Intranet ROI: How to Track & Improve Intranet Performance

Intranets can unite employees by streamlining communication, collaboration, and knowledge sharing. Done right, your intranet could become the engine that drives productivity, employee happiness, and company revenue.

But that’s just the theory – the average company wasted $18 million on unused SaaS licenses in 2023. Without a hands-on approach to track and analyze your intranet’s performance, it’s hard to drive a positive return on investment.

And that begs the question: How can you measure intranet ROI?

In this guide, we’ll explore the key challenges and best practices you must embrace to measure intranet ROI. By the end, you’ll see why it’s worth adding an intranet platform and how you can get the most value out of yours.

Key challenges that impact intranet ROI

WorkVivo was recently named Meta’s only preferred migration partner after Facebook’s parent company announced the end of Workplace. But as legacy customers prepare to switch, the true value of an intranet remains a mystery to many.

90% of intranets fail in the first three years because companies don't proactively measure the impact. As the saying goes, what gets measured gets managed. So, what's stopping companies from taking control?

Here are three challenges that tend to crop up when measuring intranet ROI.

Intangible benefits. Hard returns, like time savings or revenue increases, are tangible benefits you can easily track. But a lot of your intranet ROI is tricky to measure. Soft returns like improvements in team collaboration, knowledge sharing, and employee satisfaction are important but much more challenging to quantify.
Difficulties in attribution. Many factors influence business outcomes, including employee productivity, marketing, and sales. All things considered, it's not easy to isolate the specific impact the intranet has on company growth.
Technical issues. Even if you cultivate a strong culture that embraces collaboration and new apps, the technology can thwart your efforts to measure the ROI of an intranet. You may deal with integration problems, downtime, and data reporting glitches. Without reliable analytics, you may have to take reports on your intranet ROI with a pinch of salt.

With these challenges in mind, let’s consider other factors that come into play when you want to get the most value from a modern intranet solution.

7 factors that impact intranet ROI

Getting a pinpoint value of your intranet ROI is practically impossible – but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to measure and improve your company’s internal social network. 92% of executives have seen an uptick in performance when their employees are engaged.

The full benefits of an intranet often compound over time as user adoption and engagement increase. Not everyone can be like SupportNinja, which achieved 97% user adoption in just seven days.

So, when measuring progress, remember that your intranet ROI won't just come down to its immediate impact on your bottom line.

Here are seven key factors to consider when measuring intranet ROI.

Employee engagement. Gallup reports that only 23% of global employees are engaged at work. Your employees can make or break intranet ROI. If your employees aren’t using the intranet, nothing else matters – this is the critical factor.
Information overload and knowledge management. About 80% of Fortune 100 organizations use Slack. It lives up to its billing by making all conversation and knowledge easy to find. Without this key ability, team members grow frustrated, and productivity slumps as people waste time searching through irrelevant data.
Workplace collaboration. Intranets act as a central hub for internal communications and project management. However, these platforms can become noisy chatrooms with multiple busy channels, which may hinder progress.
Employee onboarding efficiency. You can drive intranet ROI by using it to simplify onboarding for new employees – if it’s organized. On the other hand, a messy library of outdated training materials will lead to costly mistakes and more training time for new hires.
Ease of use and management. User-friendly intranets see high adoption rates and minimal training costs. For instance, Carbery onboarded 94% of its employees to Workvivo with zero training requirements. Conversely, a complex platform can deter employees and make it harder to maintain an ever-growing data dump (that nobody is actually using).
Integration capabilities. Smooth integration with your other tools is critical to delivering the baseline benefits you’d expect in intranet ROI – streamlined workflows and time saved. If your intranet doesn’t play well with the existing tech stack, it can quickly become an isolated platform that drains your budget.
Scalability and future-proofing. As your company grows, you need a reliable platform that moves with you. Otherwise, you could face headaches and high costs if you need to transition to a different employee engagement platform down the line.

How to measure intranet ROI: Step-by-step guide

While frontline workers might feel the intranet is essential to the digital workplace, decision-makers need to understand its true business value. Without clear intranet ROI, executives will be unsure whether they should cancel, renew, or upgrade the platform.

Follow the steps below to measure the ROI of your intranet.

Step 1: Define your goals

Before you can accurately analyze your intranet ROI, you must understand what you want to achieve. Start by identifying your company objectives for the platform.

Your goals could be related to any of the following:

Productivity
Collaboration
Communication
Knowledge sharing
Employee onboarding

While these areas are intertwined, having a clear overarching objective for your intranet will help you map your strategy for success. It'll also guide your use cases so you can focus on successful intranet initiatives that directly impact your goals.

Step 2: Choose the right key performance indicators (KPIs)

Next, you must assign specific metrics to each company goal. The KPIs you choose will vary depending on your objectives, so getting them right from the outset is essential.

For instance, if you plan to improve employee engagement, consider metrics like active user participation, content comments, and social interactions.

Here are the best KPIs for tracking intranet ROI. (Click the image to enlarge and download!)

Step 3: Set benchmarks

Remember to measure the KPIs before and after introducing your intranet. By recording baseline metrics from the outset, you can refer to your benchmarks and prove your intranet ROI.

Consider the following steps when setting benchmarks for intranet ROI.

Identify categories related to your goals. For example, to drive productivity, you should record time spent on projects, finding information, and repetitive tasks. To improve engagement, consider current data on social media interactions.
Consider the time demands of each task. Homebase reports the average worker spends 51% of every workday on low to no-value tasks. Let’s say your employees are spending four hours a day handling emails, attending meetings, and tidying files.
Estimate the monetary value of time spent. Let’s say your employees earn $25/hr – that means low-value tasks cost $100 a day or $2000 a month.

When you establish how much time you are wasting on low-value tasks and processes, you can focus on using your intranet to automate or eliminate them. Getting your employees on board will help gather benchmark data in all the relevant categories related to your goals.

With baseline benchmarks as a reference point, you can do quarterly reviews to gauge the time savings driven by your intranet. For example, if the new systems save employees 20 hours a month – or $500 per employee – that’s something you can report as intranet ROI.

Step 4: Determine how you'll track intranet ROI

Before the C-suite makes decisions about further investment in the company’s intranet, they’ll need to see a clear picture of the system’s impact on your KPIs and the company’s goals.

You must pick reliable methods to analyze the data against your benchmarks. The tools you use should help you effectively communicate the value-add your intranet offers the company.

Here are a few methods for tracking and reporting intranet ROI.

User surveys. You can gather feedback on intranet usability and satisfaction to understand employee engagement. Platforms like SurveyMonkey make it easy to understand your team by collecting insights through rating scales and open-ended questions.
Heatmaps and click-tracking. It's important to understand how people interact with your content. Tools like Hotjar and Crazy Egg let you visualize user behavior, helping identify which areas need attention.
Analytics dashboards. For a clear and comprehensive view of how intranet usage trends impact your company’s goals, you can employ usage analytics dashboards to monitor your KPIs. This approach is a powerful way to glean meaningful insights from data, which helps guide decision-making.

Step 5: Conduct a cost-benefit analysis

You can use a cost-benefit analysis to weigh the positives and negatives of your intranet and get a clear view of the overall impact. With this holistic look at the return on investment, you can make informed business decisions on how to improve performance.

Here’s what to do:

Start with hard returns. After your data analysis, you should have some idea of the financial value of the intranet. Hard cost savings may include lower paper costs, fewer phone calls, reduced travel expenses, and lower subscription fees on third-party software.
Consider soft returns. Consider the positive outcomes and estimated time and cost savings from better communication, streamlined processes, and improved employee management.
Account for costs. Remember to tally up all expenses in implementing the new intranet, including maintenance, training, subscription fees, and administration costs.
Evaluate and compare. By referring to your benchmarks and KPIs, weigh the total benefits against the total costs.

At this point, you'll have a good idea of whether you have a cost-effective intranet. One crucial thing to remember is that intranet ROI can increase over time. This progression is expected as you spend less time with guesswork and let data analytics and reporting guide you in applying the intranet to different business cases.

That said, it's good to look for trends, not absolutes. Before making snap decisions based on short-term results, ensure you're interpreting the data the right way.

6 best practices to maximize intranet ROI

Getting a positive return from your intranet takes time and patience. You must learn from mistakes – which is why measuring ROI is critical. Once you’re proactively tracking, you can start thinking more about how to improve results.

Here are six best practices to maximize your intranet ROI.

Use the company goals as your North Star

When evaluating different intranet platforms, chat with providers about your objectives. Before deciding whether to buy, build, or stick with what you already have, ask yourself if this platform supports your core business objectives.

Look beyond standard features

The best intranet platforms offer advanced capabilities beyond simple chat and engagement features, like robust data management and security protocols. This ensures a safe and reliable environment for information sharing and collaboration, fostering trust and driving user adoption. Workvivo has tools for employee recognition, feedback mechanisms, and social spaces. This culture-driven design drives customer adoption of our platform. For example, Keyloop achieved a 91% adoption rate among its 2,600 employees.

Request a live demo

You can’t get a new SaaS platform without a demo, right? This is especially true when you’re considering expensive intranet software. Getting a demo will help you evaluate the platform, ask targeted questions, and ensure it meets your needs. Ultimately, this due diligence will increase the chance of a positive intranet ROI.

Never forget about user experience

Poor design and clunky navigation can be frustrating at best. At worst, it could negatively impact internal comms, employee turnover, and retention. Consider content relevance, ease of use, and accessibility to encourage more people to use the platform.

Personalize the feed

McKinsey reports that 53% of employees are disengaged at work, which puts a massive dent in productivity. If your intranet can serve content relevant to your employees' different roles, needs, and interests, engagement will flourish. If the technology allows, you should segment your audiences. Think of the intranet as a social platform for your company, with a personalized feed for every employee.

Use employee feedback as fuel for growth

Forrester reports that employees are more likely to be engaged when they have “the information, tools, and technology needed to do their jobs”. You can gather input from employees to identify areas for improvement. Not only will this collaborative effort improve employee engagement at the moment, but the ongoing feedback loop will guide your changes to increase your intranet’s ROI in the long term.

Unlock faster intranet ROI with Workvivo: Your all-in-one employee experience platform

Even giants like Meta run into problems because they can’t get people to use their intranet platform. Without a strategic approach and the right platform, your goals may falter, and you could lose a lot of time and money.

Intranet ROI hinges on employee engagement and experience. Many people may resist change, so the intranet must drive communication and collaboration in an inclusive, personalized way.

Workvivo is an all-in-one employee experience platform that drives true engagement and gives every employee a voice. That’s what we do for our customers, including Bupa, Ryanair, the Virgin Group, and Amazon. And thanks to our employee-first approach, we’re Meta’s only preferred migration partner for its Workplace customers.

Want to see how you can improve your intranet ROI with Workvivo? Get in touch now for a free 1:1 demo.

The Definitive Guide to Measuring Intranet ROI In 2024