Why employee experience must drive your intranet strategy

Most organizations approach intranet projects backwards.

They focus on making content management easier for the few hundred people who update sites, while ignoring the experience of the tens of thousands who actually use the platform daily. 

Abby Webster from TD Bank learned this lesson while transforming the digital workplace for 95,000 employees across multiple countries and business lines. Her team discovered that prioritizing end-user experience over administrative convenience was the key to creating a platform people actually wanted to use. 

 TD Bank’s old intranet was a classic example of complexity creep. Twelve different landing pages, 40 separate sites, and 150,000 pages created what Abby called “learned helplessness” among employees. People knew information existed somewhere in the system, but finding it required specialized knowledge of where everything lived. 

 “You almost had to have this background expertise in how to navigate the intranet to find the information that you’re looking for,” Abby explained. “They’d be trying to find something, they couldn’t find it, they’ve got a customer in front of them, and then they just get lost and feel helpless.” 

The business impact was immediate and measurable.

With over a million visits per day to the intranet, employees were wasting precious time hunting for processes and procedures needed to serve customers. In a banking environment where customers expect quick answers, this navigation complexity directly affected service quality. 

The transformation required a fundamental shift in thinking.

Instead of optimizing for the 300 content editors, TD Bank designed their new platform around the 95,000 people who needed to find information quickly. This meant making content management slightly more complex in exchange for dramatically improving the search and discovery experience. 

 The results speak for themselves. The new TD Central platform has received overwhelmingly positive feedback, with employees praising how quickly they can find what they need. The platform automatically personalizes content based on employee location and role, updating seamlessly when people move between departments or geographies. 

But the technical solution was only part of the story. TD Bank invested heavily in understanding exactly how employees worked. They conducted detailed conversations about daily routines, asking questions like “When you get up in the morning, what do you do? When you get to the office and turn on your machine, what happens then?“ 

This deep user research revealed that employees needed different types of information at different moments. Someone serving a customer needed instant access to procedures. Someone starting their day wanted personalized news and updates. The platform design reflected these distinct usage patterns. 

The lesson for other organizations is clear.

Before you worry about content management workflows or administrative features, spend time understanding how your employees actually work. Map their daily routines. Identify the moments when they need information most urgently. Then design your intranet to serve those critical moments first. 

As Abby put it, “Put the colleague at the center of everything you do.” When you optimize for the user experience of the many rather than the administrative convenience of the few, you create a platform that truly enables productivity rather than hindering it.”