Choosing the right name for your intranet can actually have a significant impact on the way your employees utilise and interact with the system. Just putting your company logo on your platform will inevitably lead to your users calling it ‘the intranet’, which is so uninspiring it will ultimately lead to your company intranet being perceived as just another system your employees have to use. To really promote the usefulness of the system and drive engagement, your employees need to genuinely want to visit your intranet because they find it informative, fun and inspiring.
One step towards better engagement is to ensure your intranet reflects the culture of both your company and its employees. Giving the system its own identity, with its own unique name and branding can really help ensure your intranet platform resonates with your end users, helping your employees to feel like it’s their intranet.
Intranet names need to be inspiring, memorable and have a meaningful association for your employees to really ensure you are creating an engaging, enjoyable digital workplace.
Because your intranet’s name should be unique and personal to your organisation, we’ve decided not to do the generic list of name suggestions, because that defeats the object. Instead, we’re sharing some best practice advice to help you choose the right name for your company’s intranet software so that it truly resonates with your end users.
Four Top Tips For Choosing Your Intranet’s Name
1. Organize a Naming Contest
One of the best ways to ensure your employees feel connected to your intranet system and interact with it daily, is to actually let them be the ones who choose the name. Holding a naming competition is a great way to raise awareness and get people excited about the system, and by utilising your intranet survey and polling tools for the naming contest you’re also actively encouraging your employees to utilise the intranet. A naming content is a really proactive way to drive engagement and collaboration at the very early stages of your intranet.
Have a suggestion box where employees can share their naming ideas, and even taglines to go with the brand name. Once you’ve gathered all the suggestions, set up a poll where your employees can vote on the best suggestions. By actively letting your users choose your intranet’s identity in this way, you can ensure you are choosing a name that appeals to the majority of your users.
2. Create a Name Unique to Your Organisation
Choosing something generic is uninspiring and doesn’t encourage engagement. So why not try a more personal touch by choosing a name that uses your company’s lingo or are specifically relevant to your company culture. For example, TripAdvisor’s employee intranet is named “Passport”, and Mercedes Benz is called “Pitstop”. Making your intranet name a clever and witty pun of your working environment helps employees to feel more enthused about using the system because the name is actually relevant and resonates with them and your organisation, helping to create a more personal connection with your intranet. Employees will appreciate a clever name, so get creative and watch it spark engagement!
3. Get Creative With the Branding Persona
Taking the time to craft a unique identity for your intranet is 100% worth it. Designing a unique logo and style for your new intranet really helps to showcase the intranet’s worth to your employees, and makes it far more appealing than just another dull system with the company logo on it. If your employees can see that your company is proud of its intranet by taking the time and care into delivering a quality product for their experience, then your employees will be more likely to engage with your new intranet. Having a uniquely branded digital workplace also reinforces the employees' perspective that this is a their space. Creating a sense of ownership and connection between your employees and their intranet helps to flatten those top-down comms, sparking communication and collaboration, and helps to increase retention rates where staff actually feel valued, because you're delivering them value.
4. Never Underestimate The Power of an Acronym
You can also give better meaning to your Intranet by using acronyms as it helps in allowing the employees to relate well with your organisation. For example, Dee Beers Forever’s intranet uses an acronym name of - “SPARKLE” which means System Providing Access To Research, Knowledge, Learning and Education. An acronym is always useful because it clearly defines main purpose of your intranet's existence. Intranet names which are appealing and reflect the core values of your organization and its employees can be easily represented through acronyms and makes association easy for the employees as well.
In a Nutshell - Names Matter! Intranet names have lot of significance in the organization as they are not just used for the sake of aesthetics, but they have a larger role to play in terms of building positive association for your company and promoting a vibrant Intranet culture.
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Call: 020 7099 6370 Email: hub@pancentric.com
