Your intranet should be the traffic center of your employee experience. It’s where leaders share knowledge, company culture takes root, and distributed teams can come together as one.
Despite this, Simpplr’s 2025 State of Internal Communications and Intranet Technology report finds that, for many companies, the intranet is becoming a ghost town. Staffbase and research house YouGov’s 2025 Employee Communication Impact Study backs that assertion up: their study found that only about a third of U.S. employees say they get most of their company news from the intranet, far below the global average.
With dwindling traffic, what should be a central piece of your communication strategy might seem more like a digital mausoleum for outdated policies, stale articles, and expired documents. Often this isn’t a training or tech issue. It’s a sign that your intranet doesn’t align with how your employees actually work.
Fortunately, you can always transform your intranet into a true speedway of engagement. It starts with rethinking your intranet from the ground up, starting with the platform itself, and getting clear on how your organization will engage with it.
How intranets go bad
The decline of an intranet isn’t a random occurrence, but rather part of a predictable, self-perpetuating pattern. A bad user experience drives low adoption. Low adoption kills investment and attention, which then further degrades the user experience. Organizations caught in this spiral aren’t just wasting money; they’re actively hindering collaboration and employee engagement.
Many workers find their company’s intranet is difficult to use due to confusing navigation, slow loading, and unreliable search. Dependence on IT creates bottlenecks, and manual content and page maintenance drains resources, leading to poor content quality with outdated pages and documentation scattered across platforms.
Perhaps most critically, many intranets leave frontline workers entirely out of the equation. Simpplr estimates that 80% of the global workforce is “deskless,” including retail associates, healthcare workers, manufacturing teams, and field personnel. Yet Staffbase’s study states that only 9% of these employees are very satisfied with internal communications, and an incredible 12% say they never receive communication from senior leadership. These workers need access to critical information just as much as their desk-bound colleagues. But conventional intranets often overlook their access needs, so logging in becomes an ordeal.
No wonder employees feel so frustrated that they actively avoid using the intranet at all.
Who’s the boss?
On top of technical limitations, intranets often fall victim to internal conflict.
Simpplr found that IT controls internal communications budgets in nearly half of the companies surveyed. Unsurprisingly, IT professionals’ satisfaction with intranet functionality far exceeds that of their colleagues in internal communications (92% vs. 76%, according to the report). This is because the two camps are solving for completely different problems. IT prioritizes technical performance and back-end integration, while IC and HR need an intuitive interface that enables content creation without extensive technical knowledge.
This dynamic explains why many legacy systems — despite their technical capabilities — so frequently prove maddening for comms teams. While these systems may excel at document management and offer strong enterprise integration, they weren’t built with employee communication in mind. With technical interfaces, limited mobile optimization, and barriers to content creation, the result is a compromise that satisfies IT but frustrates communicators.
This misalignment is why non-IT departments are nearly twice as likely to want to switch from custom-built systems to dedicated, all-in-one platforms, where users report 31% fewer process challenges. Platforms like Staffbase, Simpplr, Unily, or Interact consistently rank as Leaders in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Intranet Packaged Solutions.
The modern intranet advantage
The good news is that modern solutions can revive your intranet into a sophisticated hub that employees actually find useful.
Employees of organizations with modern intranets are more than twice as likely to rate their internal communications as “excellent” — 30% compared to just 13% for those without. This gap extends across key metrics. Among organizations with modern intranets:
- 83% report higher employee engagement (compared to 69% of those without)
- 78% report higher productivity (compared to 63% of those without)
- 67% report higher revenue impact (compared to 54% of those without)
These advantages stem from a fundamental shift in how intranets work. Modern platforms don’t simply broadcast generic content to everyone. They use powerful AI features to deliver personalized content based on role, behavior, and context. And the use of these tools is rapidly rising: Gartner predicts that, by 2027, 25% of large enterprises will use AI-powered digital experience platforms to orchestrate personalized employee experiences.
As a result, organizations with modern intranets simultaneously see higher rates of AI adoption and intranet engagement, better preparing employees for the future of work. Simpplr found that employees at such organizations view AI positively at much higher rates (74% vs. 48%) and report using AI tools in their daily work more frequently (60% vs. 27%).
Where to start
The most important consideration when transforming your intranet is whether employees will actually use it. A successful modern intranet usually includes:
- Mobile accessibility, including push notifications and seamless smartphone interfaces — critical when 80% of the workforce is deskless
- System integration, including single sign-on to create a unified digital workspace and advanced security
- Intelligent personalization, with relevant content automatically surfaced by AI
- Intuitive operation, including natural language search and clear navigation
- Embedded adoption, which requires making the intranet central to onboarding, providing shortcuts and video training, and continuously driving refinement through employee feedback
- Sustainable governance, including scheduled content reviews, automatic expiration dates, and distributed ownership across teams
- Executive engagement, which signals the intranet’s strategic importance through regular leadership updates and responses to feedback
- Native and advanced AI, that includes employee-facing features such as AI assistants as well as AI content development and advanced measurement and analytics
The competitive reality
The performance divide between modern and legacy intranets is undeniable. While 91% of companies have an intranet, organizations with effective digital workplaces are pulling ahead with measurable advantages. Organizations that delay modernization face the loss of millions of dollars per month in lost productivity and missed opportunities, while their competitors attract and retain talent more effectively, reap the benefits of higher employee engagement, and even see higher revenue.
The question for every leader and communicator is simple but critical: Is your company’s digital workplace an engine for growth, keeping employees on the right path, or is it silently holding you back?
Contributors
Scott Kaul
Senior Consultant
With years of experience as a journalist and financial consultant, Scott has a talent for capturing the interest of readers. He helps companies communicate effectively with their employees, bringing clarity to complex information and making it accessible for all.
Jeff Lewonczyk
Director
Jeff is a strategist and award-winning illustrator with a background in theater, music and arts advocacy. A resident of Brooklyn, he directs musical comedies and helps clients connect with their audiences through compelling stories and messaging.
