With Covid-19 and long-term remote work booming, a well-designed intranet is essential for employees. It can help boost morale and productivity by facilitating communication, collaboration and learning.
Effective search functionality is a must. Ensure that key resources like forms, policies and employee directories are easily accessible.
It’s the perfect platform for higher-ups to communicate with employees and provide transparency. It can also connect geographically dispersed teams to improve support processes and reduce miscommunication issues.
Employee Engagement
Keeping employees engaged can be tough, especially when they are working from home. Many businesses are turning to employee engagement technology, including intranets, to help with the problem. These tools provide a way for businesses to communicate top-down information but also to engage employees with their company culture and values. In addition, they can help to connect distributed workers to one another.
Modern intranet systems typically allow employees to create content for their platforms, which helps with engagement. Creating a space where employees are expected to share stories of their achievements or highlight articles that are relevant to them, can help keep them coming back and using the platform regularly. It is important that companies have a variety of ways to encourage this, such as contests and unique posting challenges.
In addition, a well-designed intranet system allows for easy document collaboration and storage. This means that employees can access documents quickly and easily without the need to email them or request a password from someone else. This improves communication and collaboration, and enables employees to complete their work more efficiently.
Many of these solutions are available through modern intranet software, but it is important to consider the underlying causes of low employee engagement. An effective solution requires a change in the workplace culture and operations, which takes time and commitment from senior management. However, these types of solutions can help alleviate some of the more immediate problems.
Information Sharing
An intranet is a private network that connects employees across the organization. It operates over a TCP/IP communications standard, just like the internet, and uses web programming languages to display information on employee devices such as computers, tablets, and smartphones. It differs from the internet in that it is secure and used only by company employees.
It also allows the sharing of content, such as status alerts, news, employee directories and project management tools that help to streamline everyday activities. This can help to cut out the need for sending email and distributing printed memos, as well as boosting engagement with internal communications.
Employees also get to see what everyone is working on, and it can be a good way of identifying areas where collaboration could improve. Intranet software can be configured to highlight certain content for specific teams or leaders, and it’s easy to flag important alerts as Required Reading to ensure employees are aware of any urgent issues that might affect them.
It’s also a great tool to share dashboards from analytics platforms, cutting out the need to access these resources separately. Many systems can also support a range of document collaboration features, and you’ll often find that companies have topic-based information wikis within their intranet platforms. It is important to remember that an intranet only works if it’s regularly updated. Using an intranet with an infrequently-updated database can cause confusion and a lack of trust.
Company Culture
Company culture is an essential component of a successful business. It’s what sets the tone for employee behaviors and influences the overall environment of a workplace.
A well-defined and cohesive company culture can reduce conflict among employees, boost productivity, and increase customer satisfaction. Companies with strong company cultures also have better relationships with managers and employees, leading to reduced turnover. This means less time and money spent finding new hires, training them, and establishing their productivity.
The Enterprise intranet is an ideal tool for supporting company culture. It provides a platform for clear communication and enables teams to connect with one another in ways that aren’t restricted by geographic boundaries. In addition, it can be used to broadcast announcements and news updates to employees in a timely manner.
For example, when a new employee starts at the company, they can immediately access information about their workgroup, projects, and general expectations from management through the enterprise intranet. This allows them to hit the ground running and feel like they are a part of the team from day one.
Modern intranet solutions include functionality that makes it easy to recognize and reward employees for meeting or exceeding expectations. This can be as simple as a peer-to-peer shoutout or digital high five. This type of motivation helps reinforce your company values and can lead to improved worker productivity, which is one of the top reasons why businesses retain their best employees.
Streamlining Business Processes
If you’re not getting the results you want from your intranet solution, it might be time for a change. Start by asking yourself what strategic business objectives your solution is helping you reach, and whether it’s aligned with them.
A new generation of intranet solutions are based on modern content management systems (CMS), designed to look less like portals and more like constant companions that meet employees wherever they work. That means mobile app accessibility, the ability to embed a company news feed and a range of other integrations to make it easy for employees to get the information they need quickly.
Intranet software should be a one-stop shop, meaning key process requests like requesting business cards or booking hotel rooms can all be done through the platform with built-in approval tools to streamline the process. This eliminates the need to constantly switch between different tools, which can increase the cognitive load on employees.
An intranet should also have Q&A forums for essential questions that are accessed frequently. While these aren’t meant to replace managers, they can help reduce the number of phone calls and emails that need to be made to a team leader. This kind of centralized, easily-accessed information helps to cut down on workplace noise and distractions that can lead to reduced productivity. It’s important that the answers to these questions are practical and relevant, which fosters employee engagement.