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Monday, January 30

Intranets that don't reflect company

by Toby Ward on Mon 30 Jan 2006 04:18 PM EST

Not all intranets reflect that state of the company - per the suggestion in yesterday's Intranet as a corporate reflection pool . Some do; some don't

I continued the conversation with Jeremy Owyang regarding his recent blog Health Inspectors and Corporate Intranets. Jeremy is largely right: the state of the intranet does say a lot about the company.

There are however some exceptions. I can think of one very, very large, blue chip organization. It has one of the finest intranets on the planet. However, it has a highly bureaucratic and political climate. I’ve had friends and colleagues work at the company and they only lasted a couple of years or less. Employee satisfaction is about 60%. You would think though, by judging the intranet by itself without the benefit of other outside influences, this company is highly progressive and deeply connected to employees. The reality is that the company does care about employees, culture and employee communications but it is so large that the bureaucracy impedes creativity and management politics dampens enthusiasm. Therefore employee satisfaction lingers at 60%. The intranet may in fact be one of the very best in the world, but employees don’t feel like the company is the best in the world to work for.

On the flip side, another client of mine with an employee population of some 3,000 has fairly high employee satisfaction. The average staff tenure is 21 years. The average employee age is well in to the 40s. The intranet (prior to a redesign) though was quite poor scoring a 4.5 out of 10 according to our advanced rating methodology (been applied to dozens of intranet). A healthy culture persisted despite a terrible intranet. Oddly enough however, there is a customer service corollary. At this company with a healthy culture and poor intranet, customer satisfaction was quite low. In fact, it was low customer satisfaction that got the attention of senior management that led to the complete redesign of the intranet as one of the chief drivers for improving customer satisfaction. Go figure!

Not all companies are created equal; nor are intranets.