Benchmarking is often used as an effective tool to assess and improve systems like digital workspaces and intranets. Comparing the intranet performance metrics to the industry standard is a great way to measure employee engagement, communication, and satisfaction and suggest where the system needs improvement.

This is similar to many other systems that act as pillars of an organization. 

A great example is compensation benchmarking, which ensures that the company is not losing money while retaining existing employees and attracting new talent. As the success of a compensation strategy can make or break a company, there are several tools available that can help compensation professionals make the right decisions. One example is CompTool, which provides solutions for salary monitoring and analysis for specific markets, salary survey management, as well as compensation pricing and benchmarking.

In this post, let us try to learn more about intranet benchmarking and comparing your intranet with industry standards to gauge its effectiveness and performance. 

Intranet Benchmarking – A Complete Guide

Intranet is not a simple component like CRM as it affects several areas of business and is used for various applications. So, trying to measure its success can seem to be a daunting task. However, with a solid intranet strategy that aligns with the business goals, intranet benchmarking is easy.

Create a strategy

A clear intranet strategy is a baseline for everything you want to achieve with your digital workspace. Organizations generally know what they are looking to accomplish with the intranet, but don't have it on paper. So, the first step is to create a new intranet strategy.

Define KPIs

The next step is to define success for the intranet. You can carry out a group discussion with stakeholders and discuss what success means for your digital workspace. An organization may focus on employee satisfaction and internal communications while some other companies may look for reduced expenses, faster page load times, or consistency of information.

Define the success evidence and think about ways to measure them. This involves listing the metrics you find significant. Once listed, you can select the ones you would like to measure depending on their relevance and feasibility.

Implement KPIs

It is important to start implementing KPIs right from the beginning to get valuable information even before you launch the system. Moreover, you should also try to extract as much information as available from the existing system before you stop using it.

There are several KPIs that, although used for intranet measurement, affect the outcomes across systems. These can be employee surveys, customer satisfaction surveys, and quality reports.

Set targets for KPIs

Before setting target values for your chosen KPIs, you should measure your baseline data. You can do this in one of the three ways – baseline from the launch, baseline from the same period in the last year, baseline from a historical average.

Once you have this data, set targets for the KPIs and summarize the values in a dashboard for easy monitoring.

Best Company Intranets – UPDATED 2021

 A great intranet is based on the pillars of people, process and technology. The best intranets always have some common ingredients like simple and effective user experience, engaged employees and stakeholders, powerful content and comprehensive accountability. Let us look at some of the best company intranets worth taking inspiration from.

Messer Construction Co, an award winner for its intranet in 2019, is a case study in employee engagement. It is an employee-owned company indulged in management, development and performance of commercial construction with 1200 employees across 10 regional offices in the United States. The company has a culture of recognizing and celebrating the employees.

A large part of its intranet home page is allocated to employee display with pictures and stories of new employees, promotions, and work anniversaries. The culture is highly social with Twitter being the most used platform. The company also adds a Twitter web part on the home page for employees. The feed contains stories and events about clients and employees.

As the Covid-19 pandemic brings about significant changes to the work environment and methods, corporate intranet acts as a means of sustenance for most employees. Some of the best intranets could respond to these changes to make a positive impact on the organization and employees.

One example is VMware Inc., a publicly traded software company that redesigned its intranet to meet the unexpected communication requirements of the organization as employees started working remotely. The content owners and communication team created well-designed pages, posted new content and responded quickly to employee comments to strengthen the trust and collaboration in the workspace.

Another inspiring intranet is the one developed by the Hershey company out of a need to adapt the workplace to allow employees to continue inventing, manufacturing, and marketing as a market leader. Hershey needed a modern intranet that could put the most advanced tools at the fingertips of each employee to achieve goals like increased productivity and knowledge sharing. Its intranet was more of a business tool than a communication platform.

The intranet leveraged maximum benefit out of Office 365 by giving each employee intuitive access to the best available tools. With some of the best apps, collaboration sites, communication channels, and integrated tools, the employees enjoy united access to all they need to work smarter from any place on any device. 

Intranet Industry Benchmarks

Lets dive into  Intranet Industry Benchmarks. Organizations can benefit to a great extent by comparing their intranets with industry standards as it helps create an apples-to-apples comparison of digital workplaces across the world and provides detailed suggestions for improvement. Most providers use a sophisticated framework to perform benchmarking across key areas.

• -Strategy & Governance
• -Metrics & Performance
• -Communication & Collaboration
• -Usability

The intranet means a lot of different things to different people. However, the key roles concerning the system prioritize the areas that need improvement. The benchmarks split into areas can be measured against the average for peer intranets to give the team the information they need to focus on poorly performing areas and take action.

Comparing the intranet to industry benchmarks provides wonderful insight into a system of intertwined practices. Fixing a problem with one area might need action somewhere else. This is true for all the areas of benchmarking. 

Intranet Feedback Survey For Benchmarking

Getting feedback from the users of your digital workspace is one of the best ways you can proceed with benchmarking. The feedback from the survey can be compared with other organizations to get an understanding of your intranet's effectiveness. The feedback survey for benchmarking should cover topics like look and feel of the system, ease of finding information, quality of content, availability and performance, maintenance, employee engagement, and completion of tasks.

A feedback survey is a great way to gain insight into how your organization is doing with its intranet. It also provides your employees a secure way to share their suggestions anonymously. The survey should be kept under 30 questions to form a range of reference and identify the areas of improvement. Here are some example questions for different areas of the intranet.

Employee Feedback

• -How seriously does the organization take your feedback?
• -How effectively does the organization act on your feedback?
• -Have you seen positive changes in the organization since it has started collecting feedback?

Information Flow

• -Do you feel that you have a clear idea of how the organization is performing?
• -Does the organization provide adequate information about your job progress?
• -What do you think can help improve communication at the organization?

Culture

• -Do you feel valued at work?
• -Do you think the company works at promoting recognition in the workplace?
• -How well does the company recognize you when you do a great job?
• -Have you received any recognition from your manager in the past two years?
• -How well does the company culture drive your engagement at work?

Transparency

• -What is your satisfaction level with the communication you get from the company?
• -Does the organization always provide accurate information?
• -How well do departments communicate with each other?
• -How transparent does the management feel to you?

Capturing feedback from the employees and comparing the results with your intranet metrics would help you benchmark the performance and success and create a more informed strategy to result in a more engaging intranet and a healthier company.