Employee Hub: leaving behind the intranet nobody opens

Almost every company has an intranet. Very few have an intranet employees open of their own accord. The diagnosis, though, varies little from one organisation to the next — and it is rarely a matter of content.

Why traditional intranets are deserted

An interface that has aged. Employees use polished consumer applications every day. A dated intranet starts with a usability handicap that is hard to make up.

The same content for everyone. The same news feed is shown to head office and to the field, to HR and to production. Relevant information drowns in the noise, and users learn to stop looking.

An isolated tool. The intranet lives alongside Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace instead of plugging into it. It becomes one more destination, when what employees want is a single way in.

No access on the move. A significant share of the workforce — field staff, workshops, people on the road — has no fixed desk. An intranet designed for the desktop browser excludes them in practice.

What the Employee Hub approach covers

An Employee Hub does not simply rebuild the internal site: it changes what it is for. It is no longer about publishing, but about connecting each employee to what they need in order to work.

Targeted communication

A feed personalised by profile, entity and location. Important information reaches the right people at the right time, and cross-cutting search makes it possible to find a resource without knowing where it was published.

Services in one place

Everyday procedures — leave requests, expenses, room booking, access to HR tools — become available from a single place, without switching application for every task.

Skills development

Straightforward access to learning paths, and skills tracking. The intranet stops being a top-down channel and becomes a means of support.

The real subject: integration

An Employee Hub does not replace existing tools, it federates them. That is where the project succeeds or fails, and it is the most technical part:

• access to SharePoint and OneDrive documents from the intranet;
• unified search across all content, including Teams;
• synchronisation of profiles and reporting lines with the corporate directory;
• single sign-on;
• integration of calendars and meetings.

Without that integration layer, the Employee Hub becomes exactly what it claimed to replace: one more destination.

What AI brings, and what it does not

Recent platforms include assistance features: natural language search, automatic personalisation of the feed, notification filtering. Properly tuned, they genuinely reduce the time spent looking for information.

What they do not fix is poor document governance. Intelligent search over a badly structured repository simply surfaces obsolete documents faster. Structuring the information remains the prerequisite — AI amplifies order as readily as disorder.

How to frame the project

1. Audit what exists. Measure how the current intranet is actually used and identify the points of friction, rather than starting from a wish list of features.
2. Align the objectives. An intranet project concerns internal communication and HR as much as IT. Without a shared arbitration, it stalls.
3. Choose the platform on the basis of the integrations you genuinely need, mobile support, and how far it can be personalised.
4. Pilot on a limited scope before the global rollout, with representative users — including those who have no desk.
5. Support adoption. This is the most underestimated item, and the one that determines whether the platform will still be used in six months.

Where we stand

ModalB is an official LumApps partner and supports Digital Workplace projects from the initial audit through to rollout, including bespoke integration with the existing information system.

On a purely Microsoft 365 scope, the same logic applies with SharePoint Online and Teams: see our Microsoft 365 expertise.