Your Intranet Is a Graveyard (And Nobody's Coming to the Funeral)

Let's have an honest conversation.

Your company spent six figures on an intranet platform. It's got sections for everything: company news, policies, the culture hub, that wellbeing page someone set up in 2022 and never touched again. And yet, every time you post something there, you can hear actual tumbleweed rolling through the digital corridors.

The average employee visits their company intranet once a week at most — and usually only because someone told them they had to.

So why are we still treating the intranet like it's the answer to internal communication? Spoiler: the platform was never the problem. The content was.

What's Actually Going On

An intranet doesn't fail because the tech is bad. It fails because it's treated like a filing cabinet rather than a destination. Nobody goes to a filing cabinet for fun. Nobody thinks "ooh, I wonder what's on the company wiki today." But they do open their phones, check Instagram, scroll LinkedIn, and watch a video someone sent them in a WhatsApp group — all before they've had their morning coffee.

Your employees are human beings with genuinely high content standards. You're competing with that, whether you like it or not.

The intranet should be a place your people want to visit — not somewhere they're sent by a passive-aggressive reminder email.

Here are three ways to breathe life back into your digital home base.

1. The "What's Actually Happening" Weekly Digest

The Problem: Your intranet has news posts, but they're either too formal, too late, or both. By the time something's published, everyone already heard it in a meeting or on Slack.

The Fix: Create a short, personality-driven weekly digest that lives on the intranet homepage. Not a press release. Think one punchy paragraph per story, written like a human being wrote it (because one should). Include something that made the team laugh that week. Give it a name. Make it a thing people look for.

Why it works: Consistency builds habit. If people know something worth reading goes live every Monday morning, they'll actually show up for it.

2. The Employee-Generated Content Drop

The Problem: All content is coming from the comms team or leadership, and it shows. It reads like an announcement, not a conversation.

The Fix: Give one employee per month a "takeover" slot on the intranet. They write a piece, share a project they're proud of, or tell a story about how they actually solved a problem at work. Keep it short, keep it real, give them a loose format and get out of the way.

Why it works: People read content from people they recognise. It builds community, surfaces hidden expertise, and makes the intranet feel alive rather than curated.

3. The "Prove It's Worth Your Time" Challenge

The Problem: People don't visit because they don't see the value. They've been burned before — clicking through to find a PDF that hasn't been updated since 2019.

The Fix: Run a 30-day campaign where something genuinely useful, funny, or exclusive lives on the intranet every single day. A team meme. A how-to video. A Friday quiz. A shoutout. Make it worth the click, consistently, for a month — then watch the habit form.

Why it works: Behaviour change needs reinforcement. Give people a reason to come back, and eventually they will.

The takeaway

Your intranet isn't broken. It's just boring. And boring is a choice.

If you want your employees to show up for internal content the same way they show up for content they actually like, you have to make it worth their while. That's not a tech problem. That's a creativity and strategy problem — and that? We can absolutely fix.

[Let's make your intranet a place people actually want to visit]