A small-business intranet that people actually use

Ask anyone on your team where the PTO request form lives, or the Wi-Fi password for the guest network, or the phone number for the payroll company. Watch what happens. They ask the person next to them, who asks someone else, who eventually forwards a two-year-old email with an attachment that may or may not be the current version. Every company past about five people has this problem, and the fix has a name that sounds bigger than it is: an intranet.

Forget what that word conjures. You don't need a portal project or a six-month rollout. A small-business intranet is one internal home page that answers the questions your team asks each other all day. That's the entire job.

What goes on the page

Four things, and honestly the first one carries most of the weight:

• Links. Every system your team logs into: payroll, timesheets, the CRM, the shared drive, the help desk, the benefits portal. One list, kept current. This alone kills half the "hey, what's the link for..." messages.
• Announcements. Office closed Friday. New hire starting Monday. Health insurance open enrollment ends on the 15th. The stuff that currently goes out as an email everyone deletes and then asks about.
• Documents. The employee handbook, the PTO form, the expense policy, the org chart. Not every document your company has ever produced. The dozen things people actually go looking for.
• Who to ask. A short list: payroll questions go to this person, IT problems go here, building issues go to that person. New hires need this on day one and nobody ever writes it down.

If your page has those four sections and stays current, you have a working intranet. Everything past that is decoration.

Simple beats fancy, every time

We've seen elaborate intranets with news carousels, department sub-sites, and photo banners that nobody has opened since the month they launched. We've also seen a single pinned Google Doc that a 15-person company uses every single day. The doc wins. Here's why: an intranet lives or dies on trust. The first time someone follows a link and it's dead, or reads a policy that turned out to be outdated, they stop checking and go back to asking coworkers. A small page you can update in ninety seconds stays trustworthy. A fancy site that requires effort to update rots.

So the design rule is: build the smallest thing you'll actually maintain.

What to build it with

Use whatever you already pay for.

Microsoft 365: SharePoint is included in nearly every business plan, and a single SharePoint communication site is the natural fit. Use the built-in templates, add a links web part, a news section, and a document library, and stop there. Resist the urge to build sub-sites for every department. You can also pin the site as a tab in Teams so people see it where they already work.

Google Workspace: Google Sites does the same job with even less setup. A one-page site with sections for links, announcements, docs, and contacts takes an hour. Or skip Sites entirely and use a well-organized Google Doc pinned in your team chat. We're serious. For a team of eight, that's often the right answer.

Neither: if you live in Slack, a canvas pinned to your general channel works. The tool genuinely does not matter. What matters is that there's exactly one of it and everyone knows where it is.

The part everyone skips: an owner

Pick one person whose job includes keeping the page current. Not a committee. One person, with a recurring fifteen-minute calendar block once a month to walk the page, click every link, and prune anything stale. Announcements older than a month get deleted. This maintenance habit is worth more than any feature. An intranet that's 90% complete but always accurate beats one that's 100% complete and slowly going stale.

Also give people a way to flag problems: a "something wrong on this page? tell so-and-so" line at the bottom. Your team will find the broken links faster than the owner will.

How to launch it

1. Spend a week collecting the questions people actually ask. Check your team chat for "does anyone know" and "what's the link" messages. That's your content list.
2. Build the page in an afternoon. Four sections, no more.
3. Make it the default answer. When someone asks where the PTO form is, reply with the intranet link, not the form. This feels petty for about two weeks and then the questions stop.
4. Put it in every new hire's day-one email, first line.

How you know it's done right

The measure isn't page views. It's whether the repeated questions dry up. When a new hire finds the handbook, the Wi-Fi password, and the payroll contact without asking anyone, it's working. When someone answers a chat question with a link to the page instead of a typed-out answer, it's working. And when you update a policy in one place and everyone sees the current version, you've quietly fixed a problem that was costing you small amounts of time and confusion every day.

We build these for clients on top of Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace they already own. Typical setup is a day, including migrating the documents that matter. The hard part isn't technical. It's deciding what to leave out.