Webinar Recap | Measuring the ROI & Success of Your Intranet | Turn Data into Action

Thanks for your interest in ” Measuring the ROI & Success of Your Intranet | Turn Data Into Action.” If you were able to join us for the webinar, we sincerely thank you for being there. We hope you had as much fun getting to learn about ROI and intranet success as our speakers did sharing their knowledge with you.  

Didn’t get a chance to catch our session live? We’ve got you covered. 

This session:

Intranet success looks different for every organization. But no matter how you define success, your intranet investment mandates user adoption, and stakeholders and project sponsors want to see ROI. A company’s digital workspace must attract users, make them feel at home, and encourage them to stick around. So what does success look like? What KPIs should you target for your intranet, and what metrics should you be tracking to not only prove ROI but make data-driven decisions to bring improvements to your intranet for your users? Join us as we show you how to define success, what to track, and how to turn that data into action.

Episode takeaways:

• Why monitoring is key to intranet health
• How to define success for your organization and your department
• How to choose the right KPIs and benchmarks for success, including:
  • What to track to prove success/ROI.
  • What to track to make data-driven actionable change
  • What to track to understand how your organization is working
• How to track success and what tools are available to you today, including demos!

Key takeaways:

Monitoring employee experience is arguably one of the most important metrics for your organization’s success. But before diving into why this is — let’s define employee experience. Technical Business Analyst Team Lead and intranet expert Carolyn Gjerde helped understand this:

What is employee experience?  

The employee experience is an employee’s beliefs about the events that occur during their professional existence as a member of an organization. What they think, feel, observe, and encounter comprises employee experience.

Now, let’s move on to why monitoring employee experience is crucial for your organization.

Why is monitoring important?  

Perception is reality, so understanding how your team views their experience with your organization is vital. Keeping a pulse on this through metrics brings awareness to issues and allows you to address them before they snowball. These metrics help you get the pulse of your team’s sentiment.

We then moved on to the concept of success and what that looks like when discussing the intranet. Well, success varies depending on what role in the organization you are looking at it from. Carolyn broke down three main roles in the organization and what intranet success looks like for each.

Defining success: digital workspace owners  

In terms of content consumption, it’s essential to track a few things:

• What content is being consumed & how team members are using it

• How many times stories are being viewed, and by what types of team members

• What content isn’t being viewed — is it still relevant?

• Page views

• Percentage of team members that consumed content

Defining success: HR and Operations  

For content messaging, uncover what content isn’t reaching certain groups or types of team members to better understand the challenges of content access. Do certain regions or locations access specific content? For collaboration insights, track sites and content that’s shared across different teams, departments, and regions. And in terms of retention, find out if there is a correlation between any groups experiencing an increase in leaving the organization and intranet use.

Defining success: IT  

With security tracking, you should track the external guest activity and external file sharing, as well as monitor sensitivity label content. With data protection, tracking what information is being shared or obfuscated is essential. While managing content, tracking inactive content throughout the tenant is crucial.

Now, how do we go about choosing the right KPIs for success? Carolyn broke this down into three areas:

What to track to prove success/ROI  

Evaluating the ROI of a crucial business system such as an intranet is much more complex as it involves taking into account a wider range of variables and intangibles. To do a cost-benefit analysis, you’ll need to establish benchmarks around the tangible benefits realized from an intranet. Here are some steps on how you can get started:

1. Set benchmarks 

Benchmark data helps you identify productivity issues and establish baseline metrics before your new intranet is in place. Some metrics you can evaluate are:

• Productivity (time spent on completing tasks, and responding to requests)

• Collaboration (document creation, editing and sharing, and comments/likes/shares)

• Communication (Email usage and company news consumption)

2. Assign values to productivity gains

As part of your intranet ROI, you should assign values to productivity gains. Some values to measure include:

• Less time spent checking email

• Finding information more quickly

• Quicker onboarding of new employees

• Access to subject matter experts

3. Value retention 

By providing easy access to necessary information and resources, an intranet can assist in the retention of employees, contributing to a reduction in burnout and an enhancement of the overall employee experience.

Some examples of how to calculate how an intranet improves retention rates are:

• Measure employee satisfaction rates before and after implementing an intranet

• Do exit interviews to understand employee pain points better

What to track to make data-driven actionable change  

Employee Satisfaction

• Review employee surveys, retention rates, and exit surveys.

• Use information from these tools to create content and experiences that address strengths and weaknesses.

• Feedback loop to track the effectiveness of changes over time

What to track to understand how the team is working  

• Track files being shared between departments to uncover interconnected ways team members are working across the organization

• Track what types of content are being shared externally – look to survey responses around how engaged team members are feeling

One of the things that can be tricky with measuring success is figuring out what signals to measure and then gathering that data. SharePoint provides us with a reporting option to facilitate this. Microsoft 365 Apps and Services MVP John White gave us a brief overview of what is possible within SharePoint — check out the recording for details.

The out-of-the-box options are great if you are looking to measure some base success metrics. However, if you’re looking to dive deeper into analytics for Microsoft 365 – our friends over tyGraph offer an amazing platform that delivers exactly that.

What is tyGraph?  

tyGraph organizes, measures, and analyzes human interactions in the workplace. It uses your data and helps construct an actionable reflection that improves decision-making, optimizes performance, and uncovers insights that directly impact the way your people work.

Microsoft 365 Apps and Services MVP Norm Young walked us through a deep dive of tyGraph to visualize all that this platform can offer. Check out the recording to view the demo.

It can be overwhelming to think about the many metrics you can measure, and you may be wondering where to start. Luckily, Carolyn gave us quick tips on this:

What to start tracking today  

• Metrics around what team members are consuming
• Top pages/sites – what content to track
• Page viewers
• Page views
• Average time spent per user
• What time team members are visiting the site

Next Steps

• What pages are being viewed/not viewed
• Who is viewing/not viewing content

And there you have it! We hope this recap gave you some valuable insights that you can put into practice. Check out the recording for more details! 

Make sure to join us at our next webinar on June 29th, where we’ll show you how automating onboarding processes can lead to remarkable transformations within your organization.