How do you measure the value of updating your intranet? Generally speaking, it can be hard to establish quantitative value metrics for enterprise level or infrastructure-level investments such as the corporate intranet. This is because their benefits are very broad – and often take time to show a demonstrable impact, especially in areas where something was not possible before the investment. Read on for some of our thoughts.
In considering the value of updating your intranet, there’s the obvious cost-savings of eliminating the hard costs of maintaining and supporting multiple technologies. But that cost is only one element of the benefit. You’ll want to include the cost/benefit of increased efficiency to manage and maintain the new intranet, and the bigger value of improved employee engagement and communications.
An example of this would be the challenge of quantifying the cost/benefit of hybrid work remote work at a large scale prior to the pandemic. It also would have been difficult to predict, before the pandemic, how productive people would end up being when forced to work remotely for extended periods of time. But looking back, remote and hybrid work has proven to be far more effective than anyone expected.
At the department level it’s easier to assess value and impact – for example, a department that provides services to employees (like HR) can track how many inquiries are received/handled via the intranet instead of email or phone, which not only saves HR money, but is far more convenient for employees.
The same analysis can be applied to marketing, or finance or any department that has resource documents accessed by employees. Impact can be determined by how many people accessed or downloaded a brand template versus having to ask for a copy to be sent.
For employee communications teams it’s always been hard to establish quantitative value measures. After all, what’s the tangible benefit of employees being more informed? Of being more ‘engaged’? How can you measure the actual impact of employee communications and engagement on the decrease in employee turnover?
However, just like the challenge of measuring investments in advertising and marketing, being able to have measurable and actionable data on audience behavior with employee communications and messaging is at least one way to know how "successful" various communications are in reaching their target audiences, and/or affecting a CTA. If you are using SharePoint, you do have access to some data points, but understanding and using that data is not necessarily intuitive.
It’s always hard to draw a direct connection between advertising/marketing and sales revenue, but certainly marketing technologies enable far better performance measures than ever before. Employee communicators need to adapt the same way of thinking and measuring. Using annual employee surveys about communication isn’t enough. We need to start using measurable analytics.
Velaku's consulting services can help you make the most of the data that you collect in SharePoint. Contact us today to find out how valuable insights like visitors to a site and time on site can be leveraged.
