Everyone Has an Intranet. Almost Nobody Has a Great One.

Think about the last time you needed something at work that you knew existed. The current expenses policy. A deck a colleague built last quarter. The name of the person who actually owns a particular process. You knew it was somewhere. The only questions were where, and how many people you would have to interrupt to find out.

That small, forgettable moment repeats thousands of times a week across an organisation, and it is one of the more expensive things almost nobody puts on a budget line.

The cost nobody measures

It is measurable, though, and the numbers are consistent enough to take seriously. Microsoft's 2023 Work Trend Index, which surveyed 31,000 people across 31 countries, found that 62 percent of us lose too much of the day simply searching for information. Gartner landed in the same territory that year: 47 percent of digital workers say they struggle to find what they need to do their jobs. Go back further and McKinsey's much quoted 2012 study estimated that the average knowledge worker spends close to a fifth of the working week just looking for internal information or tracking down the colleague who has it. Different decades, different methods, same direction of travel.

The cost is not only time. When knowledge lives in people's heads and inboxes rather than anywhere findable, it leaves when they do. Research by Panopto and YouGov put 42 percent of institutional knowledge as unique to the individual who holds it, the sort of thing that walks quietly out of the building on someone's last day. New starters feel the same gap from the other side. Gallup found that only 12 percent of employees strongly agree their organisation onboards people well, and that a strong start makes them far more likely to stay.

None of this stays neatly in the box marked inconvenience. Gallup's most recent State of the Global Workplace put the share of genuinely engaged employees worldwide at around 20 percent, and estimated that low engagement costs the global economy the equivalent of around nine percent of global GDP, a figure it has put at close to nine trillion dollars. An intranet does not fix engagement on its own, and anyone who tells you it does is selling something. But the daily experience of not being able to find things, not knowing what is going on, and feeling like the place is harder to navigate than it should be is exactly the texture of a disengaged workplace. The tool people use to communicate and to actually get things done is part of that picture, for better or worse.

The more interesting question

So far, so familiar. Most people accept that an organisation needs somewhere central for its people to find things. The more useful question, and the one that actually separates the results, is what makes an intranet people use rather than one they abandon. Here the research is unusually clear, because a handful of organisations have been studying it properly for twenty years.

The first thing is almost boringly simple. Good intranets are organised around what people are trying to do, not around the org chart. Nielsen Norman Group, which has usability tested intranets for over two decades, found that structuring content by department is one of the most reliable ways to make it impossible to find. When they timed people completing real tasks, those working on well governed, sensibly centralised sites finished in about 78 seconds, against 123 on the sprawling everyone owns a corner kind. The same information, a third less time, purely down to structure.

The second is search that genuinely works. One search box, in the same place on every page, that looks across documents, people and tools at once. It sounds obvious, and its absence is one of the most common reasons people give up and retreat to bookmarks and asking the person next to them.

The third is relevance. The good ones show you what matters to your role, your team and your location, rather than asking you to assemble your own view. That last part matters more than it looks, because almost nobody customises anything. Left to configure their own homepage, only around one in ten people ever will.

The fourth has changed the most. The best intranets are somewhere you do work, not just somewhere you read notices. The award winning ones reviewed by Nielsen Norman let people book, request, submit, approve and track without leaving the page. An intranet that is only a noticeboard gets visited about as often as a noticeboard. When Step Two, which has run the main global intranet awards for twenty years, looked at what its standout frontline winners had in common, it found daily use rates most internal tools never come near. Mazda's, for one, is opened every day by roughly three quarters of its dealers and staff.

Underneath all of it, someone owns the thing and keeps it alive. The fastest way to kill an intranet is to let its content rot, so that a search returns three versions of the same policy and people stop trusting any of them. The ones that stay useful treat content as something with a lifecycle, created, maintained and eventually retired, rather than uploaded once and forgotten.

What a good one actually costs

At which point the reasonable question is what all of this costs. The honest answer is that it varies enormously, and that the sticker price is the least interesting part of it.

Buy a dedicated intranet platform and you are usually looking at a few pounds per user per month at mid market, less per head at real scale, though most vendors keep the actual figure behind a sales call. Build something bespoke on top of what you already have and UK implementers commonly quote anywhere from around ten thousand pounds for something modest to well over a hundred thousand for a large, heavily tailored build. Add implementation, integrations and the ongoing job of keeping it good, and three year costs for a mid sized organisation frequently land in the low hundreds of thousands. The thing that moves that number is almost never the licence. It is the implementation, the integration work, and whether anyone looks after it once the project team has gone home.

Here is the part that tends to go unsaid. Most organisations are already paying for the foundation of a perfectly good intranet, and have been for years. Microsoft passed 450 million paid Microsoft 365 seats at the start of 2026, and well over 200 million people already use SharePoint, the platform sitting quietly inside those same subscriptions. For a large majority of companies the raw materials of an intranet, the storage, the identity, the permissions, the search, are already bought, already secured, and already there. The waste, more often than not, is not the absence of an intranet. It is owning one and letting it sit idle, or paying a second time for a separate platform that then splits your content across two places and leaves everyone unsure which one to trust.

Which is why the most interesting option is usually the least dramatic one. Take the platform you are already paying for and make it genuinely good, in place, rather than bolting another system onto the side of it. That is the idea behind Athena, which builds the pieces a great intranet actually needs, a real knowledge and article experience, policies people genuinely acknowledge, and content targeted to the right people, directly inside the SharePoint you already have. I mention it not as the point of this piece, but as one example of an approach worth knowing exists.

The question worth sitting with

Because the point of the piece is smaller and more awkward than a product. The question is almost certainly not whether your organisation should have an intranet. You very likely already do, whether anyone calls it that or not. The real question is whether it is the kind people open first thing in the morning, or the kind they have quietly learned to route around. Those are very different things, and the gap between them has surprisingly little to do with technology. It is mostly about whether somebody decided the experience was worth getting right.

If you are not sure which one you have, there is an easy test. Ask the last person who joined how they found their feet in their first week. Then listen for whether it was the intranet that helped them, or the person sitting next to them.

Sources

• Microsoft, 2023 Work Trend Index, "Will AI Fix Work?" (2023): https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/will-ai-fix-work
• Gartner, "47% of Digital Workers Struggle to Find Information" (May 2023): https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-05-10-gartner-survey-reveals-47-percent-of-digital-workers-struggle-to-find-the-information-needed-to-effectively-perform-their-jobs
• McKinsey Global Institute, "The Social Economy" (2012): https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-telecommunications/our-insights/the-social-economy
• Panopto and YouGov, "Workplace Knowledge and Productivity Report" (2018): https://www.panopto.com/company/news/inefficient-knowledge-sharing-costs-large-businesses-47-million-per-year/
• Gallup, "State of the Global Workplace" (2025 data): https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx
• Gallup, onboarding research (2019): https://www.gallup.com/workplace/235121/why-onboarding-experience-key-retention.aspx
• Nielsen Norman Group, "Intranet Usability Guidelines" (2024): https://www.nngroup.com/articles/intranet-usability-guidelines/
• Nielsen Norman Group, "The 10 Best Intranets of 2023": https://www.nngroup.com/articles/intranet-trends/
• Step Two, "Five Highlights from the 2025 Intranet and Digital Workplace Awards": https://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/five-highlights-intranet-digital-workplace-awards-2025/
• Microsoft 365 paid seats, Microsoft FY26 Q2 earnings (January 2026); SharePoint usage, Microsoft 365 Blog (December 2020): https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/12/08/over-200-million-users-rely-on-sharepoint-as-microsoft-is-again-recognized-as-a-leader-in-the-2020-gartner-content-services-platforms-magic-quadrant-report/
• ClearBox Consulting, "Intranet and Employee Experience Platforms Report" (2026), for platform pricing and total cost of ownership context: https://www.clearbox.co.uk/2026-intranet-report-clearbox/