagement is one of the key intranet metrics to monitor, because it will help you understand if you have a successful intranet.
Track elements that indicate engaged users such as number of shares and comments, participation rates, user generated content, and completed employee profiles to gain valuable insights into your organisational culture.
Collecting feedback is an important part of ongoing intranet management, because it gives you meaningful, qualitative data into what your teams think about your intranet platform. This is especially true for your remote workers, who rely on digital workplace technology to get their work done and communicate with their coworkers from afar.
Share regular employee satisfaction surveys to capture feedback, and use polls and user ratings to get immediate reactions into specific areas of your intranet. Make sure you promote the polls and surveys on your internal social media channels too, to increase participation.
One of the primary reasons why organisations will install intranet software is to increase productivity across the business – so it’s an important intranet metric to monitor.
Look at metrics related to productivity, such as task completion rates, number of projects delivered, and SLAs met. This information will be highly valuable when making the business case for investing in your intranet software, because it shows how the system reduces business costs, saves time, and improves efficiency.
Numbers alone can’t deliver a true picture of the success, efficiency, and impact of your intranet. Adding context with narrative and anecdotal elements is more illustrative and relatable than statistics alone. Likewise, long term trends are more useful than absolutes, so take a deep dive into your data to pinpoint the underlying trends across a range of datasets.
In order for your data to deliver real value to your organisation, integrate your intranet analytics as part of a wider and ongoing formal review process. Optimising your intranet using metric and benchmarking data can deliver the kind of deep and powerful insights that help your intranet either fail fast or deliver faster.
Planning what you measure, and how and when you measure, is ultimately of no value if you don’t act on what you find. Using metrics and data analysis can prove the business case for further improvement or validate previous decisions.
But never run metrics for the sake of measuring – always do it with a view to evaluating and improving the performance of your intranet, your digital workplace, and your organisation as a whole.