If you choose to build a leader portal that is integrated into the intranet as a separate site, you’ll need to decide what content you want to store there and how people will find it.
To create intuitive navigation to the leader portal, find a logical home for the pages/site link to live. You might want to consider including the link in a header, adding it to quick links or nesting into an appropriate area of the global navigation.
To determine what goes on the site, look at the type of content and requirements that exist for the team. Leader portals often have similar content to what is stored in your intranet: news, upcoming events, announcements, and a collection of useful resources like policies, procedures and guidelines, etc.
We often will design the leader portal to have its own homepage experience with news, events and announcements. You can then store important resources in document libraries and make them available through the news content or local navigation.
If you’re publishing leader news on the main landing page of the site, you can leverage the same look and feel as your homepage for the sake of consistency. If your intranet supports it, you can also consider using the same tags and metadata or even rolling up the leader content onto the main homepage of the intranet. This ideally would be targeted content and secured, so only leaders would see it visible on the homepage.
Having one area for all this information typically provides a great user experience for your leaders, who would otherwise need to sift through all the various sections of your intranet to find what they are looking for.
Once you have a good vision for the site structure, security and communications strategy of your leader portal, the last consideration is whether you want to enable or promote two-way communication. There are a few different ways you can approach this:
This gives leaders the opportunity to ask questions, provide feedback, and engage with each other. We consider this a lite or basic approach for discussion and promoting engagement. Be sure that you have someone monitoring and responding to these comments; it’s important for engagement to happen not only with the reader, but with the author as well.
Most leaders will likely have questions. It’s best practice to provide a business contact on each news article, so leaders can easily reach out, ask questions and get answers. This can be accomplished by sharing the author’s email address or by encouraging dialogue in the comments section that has been enabled.
If you want to enable a richer conversation experience, you can turn to other Microsoft 365 tools like Townhalls, Viva Engage, Q&A discussions or feedback forums. Creating a space for open dialogue can help build trust and foster a deeper sense of community among the leaders.
Because these tools fall outside of SharePoint, you may need additional help from IT to implement each one, depending on what technology your organization has access to and what you’re familiar with.
If you end up using Viva Engage, you can consider referencing the conversations from within the leader portal news pages. Townhalls can be set up and advertised as upcoming events. This raises awareness of and encourages participation in the townhall from within the leader portal. Remember, the goal is to try to create a cohesive experience across these different platforms and avoid establishing silos that act independently of each other.
We see a lot of value in creating a leader portal within an intranet. It can optimize communication, organize important assets and resources and be a launch pad for community conversation.
A multi-channel approach to communicating with leaders meets them where they are and directs them to the intranet for that secure single source of truth. Most leaders are short on time and just want to complete their tasks, so create a model that drives leaders to that section for easy reference.
You can also facilitate two-way communication to help drive additional clarity and boost engagement, which ultimately helps to create a more informed and empowered leader. Your employees will be grateful that their leaders are organized, aligned and well informed!
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