Intranet Buckets

Posting a steady stream of fresh content to your intranet is easier if you have a handful of standing content buckets you fill weekly or monthly. Some of these ideas also provide quick and simple ways for leadership or employees to provide content, with minimal work for the communications team.

Tiny interviews

This is a great way to help keep leadership’s vision top of mind and make complex subjects more accessible. Pose just a few questions on one narrow topic to a member of your executive leadership team. Encourage them to keep their explanations simple and limit their responses to just a few sentences. Give leaders a choice of answering the questions by email or in a 10-minute phone call. Or you could conduct the interview via Zoom or Teams and edit into a very short video. Do what you can to make it easy for them to participate.

Employee mad lib

Give employees a Mad Lib style template to tell their life story. It might begin “I was born in ___. When I was a kid, I was ___. The hardest challenge I’ve ever had to overcome was ___. When we know someone’s story, we feel like we know them. And most people are more comfortable collaborating with people they know. Employee stories can also help build connections across geography for a global company and are particularly useful for building human connections while so many employees are working remotely.

Work spotlights

Who’s doing some of the coolest work in your company? You might start a series of intranet pieces that begin by asking an employee one question: What are you working on right now that’s really exciting to you? The responses can provide a better line of sight into various siloed functional areas and create shared pride in the company’s expertise and accomplishments. One of the easiest ways to collect this content is to ask leaders to suggest people on their team who might participate, and then email those employees a templated questionnaire.

Cosmo quiz

Remember all those magazine quizzes that promised to determine your personality type? Create a quiz for your leadership team with questions about their favorite books or movies, their childhood nickname, the historic figures they’d most like to have at a dinner party and other random facts. Without asking them anything too personal, you can still humanize your leadership by providing a glimpse of the personality behind the title. Expand to include several layers of management and you could post a new one every week.

Company trivia

Who rang the bell at the stock exchange the day your company went public? In what movie did your product get a mention? What were the other potential company names that the founders considered? Which of your global offices is the furthest distance away from headquarters? Dig up some interesting trivia about your company and post a weekly or monthly trivia quiz. Boost participation by offering prizes. You might do a raffle of all correctly completed entries for a gift card or company swag.