Company intranet software—or the employee intranet portal—is packed with more tools that support your organization, from customer support cases to the employee directory.
What is a company intranet?
The purpose of a company intranet is to provide a private, secured online network where employees can create content, communicate, collaborate, manage tasks and events, and develop the company culture. It’s your company’s home-base, team touchpoint, central repository, multifunctional communication tool, and more.
Modern intranet software is flexible and can be used in many ways. A true corporate intranet solution strengthens communication and productivity with internal communication and collaboration tools. To make sure your company intranet is serving your employees, it’s crucial to continuously implement new intranet ideas to keep your digital workplace fresh, fun and inspiring.
Here are 37 intranet examples to create the best company intranet.
Table of Contents
- Make files and documents accessible in your company intranet.
- Brand your company intranet. Give it a name.
- Broadcast company and individual accomplishments on your employee intranet.
- Give your employee intranet homepage some TLC.
- Experiment with your company intranet.
- Develop a content creation schedule on your company intranet.
- Give employees the tools they need with the best intranet software.
- Get creative with your color scheme.
- List community events on your employee intranet portal.
- Pin your company mission on your homepage.
- Create a sense of community through your employee intranet.
- Use images to support text.
- Keep things clean and easy to use.
- Use contests and gamification on your company intranet.
- Introduce themed days of the week on your company intranet.
- Post inspirational quotes on your employee intranet platform.
- Post job openings and hire from within.
- Tag all content in your company intranet.
- Empower early intranet adopters.
- Create a Q&A forum on your company intranet.
- Ask for feedback about your employee intranet.
- Use humor. Be a human. Communicate like a human.
- Get everyone to fill out their employee profiles on your company intranet.
- Announce new hires through your company intranet.
- Encourage discussions through your employee intranet.
- Provide training and tutorials on your company intranet.
- Upload documentation and handbooks.
- Encourage users to create content on your company intranet.
- Care about your intranet content.
- Then… monitor it.
- Segment your employee intranet into spaces, departments, or groups.
1. Make files and documents accessible in your company intranet.
Every team—regardless of industry, location, or role—will need to access important files and documents. Your intranet document management system can store anything, from templates and stock photos, to product documents and legal forms. Make your files accessible by using your document management system. Employees can easily find files by typing keywords, searching through content type or author, or date. You can also tag content and promote engagement by encouraging employees to rate what they read.
You might be saying, “Hey Alex! What do I do about the thousands of files I have in another system we were using before our company intranet?” This is an easy fix. Today’s leading digital workplaces have the best intranet integrations with the most on-demand document management systems. This way, you can easily sync important content into your corporate intranet seamlessly.
2. Brand your company intranet. Give it a name.
One of the most effective employee intranet ideas is to brand your platform. Start with a unique name that fits your company culture—this makes your intranet website exciting for your employees, who will be using it everyday.
Naming your company intranet gives it an identity that draws people in and increases adoption. The name will influence the way the intranet is perceived and used within the organization.
Without a unique name, employees are left with “the intranet”, or “the network”, maybe “the portal”, or even the name of the technology provider, such as Axero. Dubbing your intranet site with a name makes your digital workplace part of the organization and creates a buzz.
Once you’ve made the decision to name your intranet, the next question is:
What should I name it?Great question. I wrote an entire post to help you. Let’s get our creative wheels turning—you can read more here: How to Choose an Intranet Name.
3. Broadcast company and individual accomplishments on your employee intranet.
Your employee intranet is the perfect platform for broadcasting your company’s successes. Did someone win an award? Did someone get a promotion? Posting these stories is a great way to motivate employees and make each day worthwhile. It also encourages people to reach out to their colleagues to congratulate each other.
In Axero, admins and peers can show recognition by awarding badges, or shout-outs, for outstanding achievements. There is also a point system feature, where employees accumulate points for notable contributions. This builds positive employee morale, acknowledges members for their accomplishments, and cultivates growth within your company.
4. Give your employee intranet homepage some TLC.
The intranet homepage is usually the first page employees see. Use this as an opportunity to inspire and motivate members by creating a beautiful intranet template. With drag-and-drop page building features, you can customize your homepage to fit your brand without any HTML experience. Control the layout of your page so important content and features are exactly where you want them to be—such as your company calendar, daily announcements, third-party tools, a “quick links” section, etc.
Imagine what you want your best intranet look to like. Then, make these intranet examples a reality.
5. Experiment with your company intranet.
It’s important to remember that your corporate intranet solution doesn’t have to stay the same. Nothing is set in stone. As your business grows, so will the needs of your intranet website. Experiment with different workflows, different intranet template designs, and different employee intranet ideas.
For instance, if you’re a CEO and you don’t have time for your monthly blog post, try a ghostwriting feature to see how you stay connected with staff—even if you’ve never used this tool before. If you want to encourage more peer-to-peer recognition, start integrating your employee intranet recognition programs. Maybe it’s as simple as turning on “likes” and comments to see if your employees use it. Once you find something that sticks, the rest will fall into place on its own. Keep experimenting.
6. Develop a content creation schedule on your company intranet.
A great way to keep your content marketing plan on track is by sticking to a consistent schedule, which also happens to be one of the best intranet ideas, too. Create an internal content calendar for each month. Plan articles you want to share, announcements that can be written beforehand, deadlines, campaigns or company initiatives that you will be promoting.
People care about information that is relevant to them. Put your content team on a schedule to make sure your company intranet is the homebase for what matters most.
7. Give employees the tools they need with the best intranet software.
Well-designed employee intranet software is packed with tools that companies need on a daily basis to operate and innovate. (For example, cases and helpdesks for customer support, internal communication and content creation, document management, and more.) Even with all of these intranet tools at your disposal, there’s still 3rd party tools that your teams need.
Modern company intranet sites will integrate with many systems you use today. And for external platforms without integrations, use your launchpad to link to external tools. Employees love this intranet example because everything important is a click away. By organizing everyday tools in your digital workplace, you organize everyday tasks for your people.
8. Get creative with your color scheme.
A consistent brand identity is important for your business—and the color scheme of your company intranet should reflect it. That doesn’t mean you can’t get playful. If your company observes holidays throughout the year, celebrate by switching up your color scheme or add festive icons. You can also get creative and add imagery and colors to welcome new seasons.
Getting playful with your colors will catch your people’s attention, keep spirits high, and refresh your entire intranet experience. There are so many options—consider brainstorming the best intranet ideas with your entire staff by creating a poll or discussion forum.
9. List community events on your employee intranet portal.
Most people use their intranet calendars to schedule meetings and company deadlines, but there are so many other events you can plan and showcase on your calendars. Here’s a few ideas:
- Sporting events
- Local festivals or benefit concerts
- Volunteer opportunities
- Happy hour get-togethers
This is a wonderful opportunity to connect remote teams if you have employees who live in the same area. It’s also just as beneficial for companies who work in the same office everyday—social events build stronger relationships.
(Here’s another highly recommended intranet example: segment your calendars. Every department should have their own calendar to organize internal projects, deadlines, and meetings. And your company calendar should track important dates that impacts everyone.)
10. Pin your company mission on your homepage.
Here’s an intranet idea for you – write an article about your company mission and pin it on your homepage! Your employee intranet homepage is likely the first thing everyone sees when they log in, which makes it the perfect place to motivate and connect everyone to each other and their place in your organization.
Write a personable and heartfelt message that will inspire everyone who sees it. This is an effective way to make a stronger employee intranet and culture where people are productive, happy, and aligned.
11. Create a sense of community through your employee intranet.
Take your events calendar a step further and post photo albums from team gatherings on your modern intranet. This does a couple things:
- It shows that you care: employees take pride in their jobs when they feel special and celebrated.
- Balance work and fun: your company intranet should also be an enjoyable place—it’s okay to incorporate intranet content ideas not related to a work task.
- Builds a close-knit community: these photos highlight a shared employee experience. Make your community stronger by showing the faces that make up your company.
This is a quick and easy intranet idea to improve employee engagement and make your culture stronger.
12. Use images to support text.
There’s no getting around it: everyone uses text-heavy content. The downfall is that after reading page after page loaded with words, mental fatigue kicks in and it gets hard to retain information. No manager wants this.
A simple intranet example to make information more engaging and your employees more focused, is to add images inside your content. Incorporate visual context to your topic and break up the flow of your text. You’ll also boost engagement with images. The web is a treasure trove of images, so use this to your advantage.
13. Keep things clean and easy to use.
Have you ever tried to navigate through a jumbled intranet? If you haven’t, then trust me, you don’t want this for your employees. When company intranets are outdated, unorganized, and difficult to get from point A to point B, it slows down productivity. You’re also left with frustrated employees who do not have the resources they need to do their best work.
Your teams need a sleek and modern employee intranet design with intuitive navigation, so it’s easy to get stuff done. Aesthetically speaking, consider using white space, smooth lines, and plenty of strong boundaries. Leading intranet software also gives you the ability to customize your intranet navigation bar, so you have control over the entire user experience for your digital workplace.
14. Use contests and gamification on your company intranet.
It’s easy to get wrapped up in work and not pay attention to things outside of the daily to-do list. Give your staff incentive to take part in meaningful conversations and create the most valuable and best intranet content. Hold an intranet contest and offer prizes. You can, for example, reward the most active user a $20 gift card on a weekly or monthly basis.
Gamification in the workplace is also an effective way to boost engagement on your company intranet website. By implementing friendly competitions that also promote positive contributions to your company, you are bringing people together, boosting morale, and increasing productivity.
There are many options here, so think of ways you haven’t used your company intranet, then get your people communicating and collaborating.
15. Introduce themed days of the week on your company intranet.
“Throwback Thursday” is one of the most popular hashtags used on social media platforms. Consider implementing a #TBT themed Thursday to add a couple laughs each week. Or, you can do a #PhotoFriday, #MondayMeals, or something more specific to your company culture. Use your modern intranet platform to shine a spotlight on your special day. Create a space or a discussion forum where employees can share their posts. You can even dedicate a gallery on the homepage—an easy addition to your intranet design if you have page builder pages.
16. Post inspirational quotes on your employee intranet platform.
Inspiration motivates employees and keeps them on track. And there are plenty of ways to develop an inspiring social community. One great employee intranet idea is to post inspiring employee engagement quotes in your digital workplace. This is a thoughtful way to encourage the very best out of your employees and helps them start the day off on the right foot.
The main homepage is a practical place to post your quote, or you can encourage directors to post their own quotes on their space homepages. We recommend posting one quote every day or week, but don’t overdo it!
17. Post job openings and hire from within.
Hiring within your company is super beneficial and can save you money. When you hire internally, the candidate already has an understanding of the lay of the land, and a proven track record of excelling in your company. You also have confidence in their recommendations and training is significantly easier.
If you’re looking to fill a new job, here’s an idea: try posting in your employee intranet portal. Turn a discussion forum into an internal job board. Post job openings, share updates, and spread the word.
18. Tag all content in your company intranet.
When you tag content, searching for information in your company intranet becomes easier. Add tags such as “marketing”, “internal documentation”, and other categories that will help your employees find what they need. This is an effective way to manage intranet content, which saves time for your entire organization.
19. Empower early intranet adopters.
Early adopters of your employee intranet are the people who will contribute meaningful content ideas and conversations and show the value to other colleagues—without even trying. In short, these are the individuals who can take your intranet to new heights.
Identify who these key players are and make them community leaders. You can do this a couple ways—highlight “User of the Month” on your homepage, award a kudos, or use your points and recognition feature to give much deserved acknowledgement. Others will notice.
20. Create a Q&A forum on your company intranet.
People have questions. Particularly when employees are taking on new projects, just joined the team, or are learning how to use the employee intranet, a Q&A forum is a quick and efficient way to answer questions.
It’s also a great way to have a living resource always available for your people. No matter what time of day, answers are one click away. You can also create intranet discussion forums for important questions that need their own home to store detailed responses. Your Q&A forum should not replace the role of managers, who should be checking in with their team members as well.
21. Ask for feedback about your employee intranet.
Employees want to share their feedback about your company intranet—things they enjoy and things they don’t. By collecting the best intranet ideas and suggestions, you can make tweaks to your intranet design with the confidence that your employees support these enhancements. You also have the opportunity to brainstorm new examples of employee intranet ideas for the future. Do this by creating a survey or posting a forum thread. Empowering your employees to have a voice in your company boosts morale and helps you develop a stronger company culture.
(If you’re interested, here are some more employee engagement ideas.)
22. Use humor. Be a human. Communicate like a human.
We all have stressful workweeks, especially when deadlines are creeping up. It’s amazing how far a quick laugh can go.
Use your employee intranet to ease tension and spread some laughter. Post a funny video, comical quote, or add a goofy GIF to an announcement. We’ve touched on this intranet idea already, but don’t be afraid to add some humor to your digital workplace. Your intranet is built for humans, not robots.
23. Get everyone to fill out their employee profiles on your company intranet.
There are so many benefits to employee profiles. For starters, they put a face to a name. Particularly for large companies, the employee directory helps people track down who they need and connects colleagues on a human level.
That’s why for our #22 company intranet idea, we encourage you to use your employee profiles! Think outside the box and customize your profile questions. Ask about favorite musicians, personal hobbies, or a most random memory. Then, have your staff complete their profiles.
Everyone’s employee profile should showcase their professional achievements and their role in the company, and also show who they are. People want to interact with humans, not computers.
24. Announce new hires through your company intranet.
There’s no warmer welcome than introducing a new employee to the entire company on your intranet site. The social tools—likes, comments, and messenger—makes your employee intranet the perfect place to connect new team members with staff. Create a post on the homepage and share a link to his or her profile for further networking. It’s an easy gesture and immediately demonstrates to new employees that the business intranet is the main tool used in your company’s internal communications strategy.
25. Encourage discussions through your employee intranet.
A strong internal communication system is a game changer for collaboration. This brings us to intranet idea #25: use your company intranet to have meaningful conversations. Your intranet site has one-on-one chats, group messages, comments, and discussion threads. Bypassing the back-and-forth of emails and encouraging colleagues to ask questions in a quick, personalized manner, builds relationships between teams, departments, and employees. Check out this blog post to learn how to get employees to start online discussions on your intranet.
26. Provide training and tutorials on your company intranet.
Video is an effective way to train new employees because training videos combine verbal and visual instruction, and are always available for future reference. Use your company intranet to onboard new hires—you’ll make life easier for your managers and for your new employees.
This is more than just an intranet idea. Incorporating training videos becomes part of your intranet training strategy. Here’s a couple other benefits:
- One uniform training process every new hire completes.
- And because you have a uniform training program, it’s easier to make changes and collect feedback.
- You save time for everyone—new hires have a resource to reference back to if they forget something and managers can concentrate on the deeper parts of training.
Be sure to organize everything by space or tags in your employee intranet, so your training videos are always accessible for whoever needs them.
27. Upload documentation and handbooks.
Your company intranet is where employees find important information, no matter where they are. Although these days most content is digital, some companies still use paper. If this is the case, upload these documents into your digital workplace as a first step to help create a knowledge base within your employee intranet. This way, your employees can access these documents anywhere.
You not only save paper, but it’s also a safer bet that you will never lose important content. Scanning and uploading documents can take time, but it’s well worth it.
28. Encourage users to create content on your company intranet.
Your employee intranet supports and connects staff to each other and to their work. It also builds a stronger community and empowers employees to take charge in their role. One way to combine all four of these intranet benefits is to encourage employees to publish their own intranet content ideas. Wikis and knowledge base articles are some of the types of content people can create. (A WYSIWYG editor lets anyone create and publish content without coding experience.)
Always encourage your people to contribute to your intranet community if they feel they have something valuable to share.
29. Care about your intranet content.
While we’re on the topic of intranet content ideas, no one is a better authority over your company than you. Your company intranet should reflect that with valuable, timely, and relevant information to help departments do their jobs well. Encourage department heads to post helpful articles, case studies, and make sure documents are updated. By providing teams with content they care about, the employee intranet becomes a place they want to go to.
30. Then… monitor it.
Encouraging everyone to post information is the first step. Keeping tabs on its impact is the next step. Surveys and forums are excellent options to get direct feedback from staff, but it’s also valuable to keep an eye on analytics. Identify what your employees are viewing and if they like it by the number of “likes”, “shares”, “sentiment”, and comments a post receives—all tracked in your analytics tool.
If you decide to refresh your platform, whether it’s a new intranet design or internal communication strategy, this data will give you a better idea about what’s working and what needs improvement.
31. Segment your employee intranet into spaces, departments, or groups.
If you have a lot of departments, such as sales, marketing, and IT, you’ll want to segment your company intranet so your teams are organized. Here enters digital workspaces (or spaces).
Digital workspaces is where internal teams have their own space on the employee intranet to organize people, documents, and projects in one easy-to-use place. You can make them private to members of a space or public to everyone on the intranet.
If a space is public, employees in other teams can easily see what’s new in other departments. This is a great way to curb department silos.
32. Use your intranet to forge closer bonds between leadership and staff.
When people trust their company, believe in their company’s core values, and feel supported by their leadership, employees want to go the extra mile. This intranet example is for higher-ups and executives—let’s continue this relationship of trust and transparency by communicating consistently with staff members.
The company intranet is the perfect place for higher-ups to do this. Share news, announce company changes, or post a thoughtful weekly note, directly to employees. By consistently engaging with your entire staff, your employees will be more engaged with their work because they feel valued. Communication in large and widespread workforces can be a challenge—if this is your company, take this suggestion back to your team.
33. Connect remote teams with your employee intranet.
Department silos can happen in the same building. If your business is entirely remote or has remote teams, the couple hundred or thousands of miles that separate employees can add more challenges when it comes to engagement.
Use your employee intranet and it’s strong social features to eliminate these barriers. Create a space for remote members to post photos, videos, and jokes. Continue to recognize outstanding behavior with gamification features. Implement weekly or monthly team building exercises through video meetings to play games—a particularly fun intranet idea. Share weekly Spotify playlists. Punderdome, a pun card game, only requires a manager to have the cards while other members work in teams. This is one of many games you can schedule throughout the year.
Your company intranet is designed to connect every employee, no matter the distance. Use its features to build stronger relationships and happier team members.
If you want more information about connecting remote teams, check out this blog post: Axero’s 8 Rules for Working Remotely and Functioning Well as a Team.
34. Give management a private space, too.
There are some departments or employees that need their own space to privately discuss topics and share information. Use the permission settings in your company intranet to make this easier.
Managers, or anybody working on confidential tasks, will have a secure place to openly collaborate and discuss topics. You also eliminate the use of unnecessary platforms that can complicate collaboration, such as as email. Now, users can accomplish all of their tasks in one place. Edit unfinished documents, discuss department plans, or share confidential files in one private hub.
35. Go mobile.
If your company intranet doesn’t have a mobile app, you’re missing out on a huge feature that many employees want. These days, accessibility isn’t a request; it’s an expectation. When users are on the go, they want to carry their work with them.
Perhaps a staff member is at a work convention and doesn’t have a laptop handy. Or maybe an unexpected meeting popped up and you need the name of a person who worked on a project. Or maybe you manage frontline workers who need on the spot access to specific forms or tools.
Regardless of the situation, your digital workplace should fit in the palm of your hands. As long as the mobile intranet design is easy to navigate and has essential features, your staff will never be too far from their desk.
36. Keep an eye on advancing company intranet examples.
Employee intranet software is evolving everyday. Platforms such as Axero consistently release updates and new features to improve productivity and user happiness.
Pay attention to emerging internal communication trends and feedback from your employees. Sometimes it’s not the content that is lacking but the tools. As your company’s needs expand, make sure your company intranet is growing with it.
37. Set reasonable expectations for your company intranet.
Every CEO and manager wants their company intranet to be the ultimate source of knowledge, productivity and collaboration. Because when great things are happening on the corporate intranet, great things are happening in the company. One of the most helpful intranet examples we can share with you is this: take a deep breath and set realistic expectations. Flexible employee intranet software will help you accomplish all of your goals, but don’t take on too many changes at once.
Start with one area—maybe you want to revamp your intranet design, launch an employee newsletter, set up a company volunteer center, or maybe you want to test out some of the knowledge management tools your company hasn’t used yet. This is a great way to move forward and make sure you’re doing it right every step of the way.
In Conclusion.
Improving your company intranet is an exciting project that also improves how your employees work together and do their jobs. Feel free to use these employee intranet examples, or come up with your own intranet ideas and share them in the comment section below. Include your employees throughout this process and pay attention to what works best for your company. Success is right around the corner.
