Summer is right around the corner and is fast approaching. It is crunch time to shed your unwanted intranet clutter before summer vacations take hold. Yes, you read that correctly – we are talking getting your intranet portal slim and trim for the summer.

Summer is a great time to declutter your intranet portal to prepare for the fall, the busiest time of year for many organizations. Slimming down your intranet isn’t a difficult task, it just takes a little elbow grease and good planning.

Operation: Information Declutter

Your intranet portal is a hub of information, although not all of the information residing there remains useful over time. Information and content becomes outdated and irrelevant, which can happen more quickly than you realize.

To slim down and declutter your intranet portal, it is important to go through all your documents, forms, content and policies to ensure only what is relevant and up-to-date has a place on your intranet. This is especially important for outdated policies. It is imperative that these policies are removed from the intranet portal to avoid confusion and ensure all employees are on the same page.

Tip: Sifting through all of your intranet content to ensure it is up-to-date seems like a daunting task. To help move this process along, assign different people areas of the intranet portal to take charge of decluttering. For example, the HR Manager can be in charge of making sure the HR site is decluttered of relevant information and policies.

Remove Irrelevant Intranet Resources

Another thing that could be taking up space on your intranet portal is old, irrelevant discussions, quick polls, surveys, etc. Users won’t mind and will even be grateful if you delete the, “What should our group Halloween costume be?” poll results from 2012.

The intranet portal is a great place to communicate and ask each other’s opinions using polls and discussions. But when these topics no longer become useful, relevant or helpful, it is time to let them go. Keeping old discussions on your intranet may even be harmful in some cases if there have been significant internal changes and someone accidentally refers to an old resource they found on your intranet.

Tip: Not all old discussions need to be removed from your intranet. Read each of them thoroughly and decide if they can still be applied today. If they need a little tweaking, ask someone to update it or start a new discussion on the same topic with more current information.

Declutter Unused Intranet Portal Features

A hidden gem in your intranet portal are Stats and Analytics. This can be an integral tool to help slim down and declutter your intranet portal. Use Stats & Analytics to see which areas of the site are performing well and are most heavily utilized versus what is ignored.

To reduce as much clutter on your intranet portal as possible, you can take the data from your sites and analytics report to determine which areas of the site aren’t being utilized and decommission these areas. Your intranet is a business tool that should help employees accomplish their daily work tasks. If there are areas of the site that aren’t doing this, there is no point in keeping them active.

Tip: After reviewing stats and analytics, we suggest you conduct a quick survey before making final “deletion decisions”. In that case s where the content is still valuable to a few users, consider keeping it,  just revamp it to make it more useful for the majority of users.

Refresh Your Intranet Portal Design

Lastly, take a look at your intranet design and architecture. You want your intranet portal to look its best this summer. Freshen up your intranet portal design or change your theme to make it more visually appealing to your users. It is proven that good intranet design directly relates to higher intranet adoption rates.

Tip: Save your intranet portal design themes so you can reuse them again. For example, when creating seasonal themes this will save you time without having to recreate the National Hug Your Cat Day each year for June 4th.

In addition, this is a great opportunity for you to simplify your intranet portal navigation. During your slim down, make sure your navigation is intuitive and simple to facilitate easy utility for each user. Are your users finding what they need through navigation or with accurate intranet search? If not, take the time reevaluate the navigate avenue on your intranet portal to determine if there are easier or more intuitive paths to get users to the resources they seek.

Tip: To speed this process up, hold an Intranet Portal Scavenger Hunt. Take an hour out of the day to have users try to locate things on your intranet portal. Evaluate how easily users locate certain items through your navigation and/or through intranet search. If items cannot be located or users have a hard time locating certain resources, track and reevaluate these during your slim down planning process.

What are your intranet portal summer slim down tricks? We’d love to hear about them! Share with me by commenting below.