According to an article I read in the FT more and more companies are using their intranets to engage with their workforce. So, they may have an area where employees can blog, or where they can submit their reviews of the company cafeteria.
This could be the only way to make employees use intranets, and not stray off into the world wide web outside of the company. And going off into the internet is usually a big No-No especially if you do it for long periods of time when you should be working.
The company I work at have half heartedly tried to make their intranet more attractive and useful, but they cannot compete with sites like Google, Facebook or Ebay. They haven't really tried, but what they have done is block people from connecting to Ebay, Amazon, and certain pages on the BBC website. They don't want people hanging out on ebay all day bidding on auctions instead of concentrating on their work, and some of the news pages on BBC.co.uk are blocked due to the videos which can take up bandwidth on the company network.
They have also introduced a new "IT Policy", which means that everyone has to sign a declaration that they will not use the internet for non-working purposes during work time as part of your contract of employment. They've tried to make this unambiguous, but they make it sound like you could be disciplined for checking your hotmail account when you should be working. In practice people are on and off the internet all the time, and until the company starts giving warnings out for this I don't see this changing.
Instead, they should encourage staff to interact with one another on the intranet. They could have some company-wide pages where people can list their unwanted items for sale. Also, somewhere that staff could upload videos or photos of their holidays.
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