How to know if it’s time for a new intranet

A practical intranet needs assessment for your organization

If your company struggles with communication silos, outdated content, and disconnected employees, it might be time to get an intranet, or upgrade to a new, modern intranet platform.

Organizations often feel that internal communication and knowledge sharing is a lower priority. But if your team is not set up for success, then your company is failing to reach its full potential, directly impacting your bottom line. 

Sometimes the day-to-day pain points are hidden, and in a well-designed intranet can elevate all aspects of your business. 

This is why we created the Intranet Needs Assessment worksheet — a free, downloadable checklist that helps you identify the hidden pain points your organization may be facing. It’s quick, practical, and designed to help you assess the full value of a modern intranet.

What are the signs you need a new intranet?

There are many indicators of why you need a new intranet, and they impact every employee. Ask yourself:

• Are employees relying too much on email, with messages often missed?
• Do company updates take too long to share with no analytics to show who’s reading them?
• Are your deskless or frontline teams feeling left out of communication loops?

If you answered “yes” to any of these, it’s a strong sign you need a better intranet.

Let’s dive further into the key areas where an intranet can make a big impact to your organization’s operations:

1. Communication

You might have strong leadership updates or important news to share, but do employees actually see them?  Research shows that 84% of deskless workers don’t get enough communication from leadership, but yet they make up 80% of today’s workforce. 

• Are messages reaching the right people and are they engaging with them?
• Are there too many disconnected tools (Teams, Slack, email)?
• Do you have analytics on who’s reading company news?
• Are you lacking an easy way to send timely alerts or targeted updates?
• Do you have a mobile-version of your intranet for deskless workers to stay in touch?
   

Explore ThoughtFarmer’s Employee Communication features for centralized communication as well as built-in Intranet Analytics reporting.

2. Knowledge management

When information is scattered or outdated, employees lose trust and waste time searching. Research shows that on average employees spend 3.2 hours a week searching for information. 

• Is critical information buried in shared drives or personal folders?
• Is information duplicated, out of date, and unreliable?
• Are long-standing experts’ knowledge and best practices being lost?
   

ThoughtFarmer’s Content Management System creates a single, searchable source of truth with content governance built in.

3. Processes

Manual workflows, data entry errors, and missing confirmations can create compliance risks in addition to wasting time. 

• Do workflows still depend on manual approvals or paper forms?
• Is it difficult to confirm employees have read required policies?
  

Easy-to-build online forms can automate processes, approvals, read receipts, and onboarding steps — no code needed.

4. Collaboration

If teams don’t know who to contact or what others are working on, collaboration suffers.

• Do employees know who to contact for expertise?
• Is there a space for open discussion and feedback?
• Can people easily find their colleagues in an employee directory and learn more about them?
  

Intranet Collaboration Tools make it easy to connect people, projects, and knowledge.

5. Culture

When employees feel disconnected from leadership or unrecognized for their efforts, engagement drops.

• Is there a way to celebrate employee achievements?
• Are company updates transparent and two-way?
  

With ThoughtFarmer Employee Engagement features, you can strengthen culture and alignment across teams.

6. General admin

The best intranets make it easy for anyone to make changes and post content. 

• Is your intranet accessible and easy to manage? 
• Does it require IT to update and maintain?
• Can navigation and design be easily updated?
  

ThoughtFarmer’s turnkey intranet platform offers intuitive content management, permissions, and a mobile app for every employee – all within a low maintenance cloud-hosted environment with enterprise-grade security. 

Why is assessing your intranet needs important?

Most organizations don’t realize how much time and money they lose to inefficient communication and knowledge management.

By taking five minutes to complete the Intranet Needs Assessment worksheet, you can:

• Identify hidden productivity bottlenecks
• Build a data-driven business case for intranet improvement
• Prioritize your next digital workplace investments
  

It’s a simple exercise that often sparks deeper conversations about digital transformation and employee engagement.

How do you get started?

Download the Intranet Needs Assessment worksheet and share it with your team.

Once you’ve identified your organization’s biggest challenges, see how ThoughtFarmer’s digital workplace platform can help you solve them.

Ready to transform the way your teams connect, communicate, and collaborate? Book a ThoughtFarmer demo today.

Workbook

Download the free Intranet Needs Assessment checklist

Get the worksheet