5 Signs Your Organization Actually Needs an Intranet

Not every organization needs an intranet. If you're a five-person startup sitting in the same room, a few Slack channels and a shared Google Drive probably work just fine.

But somewhere between "we all know everything" and "nobody knows anything," organizations cross an invisible threshold where informal communication breaks down and institutional knowledge starts slipping through the cracks.

Here are five signs that the threshold has arrived.

1. The same questions keep getting asked (and re-answered)

You notice it first in Slack or Teams. Someone asks about the PTO policy, and a manager responds. Two weeks later, someone else asks the same question and a colleague steps in with a slightly different explanation. A month later, a new hire asks, and nobody responds because everyone assumes someone else will handle it.

This isn't a sign you’ve hired lazy employees or enabled poor management. It's about the fundamental nature of chat tools: they're designed for conversations that disappear. Every question becomes an excavation project through months of scrollable history, hoping the right search term surfaces the right thread from the right channel.

When your team spends more time hunting for answers than working with them, you have an information architecture problem. An intranet creates a permanent home for the answers that matter, turning "Does anyone know..." into "Here's where you find..."

2. Important updates get lost in email overload

Your CEO sends an all-hands email about a major policy change. Fifty percent of employees see it. Twenty-five percent read it. Ten percent remember it by next week. Not because people don't care, but because it arrived sandwiched between a calendar invite, three vendor emails, and a thread about someone's birthday cake in the break room.

Email was never designed to be your company's central nervous system, yet most organizations treat it that way by default. The result is that critical information competes for attention with everything else in the inbox, and critical information usually loses.

An intranet doesn't replace email, but it changes its role. Email becomes the notification — "something important was posted" — while the intranet becomes the source of truth. Instead of forwarding the same announcement multiple times or wondering which version of the document is current, there's one place everyone knows to look. The message gets bookmasked instead of buried.

3. New employees take weeks (or even months) to get up to speed

Ask yourself: if someone joined your team tomorrow, could they find everything they need to be productive without pestering five different people?

Most organizations answer this question with a patchworked answer: an outdated PDF, a wiki that two people still update, and a lot of "just ask Sarah, she'll know." Sarah does know. But Sarah is now the bottleneck, and every new hire becomes another drain on her time.

Onboarding shouldn't be a scavenger hunt. When tribal knowledge lives in people's heads instead of accessible systems, you create fragility. What happens when Sarah leaves? What happens when the new hire makes a decision based on information that is no longer correct?

An intranet turns onboarding from an oral tradition into a repeatable system. New hires get a single starting point with clear paths to the information they need: company values, team structures, process documentation, tools access, cultural norms. They ramp up faster, and your existing team gets their time back.

4. Remote or multi-location teams feel like different companies

There's the main office, where everyone knows what's happening because they overhear it at lunch. Then there are the remote employees, the satellite office, the field team—all operating with partial information and delayed context.

You start noticing it in small ways first. The remote team doesn't know about the leadership change until halfway through the workweek. The field workers miss the product update. The satellite office develops its own workarounds because they didn't realize there was already a solution.

Physical distance separates people informationally, too. Water cooler conversations, hallway updates, and impromptu desk chats create an information advantage for whoever happens to be in the room. Everyone else gets the highlights, maybe, eventually.

An intranet levels the playing field. It doesn't matter if you're at headquarters or working from home in another time zone: the same information is available to everyone simultaneously. Company updates, project status, team wins, process changes… they exist in one shared space rather than being whispered through informal networks. Geography stops being a disadvantage.

5. You're scaling, and the old ways aren’t working anymore

When you were twenty people, everyone knew everything. Decisions happened organically. If someone needed approval, they walked over to a desk. If a policy needed clarification, someone shouted across the room.

Then you hit fifty people. Then one hundred. Suddenly the CEO can't personally onboard every new hire. Managers can't keep everyone updated through weekly team meetings. The informal systems that worked beautifully at startup scale start creaking under their own weight.

This is the moment many organizations realize they've been running on institutional memory and personal relationships rather than actual systems. It worked when everyone was hired in the first two years and sat in the same office. It breaks when you add locations, departments, shifts, or simply more people than can fit around one table.

Growth exposes the gaps. An intranet doesn't solve growth, but it gives growth a structure. It transforms "how we do things here" from folklore into documentation. It turns one-to-one knowledge transfer into one-to-many. It creates the scaffolding that lets organizations scale without losing coherence.

The real question

None of these signs mean your organization is failing. In fact, they mean you're succeeding: growing, evolving, becoming more complex. But the systems that got you here aren't the systems that will get you to the next stage.

Having an intranet means recognizing when informal communication has hit its limits and intentionally building something better. It's infrastructure for how your organization thinks, shares, and remembers.

If you saw your company in three or more of these signs, you're not researching intranets because someone told you to. You're researching them because you've already felt the pain of not having one.

The question isn't whether you need an intranet. It's how much longer you can afford to work without one.