by Walter van Hecke, co-founder Involv Intranet
The most common excuse I hear when an intranet project gets delayed? Simple: “It’s not a priority right now.”
And frankly? Sometimes that is true. Organisations face pressing challenges every day. There is always a migration project, a reorganisation, a compliance track, or an operational issue demanding full attention.
But that is precisely where the problem lies.
I often compare a poor or non-existent intranet to mosquito bites. One bite is annoying, ten are irritating, twenty are disruptive. But at a certain point, concentration becomes impossible and normal functioning breaks down. Death by a thousand cuts, as they say.
Many organisations live with those thousand small stings for years. Employees who cannot find information. Knowledge scattered across dozens of systems. New colleagues who need months to find their footing. Internal communication that does not reach everyone. None of those problems is large enough to cause a crisis on its own, but together they cost the organisation time, energy, and productivity every single day.
And that is precisely what makes them so dangerous.
The real reason for delay? Nobody owns the problem.
If I am being honest, I do not think budget is the real reason organisations delay. And in most cases, it is not fear of change either.
The real reason is far simpler: the problem does not belong to any one person.
An intranet touches communication, HR, IT, operations, management, and every employee in the organisation. Because so many departments are involved, nobody feels fully responsible.
What belongs to everyone belongs to no one. And what no one owns never becomes a priority.
There is something else at play: organisations usually do not know what their current situation is costing them. They cannot see the lost time. They do not see how many minutes employees spend each day searching for information, asking the same questions repeatedly, or working with outdated documents.
Imagine you are driving on the motorway at 100 kilometres per hour and someone else is driving at 110. You can immediately see that person will arrive sooner. But what if you cannot make that comparison? What if you cannot see how much faster other organisations are making decisions, sharing knowledge, and getting new employees up to speed?
That is precisely what is happening at many organisations today.
What does inaction cost? Let us run the numbers.
The real cost of a poor intranet is not in the technology. It lies in the daily losses that organisations have come to accept as normal.
Virtually every study, from McKinsey to Deloitte to Gartner, shows that employees lose time every day searching for information. Let us be conservative: 15 minutes per employee per working day. That sounds like very little.
Based on 15 min/day · €50/hour average labour cost · Source: McKinsey, Deloitte, Gartner.
But perhaps the greatest cost lies somewhere else entirely: culture.
You cannot build a strong organisational culture without strong communication. When employees are insufficiently informed, uncertainty sets in. When successes go unshared, engagement fades. When people do not feel heard, motivation declines.
And engagement has a direct financial impact. Less engaged employees are less productive, absent more often, and leave the organisation sooner. New people then need to be recruited, trained, and onboarded. A cycle that costs organisations far more than most executives realise.
Based on our own project experience, we estimate that knowledge workers lose an average of 200 to 300 euros per employee per month through inefficient information management, poor knowledge sharing, and inadequate internal communication. It is not an exact science, but it is a pattern we recognise time and again across the organisations we work with. That loss does not occur just once. It occurs every day. Every hour. With every search that takes longer than it should.
Most organisations ask themselves what a new intranet will cost. I believe the more important question is: what does doing nothing cost?
Nobody gets fired for delaying an intranet project
Inaction is very easy. It comes down to: it is not my problem, not my responsibility, not my KPI.
And to some extent, that is true. Which is precisely the problem.
Nobody gets fired for delaying an intranet project. Nobody receives a negative performance review because employees are losing too much time searching for information. Nobody is directly held accountable for a lack of knowledge sharing.
The cost of inaction is spread across the entire organisation, while the decision to act usually rests with one person or one team. That is what makes inaction so tempting and so easy to defend internally.
There is also a clear difference in who does decide to act. When I look at organisations that continue to excel, I almost always see the same pattern: leadership that dares to look beyond today’s problems. The attitude of employees is, after all, often a direct reflection of the attitude of leadership. When leaders consistently delay, that behaviour filters through the rest of the organisation.
What happens in the meantime
It is not as though organisations without an intranet fail to find solutions. On the contrary, people are creative.
When no good digital workplace exists, small local solutions spring up everywhere. A spreadsheet here, a Teams chat there, a shared folder somewhere else. For employees who have been with the organisation for five or ten years, that still works reasonably well. They know where everything is. They know the organisation.
But that knowledge is not documented anywhere.
Every day brings a little efficiency loss. A little knowledge loss. A little motivation loss. It does not happen overnight; it creeps in gradually. But eventually it begins to erode the quality of the service and the results of the business.
I compare it to an engine that starts to splutter.
The organisation keeps running. It keeps moving forward. But it consumes more energy, delivers less, and becomes increasingly unreliable.
The most underestimated hidden cost? Culture. You will not receive an invoice for it at the end of the month. But you will see the consequences: higher turnover, longer onboarding trajectories, more duplicate work, and an organisation that moves more slowly than it should.
Post-COVID: the barrier has never been lower
The barrier to starting an intranet project is far lower today than it was before the pandemic. That is not up for debate, as far as I am concerned.
The digital maturity of organisations has increased considerably in recent years. People have become accustomed to collaborating, communicating, and sharing information digitally. Resistance to digital solutions has decreased significantly as a result.
In the past, connection happened naturally around the coffee machine. Today, many people work hybrid or fully remote, and organisations need to invest in that deliberately. Because if that space is left unfilled, something else takes its place: uncertainty, rumours, and distance.
So when does it finally tip?
The most common trigger is a change in leadership. When a new executive, a new head of communications, or a new department head comes on board, it often has a direct impact on whether an intranet project moves forward or not.
A merger or a business split is also a genuine opportunity. In those moments, it suddenly becomes urgent to get the right message to the right people, and the limitations of an organisation without a central platform become apparent very quickly.
A crisis might seem like the fastest trigger in theory. But what we observe in practice is that organisations in times of crisis fall back on what they already know. They continue doing what they have always done, even if it is far less efficient.
What I almost never see is a single large shock that causes everything to shift. What I do see is the accumulation of many small frustrations that eventually becomes too large to ignore.
Organisations that later say “we should have done this two years ago” almost always reach the same conclusion: the investment turned out to be far smaller than the cost of waiting.
“We don’t have the budget.” Here is my answer.
When I hear “we don’t have the budget,” it usually means an intranet is still being viewed as a standalone, expensive investment. I understand that perspective. But it is rarely accurate.
Look at what most organisations are already running. There is already budget for Microsoft 365, for onboarding, for internal communication, or for reaching frontline colleagues. An intranet is not an additional cost; it is a better use of what already exists.
And we do not build the business case on vague promises about retention. We look at concrete improvements: less time lost searching for information, fewer fragmented communication channels, a wider reach to employees, and more efficient content management. That makes it clear which existing costs can be eliminated and which investments will deliver a better return.
The question is therefore not:
“What does a new intranet cost?”
The real question is:
“What is the current fragmentation costing us each month, and what is the solution worth to us?”
What can you do tomorrow?
The first step does not have to be a large one. And it takes almost no time or money.
Calculate the cost of your current situation. Our free ROI calculator gives you a concrete indication of what the current inefficiency is costing your organisation in just a few minutes. No obligations, just numbers to start the conversation.
Run an internal survey. Ask employees how they experience internal communication, how they perceive the company culture, and where they lose time each day due to inefficiency. That can be done today via Microsoft Forms, Google Forms, or a similar platform. That information alone is invaluable. It makes visible what you cannot currently see, gives names to problems that everyone feels but nobody says out loud, and creates the support base for the conversation that should have happened long ago.
Have a conversation. Sometimes the most useful thing is to talk through the situation with someone who has guided this process at dozens of organisations. There are no obligations and no sales pitch involved.
You know the cost of an intranet. You don’t know the cost of not having one.
Walter van Hecke is co-founder of Involv Intranet, a modern intranet platform built on Microsoft 365 and SharePoint. He helps organisations connect, inform, and engage their employees.
