An intranet should contain the information employees need to do their job and to feel part of the organisation — structured into four layers: operational essentials, policies and procedures, company news, and people. Anything that does not fit one of those four probably belongs somewhere else.
The most common intranet failure is not too little content. It is too much of the wrong kind, with nobody responsible for keeping any of it current.
The four-layer content model
| Layer | Contains | Update frequency | Owner |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Operational | Roster, shift swaps, payslip links, who to call | Daily / live | Operations |
| 2. Reference | Policies, procedures, SOPs, forms, training | As changed | HR / Compliance |
| 3. News | Announcements, updates, results, changes | 2–3 per week | Comms / Leadership |
| 4. People | Directory, recognition, new starters, milestones | Continuous | Everyone |
The layers do different jobs. Operational is why people open the app. Reference is why they trust it. News is why they return. People is why it feels like somewhere they work rather than a document store.
An intranet missing layer one has an adoption problem. An intranet missing layer four has an engagement problem.
Layer 1 — Operational essentials
The content that makes the app necessary rather than optional. In most frontline organisations that means:
- The roster, or a direct link to it
- Shift swap and availability process
- Payslip and leave request links
- Who to contact for what, by situation
- Site-specific opening and closing procedures
- Emergency and incident contacts
If you put nothing else in, put the roster in. It is the one thing every employee checks every week, and it converts an optional app into a necessary one without any persuasion.
Layer 2 — Reference content
Policies, procedures, forms and training material. The two rules that matter more than volume:
One version, and it is current. The value of a document library is not that documents exist — it is that the version people find is the version they should be following. Superseded PDFs circulating in email are precisely the problem you are solving.
Mandatory items need acknowledgement. For anything compliance-critical, publishing is not enough. You need a record of who read it and when, which is covered in intranet compliance for frontline teams.
Audit reference content by search, not by structure. Look at what people actually searched for in the last month and could not find. That list is your content plan, and it is almost always shorter and more practical than the one produced by asking department heads what should be on the intranet.
Layer 3 — News and announcements
Two to three posts a week is roughly right for most organisations. Daily is unsustainable and starts to feel like noise; weekly is not enough to make the feed worth checking.
| Post type | Frequency | Target audience |
|---|---|---|
| Operational update | As needed | Affected sites only |
| Company news | Weekly | All |
| Recognition | 2–3 per week | All, or site |
| New starter introduction | As they join | Their site |
| Leadership message | Monthly | All |
| Compliance / mandatory | As required | Relevant roles |
Target everything. The fastest way to train people to ignore notifications is to send a kitchen procedure update to the entire organisation. Publishing to everyone is a habit worth breaking early.
Prosper Intranet & Hub Publish once, target precisely Prosper targets every post by site, role, team or employment type — and reports read rates per audience, so you can see whether a message reached the people it was for. See Prosper Intranet & HubLayer 4 — People content
The layer most often treated as optional and the one that determines whether the app feels alive.
- An employee directory with photos, roles and sites
- Recognition posts tied to company values
- New starter introductions
- Work anniversaries and milestones
- Team and site highlights
Recognition is the highest-value item here. In frontline work most exceptional effort happens where nobody senior is watching, and a recognition feed is often the only mechanism making it visible across sites.
What does NOT belong on an intranet
Restraint matters as much as content. These commonly end up on intranets and should not.
| Content | Why not | Where it belongs |
|---|---|---|
| Urgent operational messages | Needs guaranteed delivery | Push notification or chat |
| Individual performance data | Confidential to two people | Performance module, private |
| Live conversation | A feed is not a conversation | Team chat |
| Every historical document | Buries what is current | Archive, out of search |
| Personal contact details | Privacy risk | Directory with in-app messaging only |
| Draft or under-review policies | Creates version confusion | Keep out until approved |
Governance: who owns what
The question that determines whether an intranet is still useful in year two. Content without an owner becomes stale, and stale content is why people stop returning.
Assign explicitly
- A named owner per content layer, not a department
- A review date on every reference document
- A publishing cadence with someone accountable
- Site-level posting rights for local content
- A quarterly audit of what has not been touched
Decide up front
- Who can publish to all sites versus one site
- Whether comments are on, and who moderates
- How long news posts stay in the feed
- What gets archived and when
- Who removes content when a policy is superseded
Giving everyone publishing rights to every audience. It feels collaborative and it produces a feed where a single-site parking notice reaches four hundred people. Site-level posting for local content and a small group for organisation-wide posts is the structure that holds.
Content for frontline and multi-site organisations
Write for a phone on a break. Three short paragraphs, not a page. If it needs to be long, put a summary at the top and the detail below.
Let sites publish locally. A venue manager posting about their own site produces more relevant content than head office ever will, and it is the strongest driver of local adoption.
Assume no context. A casual working one shift a fortnight has missed most of what happened. Posts that assume familiarity exclude the people who most need informing.
Put procedures where the work happens. An SOP is useful on the floor, at the moment, on a phone — not in a folder in the back office.
A quarterly content audit
Frequently asked questions
Four layers: operational essentials (roster, contacts, processes), reference content (policies, procedures, forms), news and announcements, and people content (directory, recognition, milestones). Operational content is what makes the app necessary rather than optional.
Two to three posts a week for most organisations. Daily becomes noise and is unsustainable; weekly is not enough to make the feed worth checking.
Urgent operational messages needing guaranteed delivery, individual performance data, live conversation, every historical document, personal contact details, and draft policies still under review.
A named individual per content layer rather than a department, with a review date on every reference document and a publishing cadence someone is accountable for. Content without an owner goes stale, and stale content is why people stop returning.
Site-level posting rights for local content and a small group for organisation-wide posts. Giving everyone rights to every audience produces a feed where a single-site parking notice reaches the whole organisation.
Quarterly: list anything not updated in six months and archive or refresh it, check search terms that returned no results, review read rates by post type, verify mandatory documents are current, and ask three frontline employees what they cannot find.
Short — three paragraphs, readable on a phone during a break. Put a summary at the top if detail is needed below, and assume no prior context, because a casual working one shift a fortnight has missed most of what happened.
The roster, or a direct link to it. It is the one thing every employee checks every week, and it converts an optional app into a necessary one without any persuasion required.
Content that reaches the right people
Target every post by site, role or team, track read rates per audience, and keep one current version of every policy with acknowledgement built in.