If you’ve read this piece here, you already know that personalizing your Confluence intranet can improve employee engagement and productivity. 

As a quick refresher, a personalized intranet should:

• anticipate user needs
• make information more accessible
• reflect your company’s culture and brand

If you’ve decided it’s time to upgrade the user experience on your Confluence intranet and boost engagement with personalization, you’ve come to the right place. In this post, we’ll walk you through three areas ripe for personalization — and show you how you can achieve that with Refined Sites.

1. The homepage (and landing pages/space overviews)

Imagine a new employee logging into your company intranet for the first time and their dismay upon realizing it looks exactly like the intranet from their previous three companies. Your brand is nowhere to be found, and they are left to wade through a sea of pages and spaces — much of it irrelevant to their role and needs.

There’s a golden opportunity for you here to strengthen your employee branding and increase employee engagement — which Gallup shows can improve profitability by 21% and reduce absenteeism by 41% — by using site-building or design tools to make your Confluence intranet look and feel like an extension of your brand, starting with the homepage.

Design a branded homepage

Whether it’s incorporating logos and color schemes, playing around with fonts and text, or adding a variety of eye-catching modules, tools like Refined Sites for Confluence can help you build a homepage that reminds employees of what your company stands for every time they log in. 

Apply view permissions based on Confluence user groups

You can go a step further by applying permissions based on Confluence user groups to sections of the homepage, so that the right information, navigation links, and activity feeds are shown to the right subset of employees. 

Highlight your values

A personalized homepage can also help you activate your values and culture. 

If you prize a culture of recognition, for example, you can add blog feeds and announcement banners, which can highlight anything from individual accomplishments to team- and company-wide milestones. To boost transparency, blog feeds can be a particularly effective way to share out to staff by highlighting candid CEO updates on company performance, offering behind-the-scenes previews of new products, or posting Q&As with leadership.

2. The navigation experience

Different departments have different needs.

Marketing staff might need quick access to the latest campaign data, social media analytics, and creative assets, while the legal department might prioritize access to compliance documents, legal templates, and regulatory updates. 

But what happens when the intranet isn't tailored to these needs?

Here’s what happens: Bob from Legal is preparing for a crucial meeting about a new regulatory change. He needs to pull some compliance documents from the intranet, but the link he needs is buried deep within the system. By the time he gets what he's looking for, he's running late for his meeting. 

Without personalizing the intranet navigation experience for different users, productivity can take a hit. In fact, 49 percent of employees say they spend up to two hours each day trying to track down the information they need to do their jobs.

By personalizing the navigation experience, you’re well-positioned to reclaim some of those two hours per employee, which quickly adds up. Assuming you employ 1,000 people at an average of $50 per hour, you could save $50,000 per day by cutting in half the time employees waste searching for information. 

How to personalize your Confluence navigation with Refined Sites

There are a number of ways to tackle the information-discovery problem. One of them is from the bottom-up by focusing on the structure, navigation, and design of the intranet. The goal is to create intranets that anticipate what users are looking for, so they don’t even need to go searching. That’s done by organizing information pathways thoughtfully, making everything more accessible right from the start, and by using permissions to limit each users’ menu options to the spaces that are relevant for them. 

You can supplement that approach by enhancing the intranet’s search capabilities. With Refined Sites, for example, you can configure your intranet to suggest pages based on the keywords typed in search boxes, helping users find what they need faster. You can also simply add more search points throughout the intranet site, so users can locate information no matter where they are.

3. Service points

Increasingly, today’s intranet managers are incorporating service points — areas that provide employees with access to essential services and resources — directly into the intranet, so that employees can request IT or HR services without switching contexts.

Not all service points are created equally, however.  Some are personalized to cater to the needs of user types based on factors like geography, role, function, and employment status.

A personalized ‘benefits’ service point, for example, can display the most relevant benefits information and request types to different employee groups. Contractors vs. full-time employees; executives vs. managers vs. individual contributors; American staff vs. Canadian — each group would see only see the information and request types relevant to them.

Personalize service points on Refined Sites with a JSM integration

You can create a personalized ‘benefits’ service point with Refined Sites by building dynamic landing pages that display content according to user groups in Confluence. These pages could show younger employees or recent graduates student loan repayment assistance, career advancement opportunities, and fitness benefits like gym memberships; while employees with families might be presented with more information on dependent care assistance, family health insurance plans, and parental leave policies.

The best service points give employees a line to help directly from self-help resources. Consider a scenario where an employee is getting ready to sign up for the company’s 401(k) match program (that’s a U.S. retirement benefit), but has several questions, such as how the matching contributions work, what investment options are available, and how to maximize their benefits.

Refined allows intranet managers to embed a JSM request type directly within their benefits policy page using a Refined Sites for JSM integration. This allows employees to connect with HR through customized forms right at their point of need, all without leaving the intranet and switching contexts. 

Final thoughts and further reading

Personalization comes in various shapes and forms, from strengthening employer branding with meaningful visual elements to displaying targeted content to enhancing search capabilities. Regardless, Refined Sites can help you do all that — and create a more efficient and engaging work environment for everyone along the way.

Ready to start your personalization journey? Try out Refined Sites for Confluence from the Atlassian Marketplace for free now and see the difference it makes.