How to attract employees to your intranet

More than half the employees at Air Products and Chemicals would not be willing to appear on a reality television show, according to a rather unscientific survey conducted through the company’s intranet.

Does the hesitancy of Air Products employees to take part in reality television truly matter to the fate of the company or its corporate culture? No, it doesn’t. But this question is one tiny integer that adds up to the summation that Air Products and Chemicals has an impressive intranet.

Air Products, headquartered in Allentown, Penn., serves the energy, technology, health care and industrial markets. The company employs 20,000 people in 30 countries. Of those 20,000 employees, nearly 18,000 visit the company’s intranet, according to Margaret Rishel, the senior communications intranet specialist at Air Products. On average, the intranet Homepage—dubbed APOnline—registers 42,200 page views, she reported. In the first quarter of fiscal year 2007, APOnline clocked almost 3 million page views.