Effective company communication is vital for a high performing team. Yet the platforms companies use to communicate often fall behind.
Work with stakeholder teams to determine guiding questions for your intranet solution. Review vendors and solutions that meet those requirements to select the right one for your organization. Start with a simple, user-friendly platform.
Communication
The business intranet centralizes communication within the organization, bringing all information into one place where everyone can see it. This helps streamline communication by eliminating email chains and provides a place for all employees to share, comment, and provide feedback. It also enables frontline workers to be heard.
Modern intranet solutions are built to work on desktops, tablets, and mobile devices. This is because the modern workplace is increasingly dispersed and includes remote employees, field staff, and frontline workers. A company intranet should allow workers to connect, communicate, and collaborate from anywhere with a reliable Internet connection.
An intranet with social features like messaging, forums, and media-sharing tools will greatly facilitate internal communication. Additionally, a powerful search function will make it easy to find any document, file, or piece of news. It is also important to have a corporate calendar that allows workers to easily keep track of events and deadlines.
Upon logging into the enterprise intranet a news feed will display relevant updates for the employee. Using a similar style as social media, the news feed will highlight new content and provide the option to select specific Channels that the user wants to follow. This allows users to personalize their timeline, ensuring that only the content they need is presented. The news feed will also help to eliminate distractions by displaying only the latest updates and content.
Collaboration
A modern intranet portal is a digital bulletin board and information clearinghouse accessible to everyone at a company. In theory, this should make it easy to find what you need and avoid the time-consuming and frustrating process of asking around for the answer. However, most internal workplace platforms are not ideally positioned for the realities of remote or hybrid work, with cumbersome UX and search experiences.
To overcome these challenges, choose an intranet solution that is equipped with collaboration features that support a wide range of workstyles. For example, some tools allow you to create and share ideas through forums or surveys, and others offer a chat system that can be used alongside other workspace solutions like Slack.
Another way to improve collaboration is to provide a platform that integrates with existing third-party apps, so that all the data you need is in one place. Some intranet systems even let you automate workflows with customizable online forms that are routed to the right team members for action.
Yammer is a good example of an integrated intranet solution, as it offers forum hosting, polling functionality, a messaging system for individual workers, and the ability to send private messages. It is also one of the more inclusive workplace tools, with screen reader accessibility for users with visual impairments. A more sophisticated enterprise solution is SAP Jam Collaboration, which has a suite of social collaboration tools including forums and wikis. It is suitable for medium to large companies, and it offers a free trial and personalized quote.
Knowledge Management
Knowledge management is a crucial component of your intranet. It provides employees with easy access to answers and information that help them complete tasks effectively. It also helps new hires to quickly get up to speed by reducing the learning curve and removing reliance on specific individuals for certain types of questions.
Knowledge sharing within your company isn’t just about creating a knowledge center, it’s about fostering an organizational culture of knowledge sharing and ensuring that all employees have access to the information they need to do their job well. A McKinsey Global Institute report finds that companies can reduce information search time by 35 percent and improve organization-wide productivity by 20 to 25 percent through a robust knowledge management system.
An intranet platform that combines knowledge management with collaboration can allow your team to easily create questions and answers in a forum, allowing employees to work together and build upon the knowledge of their peers. It can also provide a central location for key documents like research papers, service manuals, and human resources forms and policies to be saved digitally.
Additionally, you can share dashboards from analytics tools to keep everyone up to date on high-level metrics. All of this is made possible through a simple interface that can be used across desktop and mobile devices.
Employee Engagement
Employees need to be able to access the information and tools they need in order to do their jobs. This is why it’s so important to keep the intranet up-to-date with content. A well-maintained and updated intranet will encourage employees to log in on a regular basis.
Sharing relevant industry news and tips can keep employees engaged on the intranet by making them feel like they’re always up to date with the latest company developments. This is a great alternative to sharing industry news via email, which often gets lost in the noise of employees’ inboxes.
In addition to posting industry-related news, the intranet can also be used to highlight employee achievements. Whether it’s through the company newsfeed, shouting out star workers on team chat or through a #LoveWall or #ComplimentWall community, recognizing an employee for their efforts will increase engagement on the intranet. This can be done through a simple message from their manager, by highlighting their accomplishment in the company newsfeed or by hosting semi-annual award ceremonies.
Another way to encourage employee engagement is by introducing fun and exciting contests or activities on the intranet. This could be anything from a virtual cook-off to a photo challenge or even an employee of the month vote. Recruiting a group of dedicated employees to oversee the intranet communities and their planning is a great way to boost engagement. This group should include senior employees and department heads.