Best Practices: Engaging and Fun Content

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Fun content is not a waste of business time. It builds up the company culture and gives employees icebreakers to network and connect with their coworkers. Once the business-as-usual content is merged with executive-voiced content, fun activities and social engagement from your employees, your employee intranet will become an engaging, vibrant community!

Fun content is necessary to build and foster company culture!

Engaging and fun content ideas are humorous. Here are some engaging tactics to get employees more addicted to their intranet:

• Communicate the program before launching. Bringing it up at a company meeting and promote it in your communications so people understand the program and know where to go.
• Get the buy-in from your governance committee to ensure everyone is on board.
• Have incentives in place so people can win prizes. Prizes are fun and it spur engagement and help your recognize and congratulate the winners.
• Get all employees involved! Have employees vote on submissions through the simple Like button or elaeving comments.
• Media (such as posting photos and videos) is your friend! The more interactive and media-rich the content, the better.
• Name the initiative: e.g. The Great Company Cook-off
• Plan out the full year and preview to employees next months theme to keep the momentum, here is an example:

Me-first content: Content and resources that respect employees’ innate needs to take care of themselves first. When balanced with purpose driven content, these are great way to drive engagement.

Company-sponsored distractions: Clever, structured ways to encourage intranet usage when employees need to take a break to recharge with interesting or helpful distractions and drive more frequent intranet engagement. 

Enabling feed on your intranet or this site will allow users use it as a forum to share their own articles, funny musings, jokes and life advices. We have seen this type of site take off organically.

When done well, this type of sites can help achieve all of the major benefits of an intranet: connecting distributed employees, boosting culture and employee engagement, bolstering a stronger sense of community, and encouraging employees to take on a growth mindset.

Engaging videos

Intranet usage analytics show that videos are more widely consumed than any other form of content. Videos get consumed up to 4 times more than standard news articles. Here are some ways to produce videos effectively while without sinking too much resources: 

• Employee spotlight videos: Employee spotlight-themed content is very popular among the internal communicators. It’s a great way to learn about your coworkers and drive engagement to the corporate intranet.

• “Person on the Street” videos: You and your team choose a topic, show up unannounced at various coworkers’ desks, ask the question while the camera is rolling, and piece the footage from various interviews together: 

How to create “Person on the Street” videos for engagement:

The rules:

• Brand the series
  These will build on each other and when successful, your coworkers will look forward to new installments.
• Keep a regular cadence
  Do one every month. Set a calendar and stick to a rhythm. This cadence along with your other programmatic series will help drive continuous intranet adoption.
• Keep it low-tech and timely
  You should be comfortably filming with your smartphone and editing content together in something easy like iMovie. The whole thing shouldn’t take more than a few hours of work. 
• Develop a personality
  Identify someone to be your interviewing personality. The consistency will help enforce the content and the publicity will call attention to your internal communications function.
  Pro Tip: Pick someone who’s fun!
• Coach the interviewees to be brief
  Start a question with, “In ten seconds or less...”. Attention spans are short.
• Consciously alternate interviewees
  Over time, you want to be sensitive to who participates. Make sure you cover different locations and departments.
• Keep the videos short
  1-2 minutes is the goal here. You don’t want these things to drag on.