Intranet vs Email

Hi everyone

This is my last post and tomorrow, I’ll hand in my very last university assignment! As you can probably tell, I’m very excited!

My report is done and dusted now, and as I flicked through the final copy I looked through the recommendations I put forward to the Department for Communities. The one I hope the Department takes seriously is in regards to their employee intranet, and in particular doing an audit of the system.

Internal communications made up a large part of my placement, and in particular writing articles for the employee intranet, or ‘News of the Day’ as it is commonly referred to. Although I found the writing aspect of these articles great, as it gave me the opportunity to express my creative writing skills, it was also quite tedious and I questioned whether employees actually looked at the main page of the intranet.

Although we posted information about important issues including upcoming events and employee deadlines, I still felt that in some instances, using email would have been a more appropriate mode of communication. On the home page of the intranet, there is a headline article and three or four older articles with the links to them still available. Although you go through the intranet page to log onto the internet, from my observation employees just clicked straight onto the next page.

My recommendation was to utilise the email system more often, especially when informing employees about issues that are of less importance or alternatively, more urgent. All employees have their inboxes open all day, every day; and best of all they get a pop up informing them that a new email has come through. I believe the Internal Communications employee is more likely to get a more immediate response from employees this way.

Alternatively, if giving up the use of the intranet for certain stories isn’t an acceptable recommendation, I would suggest doing an audit of the system. This could be done with a confidential survey completed by employees of the Department for Communities, whereby they would rate certain intranet criteria. I think this would give the Internal Communications employee more of an idea of what people actually think about the intranet, and therefore what articles would be more appropriate and which ones would not.

Although the Department would probably agree that an audit might be a good idea, allocating time to this task might be the biggest challenge.