An employee opens the intranet to check how many days of leave they have for a family event. The page says three. HR changed the rule last spring, and the answer is now five. The employee acts on the old number, and HR has to sort out the confusion afterwards.
Nobody did anything wrong here. The page was correct when it was written. What was missing was someone responsible for noticing when it stopped being correct.
Why stale pages cost more than missing ones
When a page is missing, people ask a colleague. That is slow but usually leads to the right answer. When a page is wrong, people trust it and act on it. The cost appears later: a wrong form, a missed deadline, a question to HR that should not have been needed.
There is a second effect. After a few such experiences, people stop trusting the intranet as a whole and go back to asking colleagues, whatever the quality of the rest. This is one of the quieter reasons intranet adoption falls after launch, and it is separate from the problem of search that does not find things.
One owner per page
Every page gets exactly one named person as its owner. Not "HR" and not "the IT team". A team cannot be asked a question, and in practice nobody in it feels responsible.
The owner does not have to write the page. They are the person who is asked when something is wrong, and who decides whether the page is still correct. For most pages the right owner is the person who knows when the content changes: the HR manager for leave rules, the office manager for the building and the equipment, the finance lead for expense claims.
Two practical rules help:
- Owners are people, not roles that nobody fills. If the owner leaves or changes job, their pages are reassigned as part of the handover, in the same way as any other work handed over when someone leaves.
- One person should not own fifty pages. If someone does, most of those pages will not be reviewed. Spread ownership towards the people who actually use the information.
A review date readers can see
Next to the owner, every page shows two dates: when it was last reviewed and when it is due for review next. Put them in a fixed place at the top or bottom of the page, in the same format everywhere.
This helps two groups. Readers can judge how far to trust a page: a page reviewed last month is different from one reviewed two years ago. Owners get a deadline that exists on the page itself, not only in somebody's calendar.
Note the difference between last edited and last reviewed. A page can be checked and found correct without any edit. If the system only shows the edit date, owners have no way to say "I looked, it is still right". Add a simple reviewed date field, or a line of text, and make confirming a page a one-click action if your tool allows it.
Different pages, different intervals
Not everything needs the same rhythm. A single interval for all pages leads to either too much work or too little checking. A simple scheme with three levels is enough for most companies:
- Every 3 months: content that changes often, such as contact lists, who-does-what pages, current projects and price lists used by staff.
- Every 12 months: policies and procedures, such as leave, expenses, security rules and onboarding steps.
- No review: news and announcements. These are dated and are not meant to be current. Keep them apart from reference pages, so that nobody reads an old announcement as the current rule.
When you set up a page, the owner picks the level. If they are unsure, the shorter interval is safer, and it can be extended after a review in which nothing changed.
What happens when nobody answers
Review dates only work if something happens when they pass. Without a consequence, they become decoration.
A rule that works for small companies:
- Reminder at the due date. The owner gets a message, by email or in the tool, with a link to the page.
- Second reminder after two weeks, also copied to the person responsible for the intranet.
- After a further two weeks, a banner on the page: "This page has not been reviewed since [date]. Check with [owner] before relying on it."
- After another month, the page moves to the archive and is removed from search and navigation. It can be restored by the owner at any time.
The banner is the useful middle step. It is honest with readers and it makes the owner's inaction visible to others, which is usually enough to prompt a review. Archiving is the last resort, not a punishment.
Archive, not delete
Archive means the page is no longer in menus or search, but remains accessible to the intranet administrator and, where needed, by direct link. Reasons to archive instead of delete:
- Some pages must be kept for legal or audit reasons, such as old versions of policies.
- A page may be wanted again, for example a seasonal procedure.
- Deleting removes the history of why a decision was made.
Keep the archive rule short and write it on one page: what gets archived, who decides, how to restore a page. Do not try to build a complicated retention scheme at the beginning.
Getting started in one week
You do not need to fix the whole intranet at once. A sensible order:
- Count the pages. Export a list from the admin area, with title, last edit and author if available. Most small companies find a few hundred pages, of which a third are not used.
- Archive the obvious. Old news, finished projects and duplicates go to the archive first. Do this before you assign owners, so you do not ask people to review pages that nobody needs.
- Assign owners to the rest, starting with the pages visited most. Send each owner their list and ask for confirmation, not for a rewrite.
- Set the first review dates, spread over the next few months so that the reviews do not all fall on the same week.
- Publish the one-page rule on the intranet itself, so that new owners know what is expected of them.
The same logic applies to documents outside the intranet. The principle of an owner, a review date and a rule for retiring old content is described in more detail for procedures in keeping standard operating procedures alive.
Common mistakes
- A team or a department as the owner.
- Showing only the edit date, so owners cannot confirm that a page is still correct.
- The same review interval for all pages.
- Review dates with no consequence when they pass.
- Deleting instead of archiving, which removes pages that may be needed later.
- Starting by assigning owners to every page, including pages that should be archived.
Summary
A current intranet needs very little tooling: one named owner on each page, a visible reviewed and next-review date, three review intervals, and a short rule for what happens when nobody responds, ending in the archive. Start by archiving what nobody uses, then assign owners to the pages that remain.
Sources
- Our related articles linked above.
- The review intervals and reminder schedule are working practices for small and mid-sized companies, not a formal standard; adjust them to your size and tool. No client results or market figures are claimed in this article.