Your intranet is the heartbeat of your internal culture, collaboration, and productivity. Effective internal communication (from top to bottom, bottom to top, and across levels) on this platform is extremely important. Yet, too often, leaders, the very individuals who shape organizational direction and culture, remain on the sidelines.

This is a strategic oversight. For an intranet to truly work, active leadership involvement is a must-have. So, how can you turn this knowledge into consistent, meaningful engagement with your busy leaders? 

Align with business priorities

Leaders are driven by outcomes. To get their attention and commitment, you need to demonstrate how intranet involvement directly supports existing strategic objectives and KPIs.

• Connect to the Bottom Line: Is your organization focused on employee retention, productivity, innovation, or cultural transformation? Show how leadership presence on the intranet can:
  • Reduce Turnover: By fostering a sense of belonging and openness, leaders can help employees feel genuinely valued and well-informed, which can positively influence retention.
  • Boost Productivity: Open and consistent communication from leadership helps to eliminate confusion and minimize wasted effort. It allows leaders can quickly share important information and clarify the strategic direction for everyone involved.
  • Drive Innovation: When leaders seek and respond to employee ideas on the intranet, it shows that innovation is truly valued. This nurtures a more engaged and creative workforce in which everyone can contribute their unique perspectives.
  • Strengthen Culture: When leaders actively demonstrate the company values through their intranet activities, it truly strengthens your company culture.
• Highlight Cost Savings: A well-used intranet can certainly help cut down on expensive town halls, lengthy email chains, unnecessary Teams conversations, and frustrating information searches. Quantify these savings where possible.
• Solve Their Problems: Ask leaders about their communication challenges. Do they struggle to reach teams? Do messages get lost in email? Position the intranet as their solution to these pain points.

Make it easy

Leaders are time-constrained. The easier you make it for them to engage, the more likely they are to do so.

• Provide a "Done for You" Service: Use their assistants or similar to help with ghostwriting posts, drafting announcements, or creating content on their behalf. They can easily review and approve everything, and if they find it valuable and convenient, they can later choose to take on more ownership.
• Offer Content Prompts and Templates: Provide a list of suggested topics relevant to their role and the organization's goals. Suggest using templates for different post types (e.g., "Weekly Update," "Celebrating Team Success").
• Leverage Existing Content: In the beginning, suggest that leaders repurpose content they've already created for other platforms. If they're attending an event and post on LinkedIn, suggest posting a brief notice from that on their personal timeline, along with some engaging images. That said, as they get familiar with the intranet, encourage your leaders to post there first, and only after that on other platforms. This way, news is shared internally first, making employees feel that leaders value them more than their social media followers.
• Short, Scannable Formats: Emphasize that not every post needs to be a long essay. Short timeline updates, bullet points, videos, or images can be highly effective. Their intranet content doesn't always need to be formal.
• Provide Training & Coaching: Offer training sessions on the intranet's features and best practices for leadership communication. This isn't just about how to click buttons; it's about what to communicate and why it matters.
• Integrate into Existing Workflows: Can intranet updates be tied to existing meeting cadences or reporting schedules? For example, after a quarterly review or All Hands meeting, a leader could share a quick summary and outlook on the intranet.

Lead by example (from within the Comms team)

You can't expect leaders or users to be active unless you're leading by example.

• Be Intranet Power Users: The intranet team and internal communicators should be the most active and visible users. Post regularly, engage with content, and showcase the platform's capabilities. And find regular power users by setting up an intranet champions network.
• Showcase Success Stories: When a leader does post, highlight their success! Share engagement metrics (reactions, comments, views, sentiment) with them privately. Acknowledge their contributions in newsletters or team meetings to promote positive behavior.
• Curate and Promote Leader Content: Don't just let their posts sit there. Share them and include them in other comms (e.g., a "Leader Spotlight" in your newsletter) to maximize visibility and reinforce their impact.

Invite interaction & feedback

An intranet is not just a channel for top-down communication. Leaders need to see it as a place for discussion.

• Encourage Comments and Questions: Explicitly ask leaders to end their posts with a question or use a poll to encourage interaction. Try to avoid disabling comments on posts unless it's really necessary. Keeping the comment section open helps show employees that their voices matter and are valued.
• Commit to Responding: Encourage our leaders to reply to comments and questions promptly and sincerely. Even saying, "Great question, I'll look into that!" demonstrates genuine engagement.
• Showcase Feedback in Action: When employee feedback from the intranet leads to a positive change or a new initiative, highlight this connection in a new post: "Based on your comments on [Leader's Name]'s post about [topic], we've decided to implement [initiative]!" This demonstrates that engagement truly leads to impact.
• Use Data to Prove Value: Track and report on content metrics related to leadership posts. Which topics get the most views? Which formats receive the most comments? Use this data to refine your strategy and show leaders the tangible impact of their efforts.

For helpful ideas on encouraging users to interact with content, take a look at Turning viewers into interactors on your intranet.

Create a safe space

It's common to see leaders very active on LinkedIn but quieter on the intranet. This isn't due to a lack of interest in communicating, but often comes from a feeling of vulnerability when posting internally. 

Your goal should be to make the intranet feel like a safe and valuable space for leaders to connect with their workforce. By posting on the intranet first, leaders can build direct, internal connections before sharing externally on platforms like LinkedIn.

• Emphasize Psychological Safety: Reassure leaders that the intranet is an internal environment where authentic communication, including asking questions or acknowledging challenges, is encouraged and seen as a strength, not a weakness.
• Define "Appropriate" Vulnerability: Help leaders understand that vulnerability doesn't mean airing all grievances. It means sharing insights, admitting when a decision was tough, asking for input, or acknowledging uncertainty where appropriate. This builds trust and relatability.
• Highlight the "Inside Story" Advantage: Position the intranet as the place for the "real talk": the context, challenges, and nuances that can't be shared externally on LinkedIn.
• Coach on Handling Difficult Comments: Provide guidance on how to respond to critical or challenging comments constructively, transparently, and professionally. This builds confidence and demonstrates a commitment to open dialogue. Learn more in Best practices for interpreting and responding to negative sentiment on your intranet.