Do you see some of your employees with that deer-in-the-headlights look when they sign in to your site? Here are three easy techniques that you can apply to better ensure that your employees will be able to locate content in policyIQ.

Adjust Folder Viewers

Many policyIQ sites are set up so that most (if not all) users can see all Folders. Often “All Primary Users” are granted viewing rights to top level Folders, further allowing all users to see all of the subfolders as well. Having visibility to sometimes dozens of Folders can confuse users and really frustrate them if they feel like they are on a wild goose chase trying to figure out which folder is the appropriate one for the information that they seek. We suggest removing all Groups from the viewing rights on top level folders and, rather, adjusting “Viewers” to include only the appropriate employees (by selecting appropriate User Groups) within the lower level Folders.

For example, by removing All Primary Users from the “Departments” Folder Viewers and adding Information Technology Administrators/Managers to the Viewers property on the “Information Technology” Folder, the navigation is streamlined for IT Manager, Jenny Douglas. See the illustration below:

Read Only Accounts

Another step you can take to make it easier for your employees to locate content is to utilize (in some cases, utilize more) Read-Only accounts.

By taking advantage of the fact that Read Only accounts are free and you can have as many as you’d like in your policyIQ site, you can grant users from different divisions, facilities, locations, and so on visibility to specific content. Using their respective links to your content (perhaps links that you share from your SharePoint or Intranet site), your employees will be able to zero in on the content that is most relevant.

Add keywords in order to return relevant results

Another simple trick to help users locate information is to add a Short Text field to your Templates to capture keywords. Choose the options to make the field not visible in Home and editable while published. This will allow Page Administrators to add to the keywords without having to un-publish the page and send it through the approval process. Populate the “Keywords” field with relative terms so that your employees will more likely locate the content that they are looking for upon their first Search attempt.

Of course, there are a number of other things that would be helpful such as training, checklists, a more intuitive structure, a sensible naming convention…Let us know if you’d like to talk to one of our content organization experts and we’ll help you to optimize your employees’ experience of your system.