If they cannot find it in five minutes, you do not have an intranet

Can employees find what they need on your SharePoint intranet in five minutes? If they cannot, you do not really have an intranet. You have a publishing system: a place where teams post pages, but not a place where people reliably find answers. A redesigned homepage will not fix that, because the content underneath stays the same. Adding AI search or a chatbot will not fix it either. If the content is duplicated, out of date, or filed under department names that only that department understands, the AI searches the same mess and gives poor answers. The content and structure need fixing first.

The test is a real task. Pick something an employee needs to get done, such as finding the current expenses policy or the right form for booking leave. Can they reach the up-to-date version within five minutes, even if they do not know which team owns it or whether it sits in SharePoint, Teams, or another system? If they cannot, put the debate about the homepage design on hold until they can. How the intranet looks still matters, because people trust a site that looks cared for. It just is not what this test measures.

Why do intranet makeovers fail the five-minute test?

Many intranet programs look finished on paper. The steering group sees a tidy architecture diagram, a homepage full of news, and perhaps a new hub, set up because last year's pages had become hard to navigate. Then an employee tries to find the current expenses guidance, cannot work out where it is, and asks a colleague instead.

When that happens, leaders often call it a culture or adoption problem. It is usually a findability problem: the guidance exists, but the employee cannot reach the current version quickly enough to bother.

Internal comms often hear it in the survey: the intranet is terrible again. Leadership has seen the comments. Last year’s tweak did not stick. The mandate becomes “make it look like we care before the next cycle.”

That mandate is reasonable. Employees notice when the internal site looks like leftover software while the public website looks like a professional firm. A CIO reviewing designed intranet examples said they "look like websites", and that kind of first impression builds trust. But if employees still cannot find the current policy once they arrive, the trust wears off after a few failed searches.

A makeover fails the five-minute test when it changes only what employees see first:

• a new homepage layout
• new colors on the news cards
• a new label on a hub that still links to the same out-of-date pages
• a better search box, while the pages are still named after the departments that own them

None of these changes help an employee find an answer if they did not already know where to look.

What does “find it in five minutes” mean?

The five-minute test describes a situation most employees know. They have a job to finish and need a policy, template, or form to do it. They do not know which team owns that document, or whether it sits in SharePoint, Teams, or another system. They will search for about five minutes, and after that they message a colleague.

Five minutes matters because it is about as long as people search before they stop and ask someone in Teams instead. Once they do that, the intranet has lost them for that task.

If the answer sits six clicks deep under the name of the department that owns it, employees will not go through that twice. Next time they will message the colleague who helped them. That habit can look like collaboration, but it is a workaround: it takes up the colleague's time and passes on answers that may already be out of date.

Employees do not need a new theme or another hub. They need a clear route to the current answer. Building that route is the job of information architecture: deciding what content belongs where, and labeling it in the words employees already use, before you rebuild.

What does the usual SharePoint setup get wrong?

Most SharePoint intranets are set up the same way. Each department publishes on its own site, under its own name. The homepage shows news, and search is expected to find everything else. That structure makes sense to the people who run each department site, because they know where their own content lives. It does not help an employee who needs an answer and does not know which department owns it.

Department names work for organizing people, but an employee looking for an answer often does not know which department owns it. Most staff have no interest in how HR is structured. They want the current policy, the template, the “how we do this here.”

As the firm grows to a few hundred people, with more than one office and at least one system besides SharePoint, the same problems tend to appear:

• the same guidance exists in three places, two of them stale
• page templates do not match, so nothing looks like “the real one”
• nobody is sure who owns each page, so nobody keeps it up to date
• Teams and a specialist repository hold the useful version; SharePoint holds the official-looking empty one
• someone proposes a portal so people can “find everything in one place”

A new portal does not fix this. If it points at the same duplicated, out-of-date content, employees now have one more place to search, and they still cannot tell which version is current.

The same applies to a chatbot or AI search. These tools answer from the content you already have. If that content is duplicated, out of date, or has no owner, the answers will draw on the wrong versions. Fix the content and the navigation first, then add AI on top.

Where should content live: SharePoint, Teams, or another tool?

Start with a simple rule for where content lives, one you can explain in a meeting. A full information architecture model can come later. A full plan is intranet discovery and information architecture - that sits under AI and Knowledge Management.

• Approved answers many people need belong where people already look for “how we do this.” That is usually the intranet, labeled in words they would search for, with a named owner, rather than buried on one department's site.
• Working files for a team this week can live in Teams.
• Specialist material for one function can stay in the specialist tool. The intranet should not pretend that material lives on a page nobody opens. It should say once where that material lives and link to it.

Publish each answer in one place and link to it from everywhere else. When three teams each copy the same guidance onto their own sites, two of those copies will go out of date.

How do you start a content audit without reviewing everything?

Do not start with “what have we got?” Start with the tasks that keep failing the five-minute test.

Good tasks to start with:

• expenses and the current policy
• onboarding (“what do I do in week one?”)
• the template that exists in four versions
• the how-to people keep asking a named colleague for

Start with these tasks, because employees hit them often and fail them where everyone can see. Other content can wait for a later pass, and some of it can be archived.

A usable pass looks like this:

1. List the tasks employees fail, in their words (search logs, survey comments, the questions that hit comms and IT).
2. For each task, find every copy of the answer, keep one, link to it, and delete or archive the rest.
3. Name the page in the language they search, not the team’s org chart.
4. Put the path on the homepage and in navigation as a task, not as a department.
5. Check the five minutes with someone who does not already know where it lives.

If the list of failed tasks is long, or SharePoint vs other tools is the real fight, that is discovery and IA - scoped as AI and Knowledge Management before a build.

Does the intranet still need to look like a website?

None of this means the intranet's design does not matter.

The intranet homepage has to look like it belongs to a professional firm. Employees decide within seconds whether a site is worth their time, and default SharePoint often fails that first look. A designed homepage keeps them on the site long enough to start the task.

Good design earns trust in the first few seconds, and that trust is what makes employees willing to spend the next five minutes searching instead of giving up straight away.

If you only do the look, you will get a week of compliments and the same ping-a-colleague behavior. If you only do the structure, and the thing still looks like a settings panel, a lot of fee earners will not give it the five minutes.

Design gives employees enough trust to try the intranet, and structure lets them finish the task within five minutes.

Before the next survey, start with the tasks employees attempt most often. Give each one a single current answer, labeled in the words employees search for, and make it reachable from the intranet they already open. That will not fix everything on the intranet, but it fixes what employees try first, and you can check it with the five-minute test.