Who should own your company’s intranet?
If implemented correctly, most of your employees should see or interact with your company’s intranet on a daily or weekly basis. However, in order to have a thriving intranet that your employees get value from, there needs to be a person or team who “owns” your intranet and can work across departments to ensure it continues to be a source to communicate and drive culture across the organization.
So who should “own” your intranet? For starters, we have a few ideas of who shouldn’t own your company intranet.
Your IT department
Yes, your IT department may “own” a lot of the software used at your company, but they aren’t likely to be the primary users of the software, so having it live within that team may not make a ton of sense. If the primary users need to go to another department to ask for budget or administer the software, that will just slow things down across the board. Your IT department may be a stakeholder in your intranet software, but ideally they shouldn’t own it. In more modern solutions like Workshop, then your IT department likely wouldn’t even need to be a stakeholder given how easy it is to set up and administer without technical expertise.
Your Executive team
While the initiatives behind deploying a company intranet may come from someone on the exec team, they are unlikely to be the right folks to own it. Tracking down folks in other departments and making sure the various pages or areas of an intranet are up to date is not the best use of their time. If they own your company intranet, it’s much more likely that it won’t get the attention it deserves.
Who should own your company’s intranet?
Glad you asked. When it comes to owning an intranet, there are two teams that most commonly should own the intranet and it usually depends on the size of the company.
Your HR team
If your company is a few hundred employees or less, your HR department likely owns most of the internal communications and culture creation at your company. Ideally, this team has the budget allocated to spend on resources and tools to help make these things happen in an effective way. Given that they shoulder the brunt of the responsibility for culture and communications, they should also be able to pick the tools they use to do these tasks. R
Your Internal Communications team
Once you get large enough to have a dedicated internal communications team, they might be a likely candidate for owning the intranet. At this size, the Internal Comms team likely won’t be the sole owner, but they may have more at stake with your intranet than the other departments. Giving them ownership of the product they use to do their job is a great way to ensure they are able to continue to work in a more efficient way.
Remember, no matter who “owns” the intranet at your company, the most important thing is to make sure the people using it the most have the appropriate ability to make updates, drive change, and keep the content fresh. As long as you do that, you’re on the right track.
