Intranet user surveys are a powerful way to measure how well your intranet is working and, ultimately, how successful it is. Gathering honest feedback from your employees, who use the intranet daily, helps you get a clear picture of what they need, what challenges they face, and what they love about it.
These insights are important for justifying your investments, making improvements, and showing your leadership how valuable the intranet is. Without this feedback, you're making decisions in a vacuum, which can lead to wasted effort and a poorly adopted intranet.
📝 Design effective survey questions
The quality of your survey results depends on the quality of your questions. Here are our best tips for choosing your survey questions. And don't forget to download our PDF with example questions below.
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Focus on Specificity and Clarity: Avoid vague questions. Instead of "Do you like the intranet?" ask specific questions that can be tied to a feature or task.
- Bad: "Do you find the intranet useful?"
- Good: "How relevant and useful are the updates and news on the intranet homepage to your daily work? (1-5 scale)"
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Balance Question Types: Use a mix of different question types to get a comprehensive view.
- Rating Scales (e.g., Likert scale): Excellent for measuring satisfaction, ease of use, and frequency. E.g., "The intranet's navigation is intuitive. (Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree)"
- Multiple-Choice Questions: Great for gathering data on specific habits or preferences. E.g., "When you need to find a company form, what is your preferred method? (a) Search, (b) Navigation menu, (c) Ask a colleague"
- Open-Ended Questions: Essential for gathering rich, qualitative insights. E.g., "What is the single biggest challenge you face when trying to find information on the intranet?"
- Keep it Concise and Respectful of Time: Users are busy. A long, complex survey will have a low completion rate. Aim for a survey that can be completed in less than 5 minutes. Tell users upfront how long the survey will take.
🚀 Distribute and promote your survey
Getting good participation is key. When you promote the survey, explain why it's helpful and place it somewhere your users are most likely to notice it.
- Communicate the "Why": Tell users why their feedback is important and how it will be used to improve the intranet. This helps them understand the value of their participation.
- Direct Placement: Embed the survey directly in your intranet's hero teaser. This makes it incredibly easy for users to find the feedback form to submit feedback.
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Multi-Channel Promotion: Don't rely on just one post about the survey. Announce the survey via:
- A timeline post (or a blog article if you'd like to add more background) on your HR or Company News page, or on another page that all your users are auto-subscribed to.
- A studio post sent out to connected channels (e.g., email, Slack, Teams).
- Send Reminders: Send a reminder about a week before the survey closes. Reminders are a simple, effective way to increase participation and ensure a strong response.
📊 Analyze and act on feedback
Collecting the data is only the first step. The real value comes from analysis and action.
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Categorize and Prioritize Feedback: Once you have the responses, categorize them into themes based on topics that your users raised (e.g., search functionality, content, user interface, etc.). Then, use this data to prioritize a list of actionable tasks.
- High-Priority: Feedback highlighting critical blockers for a large number of users (e.g., "The link to the 'Emergency Contact Procedure' document on the HR page is broken. It leads to a blank page.").
- Medium-Priority: Issues that are frustrating but not critical (e.g., "The homepage has too many different news sections, and it's difficult to find news that's actually relevant to me. I wish it were cleaner.").
- Low-Priority: Minor suggestions or changes that affect a small number of users (e.g., "I wish I could filter the colleagues list by teams in addition to departments to narrow the results down further").
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Close the Feedback Loop: Show users their feedback matters by communicating the results and your action plan in a blog article. This transparency builds trust and encourages future participation.
- Visual Aids: Create an engaging visual summary. Use a simple chart or infographic to show key findings, such as the overall satisfaction score and the most common feedback themes.
- What's Next?: Share your action plan by highlighting the top 3-5 changes you'll be making, including a timeline for each. This will show your users that you've actively listened and are taking steps based on their helpful feedback.
- Measure Progress Over Time: Conducting surveys isn't a one-time event. Schedule larger surveys on a regular cadence (e.g., every 6-12 months). This allows you to measure the impact of your changes. Use a consistent set of core questions in each survey to track satisfaction and performance metrics over time.
Besides your regular comprehensive surveys, why not try using mini-surveys to gather ongoing feedback? They provide a helpful flow of insights that nicely complement your formal survey results. You can implement a simple, quick feedback form through a link button or an embedded MS Forms, or use Haiilo's built-in satisfaction tool to receive the data directly in Haiilo Analytics.
✅ Download example questions
Click to open and download the file!