Standardisation isn't the enemy of usability. Unchecked flexibility is.

Every time someone asks for their own SharePoint site, they mean well. They want a space that works for their team, organised the way they think about their work, free from the constraints of a structure that wasn't designed with them in mind. That instinct — towards ownership, towards relevance, towards control — is entirely reasonable.

The problem is what happens when everyone acts on it at once.

Across organisations of all sizes, the promise of flexible digital workplaces has slowly curdled into something harder to manage: hundreds of sites with no consistent structure, channels nobody can find, content buried under naming conventions that made sense to one person, once. The tools were supposed to empower people. Instead, they've created a new kind of friction — invisible, cumulative, and expensive.

The conventional wisdom says flexibility is good, and rigidity is bad. But in digital workplace design, that framing is too simple. The real enemy of usability isn't standardisation. It's the absence of it.

In our book, Digital Communications at Work, we explore why so many digital workplace investments fall short of their promise — and why the answer is rarely more technology.

Standardisation has a branding problem. Mention it in a room full of communicators or content owners and you'll see people stiffen. It sounds like bureaucracy. Like someone is about to take your toys away.

But standardisation, done well, isn't about restriction — it's about agreement. Agreed templates. Agreed naming conventions. Agreed content types, folder structures, and navigation patterns. The kind of agreements that mean a new employee can find a policy document on their first day, and a content editor doesn't have to reinvent the page layout every time they publish.

Part of the confusion comes from the tools themselves. Platforms like SharePoint and Microsoft Teams are sold on flexibility — the ability to configure, customise, and adapt to almost any use case. Organisations inherit that mindset along with the licence. If the platform can do anything, why wouldn't we let it?

But we draw a distinction that changes how you think about this: the difference between a platform and a product. Platforms optimise for possibility. Products optimise for outcomes. The most usable digital workplaces aren't the most flexible ones — they're the ones designed with clear opinions about how people actually work. Treating your intranet or collaboration environment as a product, rather than an open canvas, is one of the most practical shifts a digital workplace team can make.

The cognitive load problem

Even well-intentioned flexibility has a hidden cost — and it's paid by the people using the system every day.

Every time someone encounters a SharePoint site with a different layout, a channel with an unfamiliar naming pattern, or a folder structure that doesn't match what they saw last time, they have to stop and reorient. It's a small tax, but it compounds. Psychologists call this cognitive load — the mental effort required to process information before you can actually do anything useful with it. The more variation in your environment, the higher the tax.

Barry Schwartz's paradox of choice offers a useful lens here: beyond a certain point, more options don't liberate people — they paralyse them. In digital workplaces, that paralysis tends to show up as workarounds. People stop searching and start asking colleagues. They save things locally rather than navigating a structure they don't trust. They disengage from tools that feel unpredictable.

In Digital Communications at Work, we argue that this isn't a training problem or a change management problem — it's a design problem. When every team can configure their own space differently, you haven't given people freedom. You've given them homework.

The organisational cost

The user-level friction described above doesn't stay contained. It scales — and when it does, the consequences show up in places that are harder to ignore than a confused employee.

Consider what unchecked flexibility actually produces over time. Hundreds of SharePoint sites, each structured differently, because nobody ever said they shouldn't be. Microsoft Teams channels multiplying without naming conventions, making search functionally useless. Documents saved in locations that made sense to whoever created them, and nobody else. This isn't a hypothetical — it's the baseline state of most large organisations that deployed collaboration tools at speed and governed them slowly, if at all. Which is to say: most large organisations.

The downstream effects are well documented, even if they're rarely attributed to the right cause: poor findability, duplicated work, compliance and audit risk, a support burden that quietly becomes someone's entire job. But there's a subtler cost that almost never appears in a post-implementation review — the erosion of trust. When people can't find what they need, they stop believing the system holds what they need. And no amount of new features, a rebrand, or an enthusiastic internal communications campaign will fix an environment that remains fundamentally unpredictable.

Flexibility, in other words, isn't free. It's just that the invoice gets sent to someone else.

How standardisation enables usability

So far this might sound like an argument for locking everything down. It isn't.

The goal of standardisation isn't to eliminate flexibility — it's to make flexibility deliberate. When you establish agreed patterns, you're not reducing what's possible. You're reducing the cost of doing the things people actually need to do. Predictable navigation means people find things faster. Consistent templates mean content editors spend less time on layout and more time on substance. Standard metadata means search works as it should, and automation becomes possible. Small agreements compound into significant efficiency gains — the mirror image of the small frictions that compound into significant costs.

There's also a less obvious benefit: standards lower the barrier to participation. When people know what a good page looks like, they're more likely to create one. When the structure is clear, contribution feels manageable rather than daunting. Good governance, counterintuitively, tends to increase the quality and quantity of content — not reduce it.

One caveat worth making explicit, and one we return to in Digital Communications at Work: standards are not permanent. The organisations that get this right treat their standards the way good product teams treat their design systems — as living frameworks that evolve as needs change, not as tablets handed down from IT on the mount.

When standards saved the day

One organisation we worked with had what looked, on paper, like a reasonable approach to governance. Access was tightly controlled — you couldn't spin up a new SharePoint site without approval. What nobody had thought to control was what happened once the keys were handed over.

Editors had near-total freedom to use web parts however they liked. The result was pages doing two or three jobs at once, making meaningful indexing impossible. Even when content could be found, users arrived to a different layout, a different structure, a different logic — every time. Well-meaning editors had sprinkled widgets liberally. Nobody knew what to look at first. Trust in the intranet had hit rock bottom.

The intervention wasn't dramatic. Governance framework. Templates. Lifecycle rules. Some provisioning automation. Nothing that took anything meaningful away from editors — just a structure they could actually work within.

Adoption rose. Support tickets fell. Content quality improved.

The lesson wasn't that control is good. It's that the right constraints, applied in the right places, give people the clarity to do their best work.

How to standardise without becoming a bottleneck

The objection usually comes at this point: yes, but who decides what the standards are? And how do we avoid governance becoming a bottleneck that slows everything down?

It's a fair challenge, and it has a practical answer.

Start by standardising the essentials, not everything. Not every decision needs to be a policy. The goal is to identify the points where inconsistency causes real harm — findability, navigation, content quality, compliance — and apply standards there. Everything else can remain flexible without consequence.

Co-design those standards with the people who'll live under them, not just for them. Standards that emerge from genuine consultation are followed; standards that arrive from on high are routed around. The difference is rarely the standard itself — it's whether people understand why it exists.

Where possible, make the right thing the easy thing. Templates and patterns should be offered as defaults, not mandates — freedom within a framework, as long as the framework is the right one for your organisation. Automate governance where you can: provisioning, lifecycle management, accessibility and usability checks. The less the burden falls on individuals making good judgement calls, the more consistently standards will hold.

And finally: communicate the why, not just the what. People follow standards they understand. They work around the ones that feel arbitrary.

The freedom of constraint

Here's the thing about constraints: the organisations that resist them in the name of flexibility are usually the ones drowning in the consequences of it. The sprawling site collections. The channels nobody uses. The content nobody trusts. The intranet that everyone gave up on but nobody officially decommissioned.

Standardisation didn't cause those problems. The absence of it did.

The digital workplaces that actually work — that people use willingly, that reduce friction rather than create it, that hold their value beyond the first year post-launch — are the ones where someone made deliberate decisions about how things should be structured, and then held the line. Not rigidly. Not forever. But consistently enough to matter.

That's not a constraint on good work. That's what good work looks like.

So here's a diagnostic question worth pondering: how many different ways can someone present a policy in your organisation right now? If you don't know, that's the answer. And if the answer is "as many ways as there are editors," you don't have a flexibility problem — you have a design problem. One that Digital Communications at Work was written to help you solve.