Conducting a staff intranet questionnaire is crucial to gaining a comprehensive understanding about how your staff feel about your intranet, along with its strengths and weaknesses.
As the organisation’s central knowledge sharing, employee engagement and collaboration tool, you need to know just how effective it is in the eyes of its users.
While consulting intranet usage analytics will reveal lots of useful quantitative data about how employees use the intranet every day – unique page visits, bounce rates, time spent on certain pages, etc. – this data does not provide a true understanding of why certain pages or tools are more popular or useful than others, or where employees are becoming frustrated.
The only way to acquire this hugely valuable qualitative data is to extract it directly from your employees via regular staff intranet questionnaires or surveys.
This is critical to the long-term and ongoing success of your employee intranet.
Many organisations make the mistake of viewing the company intranet as a one-and-done project that ends as soon as it’s launched. However, companies that have the most success with their intranet have processes in place for review and development to constantly evaluate intranet performance.
Staff intranet questionnaires are designed to garner this information, which the organisation then uses to prioritise new features, content and fixes, supporting a process of continuous improvement for the company intranet.
The importance of garnering employee feedback – and acting on it
Whilst businesses of all sizes say they value employee feedback, many lack the capacity or resolve to actually capture or act on it.
According to Gallagher’s State of the Sector 2022 report, a global survey that seeks to measure the state of the internal communication and employee engagement landscape, the vast majority of organisations (88%) agree that their company values employee feedback, but are significantly less positive about their company’s ability to act on or capture this feedback (64% and 47% respectively).
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This is concerning – especially when it comes to the performance of a tool as central to employee engagement and communication as the company intranet.
Saying you “value” employee feedback, yet doing nothing to garner or act upon it, risks damaging employee morale and engagement – which indeed was found to be the top organisational challenge in this year’s survey.
(Image source: ajg.com)
The good news is that conducting an intranet satisfaction survey with your employees is a cheap, fast and efficient way to get valuable qualitative data on how you can improve the company intranet.
Below we offer some top tips on how to construct a staff intranet questionnaire to help you get the insights you need to continuously improve your intranet and keep employee engagement thriving.
How to construct a staff questionnaire on your intranet
Define your intranet’s purpose
When creating a staff intranet questionnaire, it’s important that you are clear from the outset on the purpose of your company intranet.
What are the business objectives you need your intranet to achieve?
It’s important to ask yourself this question before you start constructing further questions for your staff to answer. The reason is that you need to fully understand what your intranet is for, so you can align your survey questions with its overarching business purpose.
For example, many organisations deploy an intranet with the following business objectives in mind:
- Improve employee engagement initiatives
- Improve company culture
- Improve knowledge access and sharing
- Improve employee communication and collaboration
- Facilitate remote/hybrid working environments
- Streamline specific business processes
These, or whatever more specific business objectives you have for the company intranet, are the factors that your staff intranet questionnaire should aim to measure. This means your questions should be designed to unearth the details that reveal whether a certain objective is being met, or if there are gaps to address.
For example, if the core purpose of your intranet is to streamline business processes, you need to be clear on precisely what those processes are so you can ask more questions about whether the intranet improves or impairs them, rather than questions about employees’ general experience with the intranet.
What your intranet satisfaction survey should cover
You will need to cover a few key areas in your questionnaire. These include:
- Demographics – Who are your intranet users, where are they located and to what team/department do they belong?
- Intranet usage – Though your analytics will provide data on how many people are using the intranet, which tools they’re using, which pages they’re visiting, etc., it’s nonetheless useful to measure self-reported information on how staff perceive they’re using the intranet, as this may differ from the facts.
- Intranet usability – You need to know how employees feel about the performance and speed of the intranet, as this may affect their overall satisfaction and engagement with the tool. In addition, you need to know whether employees can use the intranet’s features – because if they can’t, they may as well not be there at all.
- Content – Which pages, newsfeeds, announcements and other content do your employees rely on the most, and least? Why?
- Applications – The company intranet is the hub of all business tools and applications – or at least it should be. Is everything working correctly and are they all useful for your employees?
The final piece of advice before we look at some sample intranet survey questions is to keep the questionnaire as short as you can to respect employee schedules, and to use a four- or five-point scoring system that rates your main questions on a scale from positive to negative – and then ask employees to provide details in their own words.
Sample intranet survey questions
The following are questions to consider for inclusion when constructing your staff intranet questionnaire. The list is by no means exhaustive or a tried and tested template – each intranet is unique to each company, after all. What we hope to provide, however, are some useful ideas to get you started.
Demographic questions
- In which department do you work?
- What is your job position level?
- What is your primary job location (i.e., office, home, field)
How often do you use the company intranet?
- Several times a day
- Once a day
- Once a week
- Rarely/never
- In your own words, what, if anything, would encourage you to use the intranet more?
How useful is the intranet as a tool to collaborate with your colleagues?
- Critical
- Very useful
- Somewhat useful
- No use at all
- In your own words, in what way could the intranet be improved to promote better communication and collaboration between colleagues?
How useful is the intranet in helping you find documents/information/forms needed for your work?
- Critical
- Very useful
- Somewhat useful
- No use at all
- In your own words, in what way could the intranet be improved to facilitate better knowledge access and discovery?
How helpful is the intranet in building a sense of community and connection with co-workers?
- Essential
- Very helpful
- Somewhat helpful
- Unhelpful
- In your own words, what corporate social networking tools/features do you use the most? In what way could they be improved?
Final thoughts on staff intranet questionnaires
The questions you ask in your staff intranet questionnaire should link directly to your intranet business objectives.
The survey should reveal insights about your intranet’s success as a collaboration and knowledge discovery tool, as well as the level of employee engagement with the digital workplace.
Once you have your results, you need to act on them. This may mean optimising existing features and content, introducing new features and new content, or it may simply mean putting staff through training programmes to help them get the most value from the company intranet.
Whatever scenario the survey reveals to be the most appropriate course of action, the overarching goal is the same – an ever-improving company intranet built for the needs of its users.
