For years, organizations have been investing in better employee experiences: modern intranets, more channels, smarter feeds, and richer content strategies. Intranets and employee experience platforms play a critical role in connecting employees and sharing knowledge at scale. But as work has become more complex, distributed, and fast-moving, access to information alone often might not be enough.
The challenge isn’t a lack of information. It’s a lack of context.
When content becomes action
Most intranet strategies are built around content: publishing updates, sharing news, launching campaigns, and driving engagement through activity and reach.
But in today’s hybrid and distributed organizations, content alone doesn’t create understanding.
Employees don’t just struggle to find what was communicated. They struggle to understand why it matters, how it connects to their work, and what happens next.
Without that context, even the best content becomes static. It’s read, skimmed, or acknowledged, but rarely contextualized or acted on.
Content without context is just information. Content with context becomes action.
The feed fallacy
This is where many platforms fall short. Feed-based experiences are excellent at moving information quickly. They surface what’s new, what’s trending, and what’s popular.
But speed alone doesn’t create meaning.
A feed can tell you what happened. It can’t help teams:
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socialize ideas
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discuss the meaning
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build shared understanding
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or sustain momentum over time
As a result, organizations feel busy but not necessarily aligned. Informed, but not connected. This creates a false sense of velocity and agility - activity everywhere, without the clarity needed to drive meaningful progress.
This is why many leaders describe today’s digital workplace as noisy, not because there’s too much content, but because there’s too little context.
The unnamed gap in Employee Experience
What’s emerging across leading organizations is the recognition that something fundamental is missing.
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Not another channel.
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Not more content.
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Not faster time to information.
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Not better engagement metrics.
What’s missing is a context layer - a layer that sits between information and execution.
The context layer is where content is interpreted, discussed, and made meaningful. It’s where people connect ideas - to each other, to shared interests, to culture, and to the work they do every day. This is the role communities are beginning to play: not only as spaces for connection and belonging, but as a foundational layer of the modern employee experience.
Reframing Communities: From noise to meaning
For a long time, social communities were seen as optional, informal, or even distracting. Nice to have, but not essential. In reality, they are the opposite.
Communities are where ideas are socialized. Where people feel empowered to ask questions, challenge assumptions, share experiences, and build shared understanding. Where ideas, decisions, strategy and change to become human.
Rather than dismissing communities, leading organizations have shown how intentional community design transforms experience.
At Pearson, for example, the company’s digital social evolution wasn’t about generating likes. It was about creating purposeful, meaningful interaction that strengthens connection, learning, and collaboration across its global workforce. Their approach shifted beyond volume metrics to curated digital communities where engagement drives culture, innovation, and shared understanding.
From likes to lasting impact
Similarly, at Johnson & Johnson, the focus wasn’t merely on publishing content. It was on removing friction and enabling seamless connection across 130,000+ employees worldwide. This was achieved by designing experiences that help people find what they need faster, connect with peers, and stay engaged with work that matters.
These stories show that when communities are built with intention, not as add-ons, but as a context layer where people genuinely connect ideas, solve problems, and inspire each other.
Communities don’t replace content. They complete it.
From friction to flow
From Digital Front Door to Digital Context
This shift is changing the role of the intranet itself. The intranet is no longer just a destination for information. It’s becoming the intelligence layer of the enterprise. The place where content, communication, collaboration, and workflows come together.
In this new model, the intranet becomes the intelligent digital front door – the single destination where work happens and where everything the workforce needs meets them where they are.
Why Context matters more than ever
In a physical office, context was ambient. You overheard conversations, read the room, and understood priorities through proximity. In distributed work, that context disappears.
Without a context layer:
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initiatives lose momentum between launches
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programs feel episodic instead of continuous
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channels multiply to fill the gaps
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alignment erodes over time
Communities fill those gaps. They create continuity between moments, keeping programs alive between campaigns, launches, and announcements. They turn one-off content into ongoing conversations and conversations into collective action.
A new maturity model for Employee Experience
This is the shift organizations need to make. Not from one tool to another - but from one way of thinking to another. From: “How do we drive more engagement with content?” To: “How do we create shared understanding and sustained execution?” Because employee experience doesn’t fail due to lack of communication. It fails when people don’t understand how things connect or why they matter.
Less noise. More value.
Communities are not just another social feature layered onto the intranet. They are the missing context layer of the digital workplace.
They transform:
Information into understanding.
Understanding into alignment.
Alignment into action.
And in doing so, they provide the foundation for business velocity and transformation in the modern enterprise.
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