How some companies keep over 87% of user adoption while others hover at less than 45% and what it costs them

Why Origami did the study

It’s no secret that with a recent rise in remote work, more companies redesign their older intranets.  

But how are these intranets used?

We found that some intranets were showing high adoption and engagement rates, with up to 87% of unique visits each month.

Others were sitting at less than 45% of unique visits per month.

One CIO asked us:

“What’s our intranet worth if only a half of our people use it“

Precisely, less than half of what you spend on your licences, is the answer.

Our goal was to find how companies running leading intranets have managed to get their high adoption, so we can help others replicate their success.

The results were so valuable to insiders, we want to share them to help increase intranet adoption at your organization.

How was the study done

To be objective and have an answer reveal itself, we gathered data from 8 initial participating organizations. Total of about 3,500 users.

We started with some Origami customers and then added non-Origami customers to validate the findings (some were using popular competitor products, and some were using plain SharePoint Online Modern).

The engagement was measured over the six months capturing highs and lows for each month.

As a result, we landed on three key factors explained further.

the findings

We found that many intranets have relatively flat engagement and adoption rates right off the bat after the launch.
The lowest engagement and adoption rate found was 35% with using plain SharePoint Modern in Office 365.

The highest engagement and adoption rate was found to be 87% at Origami customer.

But technical platform was not the sole reason.

How engagement translates into cost

Before jumping into solution, let’s look at how low usage translates into hard costs.

Low engagement often makes sense to Communications Leads. HR can translate engagement to attrition and absenteeism.

But we wanted to connect engagement to hard costs that are easy to measure and understand by all leadership levels.

Suppose your organization pays a certain amount of $’s per each user’s Office/Microsoft 365 licence. Then, 45% of that amount means that you only get half of the output you paid for.

We created this calculator so you can take a snapshot of your current unique intranet visits and calculate just how much it translates to in $’s of underutilized licences. Try it out and see how much you’re leaving on the table with your current intranet user engagement.

Why most intranets have only 45% of unique user visits

To be objective and not simply say that this 80%+ of visits are all the result of the amazing Origami engineering because there is more to it than just a technology.

In fact, the evidence was buried when we analyzed some of our own customer usage stats and found 45% engagement.

We wanted to see how we can bring them up to 80% and more.

Here are the factors we found that contributed to low engagement and adoption:

1. The intranet project was a technical upgrade from an older version of SharePoint, and the focus was mostly on the features and data migration
   

2. Content put on the intranet was not validated before launch to make it easy to find. It was lift-and-shift to Microsoft 365.

   In other cases, where stakeholders were involved, it was assumed that because of the broad stakeholder group input (15 stakeholders in one case), the intranet will automatically be intuitive.
   

3. The Comms team didn’t have access to analytics showing employee content needs, and their communication was not relevant or consistent

What can you do to bring more visitors to your intranet

Here are the top things to help you bring the failing 40% doom spiral to over 80% or more user engagement

1. Focus on usability. Start with understanding the baseline of employee needs. We use both performance analytics and user feedback to draw a clear and measurable picture of your employee needs
   

2. For the content that you have decided to put on your intranet, do an ease-of-use analysis.
   We use automated measurement to see where we thought employees would go for a given task versus where they actually went. The results increase your content find-ability by as much as 70%, which makes your intranet users much happier to come back to the site which was helpful to them
   

3. Continue measuring content engagement by using the data coming from analytics. For this reason, we embedded analytics tools directly into Origami. You can measure the performance of your calls to action, how far along did users scroll on the page and more

You are eligible for a personalized intranet analytics and adoption consultation

* Call with our Enterprise Architect, Yaroslav Pentsarskyy. Available to the first 25 eligible requests.