How Do You Get Your Employees to Use Your Intranet?

Do you have any tips on driving employees to the intranet? I have a couple sources but would like to have another. Anything mobile related? Or any other wisdom on the topic would be welcome.

People in the workplace tend to gravitate toward what’s easiest, and intranets are notorious for being the opposite. Ask anyone about SharePoint, and he’ll no doubt complain that it’s sluggish and cumbersome.

To rectify this, employers have two broad options.

On one hand, you can employ brute force (or, in bureaucratese, “incentives”). Want to drive employees to your intranet? Make your intranet the one place where they can submit expense reports. Or time sheets or PTO requests.

On the other hand, you can put yourself in their shoes. In tech parlance, “You can eat your own dog food.” For example, most intranets were designed without any real attention to the user experience, or UX. As a result, they use an overly technical aesthetic, which creates a steep learning curve.

By contrast, look at that same company’s website. No doubt, it was the product of expensive developers and designers; it wasn’t an off-the-rack template. In other words: Just as you wouldn’t think about building your public website without a UX specialist, so you shouldn’t build your private site without one.

Addendum (4/2/2018): Success!