A good intranet is critical to the success of your organization. Especially in a remote or hybrid workplace where employees now require a digital/virtual headquarters to access documents, people, and news. A perfect intranet can also play a large role in keeping employees engaged.
Whether you’re choosing an intranet for the first time, replacing one that’s fallen out of use, or checking how yours compares to award winning intranets, this checklist covers the 15 intranet features that matter most and why each one makes a difference for your employees.
What feature should an intranet have?
1. Personalized content
A great intranet is sticky, and has a way of keeping employees coming back day after day. This requires not just new and frequent content, but content that is personalized to its users. Personalized content also removes the ‘noise’ of any content that is not relevant to employees. Be sure that your intranet platform includes feature that support tailored user experience.
2. Interactive online forms
An intranet should be interactive and allow for feedback, surveys, and form creation. Things like hardware requirements, vacation requests, or benefits enrolment can all be easily accommodated through your intranet.
3. Self-service features
No one has time or patience for confusing navigation. Your intranet should make it easy for employees to find what they are looking for, so if there are links and content you know are popular, make sure you include that content up front, or in quick links. Determining which pages are the most popular is another topic altogether, and you can learn more about optimizing intranet navigation through a process called task testing.
4. Governance and permissions
Governance features keep your intranet accurate and secure as it grows. They make sure every page has an owner, outdated content gets reviewed, and people only see what they’re meant to see.
Start with the ability to assign content owners to pages and sections, so the team closest to the content keeps it current. Scheduled review reminders prompt owners to check their pages before information goes stale. Permissions and access controls let you limit sensitive content, like HR policies or leadership updates, to the right groups.
5. Powerful intranet search functionality
Employees will lose faith in their intranet if they cannot find the information they want at the speed they expect. Your intranet should allow faceted and filtered search and should pretty much resemble the ease of Google search. Anything less is wasted time—and money. Ideally, it should also allow for search across connected, external drives.
6. Design, theme, and branding
Your intranet should feel like an extension of your own brand. Some intranet solutions are locked down and don’t allow for branding elements and personalization, which is such a shame—particularly if you have a vibrant workplace culture. We have a lot of customers that take intranet design to an entirely new level, and no surprise, these are also the customers who maintain the highest engagement and visitation rates.
Check out our Lookbook for a showcase of examples of how you can tailor your intranet to suit your brand and culture.
7. Employee onboarding and training
Employees are at the center of your organization, and their journey and lifecycle (from their first day on the job to their last day) should be supported on the intranet. For example, where are your employees currently accessing onboarding material? Where are they completing learning and development opportunities? And, is there a place for employees to feel appreciated and rewarded for their efforts? All of this can and should occur within your intranet.
8. Quiet and useful notifications
There is a fine line between notifying employees and bothering them. A good intranet accomplishes this by ensuring notifications are purposeful. One way to achieve this is to allow users to choose which pages they follow and which they don’t. A perfect intranet also makes it easy to sign up for and manage summary digest emails which keep employees notified on the pages they follow.
9. Ability to broadcast emergency communications
Notifications are a great way to keep employees informed, however, when we get too many notifications, many of us choose to turn-off notifications, which can be problematic in the event of an emergency. This is when you need an emergency broadcast alert system on your intranet. This empowers communications professionals with an easy, efficient way to send quick all employee alerts about important news.
10. Built-in employee newsletters
Employee newsletters remain one of the most reliable ways to reach everyone, especially staff who don’t visit the intranet every day. When newsletters are built-in intranet feature, comms teams can create, send, and track them in one place, without paying for and managing a separate email tool.
The most useful newsletter tools let you pull existing intranet stories straight into an email, use templates so every issue looks polished, and target audiences by location or department. Built-in tracking shows open and click rates, so you can see what’s landing with readers.
There’s a bonus, too. Every newsletter link brings readers back to the intranet, which helps keep traffic and engagement growing over time.
11. A mobile app
Mobile apps help keep employees connected—particularly deskless employees. For many, ‘work’ has become something we do, rather than a place to go. This has made it more challenging for employees to stay updated and informed on critical news and information. A solid mobile app is a great way to stay connected and notified about important news or updates. It’s also a great way to improve intranet adoption.
12. AI Assistant for question-led search
An AI assistant lets employees ask questions in plain language and get a direct answer drawn from your intranet’s content. Instead of scrolling through search results, someone can ask “How many vacation days do I get?” or “Who approves expense reports?” and get the answer in seconds.
The best AI assistants do three things well. They draw only on content your organization has published, so answers reflect your actual policies. They respect permissions, so employees only get answers from content they already have access to. They also link back to the source page, so people can check the details and trust what they’re reading.
The payoff goes both ways. Employees spend less time hunting for information, and your comms and HR teams field fewer “where do I find…?” questions.
13. An employee directory with rich profiles
An employee directory helps people find the right colleague fast, whether that’s a name, a role, a department, or someone with a specific skill. In a hybrid or multi-location organization, it’s often the only way to put a face to a name you’ve only seen in an email.
A strong directory goes beyond names and phone numbers. Look for profiles that show each person’s role, team, location, and contact details, plus room for photos, bios, and areas of expertise. An org chart helps employees see how teams fit together and who reports to whom. Expertise search means someone can look up “Spanish speaker” or “payroll” and find the person who can help.
14. Integrations with the tools your team already uses
Integrations connect your intranet to the tools employees use every day, so it becomes part of their workflow instead of one more place to check. For most organizations, that starts with Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, Teams or Slack, and single sign-on (SSO).
Look for an intranet that can surface documents from SharePoint or OneDrive, send announcements into Teams or Slack, and sync employee details from your HR system so profiles stay current automatically. Single sign-on means one less password to remember and a faster path to logging in, which makes a real difference to adoption.
15. Analytics and reporting
Intranet analytics show how employees use the intranet: which pages they visit, what they read, and what they search for. That data helps internal communications and IT teams improve content and prove the intranet’s value to leadership.
At minimum, you’ll want reporting on page views and unique visitors, readership on key announcements, and popular search terms. Pay close attention to searches that return no results. They show you exactly what employees are looking for and can’t find, which makes them some of the most valuable content gaps to fix first.
As you can see, it’s about more than just intranet features–it’s about delivering a superior employee experience where employees feel connected to each other, informed on company news, and empowered with the knowledge and tools they require to do their job. Improve your intranet by checking these boxes and let us know how it goes! Explore all of ThoughtFarmer’s 240+ intranet features.
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