Promote wellbeing on your intranet

Tree on hillside offering shade

Most intranets these days should have an area to promote wellbeing. However, many intranets can really offer well-intentioned but necessarily limited read-only advice. If your intranet provides basic page editing, it's unlikely you'll be able to really engage with your community and drive behavioural change. Fortunately, there are a number of really positive things you can do to improve your wellbeing pages using simple features your intranet should be able to provide.

  1. Be honest and authentic. Your HR Team should be proud of the advice its giving so make sure everyone who publishes content to your wellbeing pages has their authorship clearly marked. They should also participate actively in responding to comments. Speaking honestly and openly about what does and doesn't work for you will help promote a trusting and sharing culture among staff.
  2. Think about design. I've seen many intranets that either use the standard branding in their wellbeing zone or reach for a sub-brand that is somewhat softer. Each organisation will want to tackle this differently but my own view is that wellbeing areas should have a different feel from the main site. However, I would again stress the need for authenticity. Avoid stock art photographs that do not reflect the real environment or demographic of your users. Real photos of your staff or location are best where possible. If you have control over the colour-scheme so much the better. Your pages should be clear but I think personalised pages with friendly colours (even if these don't look absolutely slickly designed) can help your audience understand that this is a safe and authentic space.
  3. Dovetail your content with national awareness campaigns. As part of your wellbeing content strategy, you should look ahead at national campaigns and use these as springboards for your own publishig schedule.
  4. Invite participation. It should be easy for you to publish blogs as part of your wellbeing area. Staff should be blogging regularly and responding to content. Blog comments can be augmented by enabling commenting on just about every piece of content in your wellbing pages. Turn on commenting. Listen and respond. It's vitality important that any comments are acknowledged and valued.
  5. Get structured feedback. Polls should be really easy to put together and be built into your intranet. If they aren't use one of the many free or low cost services, although please check how this data might be used and make sure you're happy with storage and data protection. Once again, these can be tied to wider national or international themes or provide vital feedback as part of organisational strategy.
  6. Harness staff knowledge. Your staff know better than anyone else what triggers issues around wellbeing and also what can really help. Turn on Hints & Tips or a similar mechanism on your intranet to gain the most from your staff and help share knowledge and widen appreciation of difficult issues. You can tag this information and collate to help better structure advice for your users. Consider anonymous posting if your intranet allows that.
  7. Turn knowledge into action. Wellbeing areas in themselves provide tremendous value at all sorts of levels. However, if they can effect organisational changes then you know things are really working for you. Provide updates to staff about the ways in which feedback has helped to bring about change.

Your intranet should be able to easily provide you with basic interactive tools to effectively promote wellbeing in your organisation. Sereno Intranet provides all the features you need to get up and running immediately with a fully interactive wellbeing area. Please get in touch if you'd like to find out more. Or leave a comment if you have any other ideas about making the most out of your intranet's wellbeing area.