11 Ways to refine your company intranet for employees

Every enterprise needs a most trusted source of information to boost a strong internal branding approach that ultimately leads to establishing business identity and awareness among its workforces. However, as the digital world is increasingly evolving by building an unprecedented opportunity of innovation across all industries. Now the question arises – How can organizations successfully build a strong foundation of internal branding and communication through the digital workplace?

A company intranet comes in frame and acts as a paramount focal point of connecting strong team collaboration and internal communication. Whereas, in today’s new workplace environment internal communication has become the new gateway to the future digital transformation. As companies level up their advancement in the technological tools to connect and communicate with the employees within the organization, there is a growing responsibility to effectively develop a cohesive approach towards enhancing the employee experience and engagement.

Did you know? – According to Gallup’s July 2021 Workplace Study, companies with highly engaged workforces are 36% more profitable than those showcasing poor engaging intranet experience.

Many IT companies are well-versed with the concept of a company intranet by now but most of them miss out on integrating a fully operative intranet portal for employees – as they ignore the fact that the intranet solutions have now evolved beyond the traditional limitations of webpage frameworks and offer highly functioned modern features that have a wide range of benefits.

In this article, we will take a closer look at how company intranet balances the parallels of having a dynamic employee experience and striking the right target to the business performance efficiently. We will also dive into the Top 10 brilliant ways to refine your company intranet for employees for the next 2022.

What is Intranet definition – And why should a company have an intranet for employees?

Before heading towards the usefulness of the company intranet, you may be wondering: What is an intranet? – An intranet is a private hub of network used by companies to store internal and external information, distribute communication exclusively within the employees to enable team collaboration, streamline strategies that enhance employee advocacy within the organization.

Good internal communication is the key to effective collaboration and to notch it up supercharging an intranet for employees which is also effectively known as the employee intranet, centralizes and allows companies to restructure the communication within all the departments and allows teams to connect, engage and share information from any location. In other words, this interactive intranet is a new-age employee intranet software that integrates the latest information via pre-built applications and systems (e.g., Office 365, SharePoint, and Microsoft Teams)

Here are the primary reasons why should a company use an intranet portal for employees:

• Two-way communication system
• Knowledge sharing access
• Boost employee engagement
• Enable HR onboarding processes
• Imparts employee directory information
• Includes administrative and financial invoices
• Organizational analytics

Employee Intranet

Employee Intranet is an essential part of the modern workplace. Over time, these internal portals for employees have evolved from the traditional invariable file storehouse to a dynamic modern intranet platform that engages company’s workforce without any geographical barrier and time limitation. Furthermore, these employee intranet platforms are effectively implemented with 3 key features that are the main reason for the increase in productivity and employee engagement.

• Easy streamline of communication: Allow employees to connect and exchange information easily
• Retain employees’ confidence: Including essential elements like focused communities, news forums, employee profile, search facility and an outlet for leadership branding, knowledge, and communication.
• Enable team productivity: Optimize and facilitate faster and smarter work processes for improved analysis and results.

An Employee Intranet Software not only enables knowledge sharing access and distribution of internal communication, but it also helps in keeping the connection, engagement, and collaboration within the teams alive. Additionally, this intranet provides employees to work together from a centralized location by sharing media files, receiving employee feedback, tracking employee experience and performance as well as collaborating on a variety of scheduled tasks. Therefore, employee intranet software is like a cherry on the cake, that allows companies with bundles of features relating to business content management and internal communication software which is easily accessible for users through the advanced intranet portals.

To understand the detailed analysis of how these employee intranets are coping in the modern workplace. – Check out the latest intranet infographics complied with important statistics that will help avoid the pitfalls and reap the advantages of using the company intranet for employees.

Top 11 ways to refine intranet for employees in your organization

A study recently conducted by Microsoft, states that employees felt truly empowered with the presence of having a well-equipped intranet in the organization that supported employee development, training, and feedback benefits, and adhering to employee wellbeing. For a fact, it was estimated that for Microsoft Teams the daily active users rose to 115 million unlocking the new forms of connection, collaboration, and communication. On the other hand, Microsoft 365 users across the globe generated more than 30 billion collaboration minutes in a single day.

Thus, understanding the employee needs and implementing a plan that emphasizes improving innovation and transparency is necessary to raise internal branding and employee engagement.

Here are Top 11 ways to tailor company intranet for employees:

1. Make the intranet user-friendly

The highlighted feature of optimizing the corporate intranet for employees is that it can customize, tweak, and configure the user interface in so many ways. However, due to multiple features and elements, the platform is congested with unnecessary tools and functionalities that seem overwhelming to the eye and lose out on having a user-friendly interface. Therefore, structuring a digital workplace that is easy to navigate by the employees helps to connect and browse the intranet easily which leads to a higher adoption rate and employee engagement.

2. Create a launch plan:

If you as a company want to make your employees feel comfortable while using the intranet, then the best way to implement is by building an intranet launch plan that offers group training sessions and video customized demos etc. Every company has a different method to incorporate the launch strategy but making sure of the set goals and spending enough time by scheduling exclusive internal training meetings, will help them understand the effectiveness of the intranet software.

3. Integrate workforce collaboration suites

An intranet integrated with powerful suits of network and application makes access easy and creates a unified workplace environment. Integrating with popular collaboration platforms like Microsoft Teams that acts as an in-house collaboration hub that helps your team stay organized, connected, and well communicated – all under one roof and other intranet portals like Microsoft 365 (OneDrive, Outlook, SharePoint). Hence, every tool mentioned above helps in HR planning, finance, survey tools, multilingual intranet solutions, business process and project analyses.

4. Increase Intranet Engagement:

If a business wants to increase the intranet engagement, then the only way is to give its staff members a vital reason to direct towards the platform. Significantly using a document management system will help store all the useful information. So, whenever an employee requires any company related material, logo, or legal form then they can turn to the resource library intranet. In addition, integrating a smart calendar system and task management will thus promote transparency and easily tracks the deadline, flow of information and project progress.

5. Build an employee directory:

A huge component in enhancing employee communication and engagement is by using social intranet aspects as a weapon. As a matter of fact, people love to engage and socialize with different mindsets of people. Similarly, an employee directory is a forum that will showcase every employee’s information that will connect to their colleagues. This employee directory forum encourages users to add in their personal interest, bio and an interesting – fun fact that allows distributed teams within the organization to build a deeper level of connection at the workplace.

6. Use employee surveys:

Employee surveys is a brilliant opportunity to get direct feedback from the teams within your organization. For instance, if you want to know what the employees’ interest for a Christmas party? Or conducting an employee satisfaction questionnaire? – By sending out feedback survey forms will help leverage your intranet engagement and direct future action plans in the organization.

7. Market your intranet:

Intensifying the intranet game at the marketplace brings in brand identity and awareness of the product or service your company is selling. Therefore, consistently sending weekly/monthly newsletters, blogs, podcasts, social media posts, digital flyers of the latest marketing campaign events or webinars via intranet retains readers attention and ensure better click-through rates.

8. Centralize communication among all apps:

An effective intranet solution enables to flourish two-way communication via apps across the organization. As an all-in-one collaboration platform companies should go beyond and consistently upgrade and support the bidirectional communications for employees to have a secure and seamless channel to connect – interact and drive brainstorming sessions on new tasks and projects.

9. Add Content Management System:

The Intranet CMS integration allows users to locate and access the information, quickly and easily. It acts like a target boosting content creation tool that builds, modifies, and personalizes digital content depending on the specific industry. Thus, maintaining up-to-date consistent employee-focused content will facilitate increased intranet user experience which means that the workforce can easily publish professional documents set with graphical user interface, one-to-one marketing and format legacy electronic documents into HTML or PDF files.

10. Onboard new talent using intranet portals:

A solid intranet portal for employees simplifies the onboarding process and makes it easier. If a company is looking to increase its employee communication and engagement. In that case, the presence of an intranet is a vital factor. Thus, new hires can immediately use the corporate intranet with its easy-to-use functionalities and features right from the beginning of the onboarding process. The intranet will not only act as a right hand during the interviews but express huge importance during training sessions of the new employees. Therefore, the platform will activate the newly onboarded employees in the digital community through the Q&A forums, employee directory, up-to-date organization charts and a dynamic news hub forum that provides insights and the latest information of the company.

11. Boost Recognition and Reward

Applauding employees’ efforts with the means of awards and recognition motivates the workforce to work better, positively impacts the productivity rate and escalates employee satisfaction. Ultimately transforming your company culture – cultivating your employees and help retain the highest performing talent.

Level up your intranet game to be fun:

As it sounds obvious, companies should include many fun elements to make the company intranet for employees more interactive, engaging and collaborative. Make sure of including entertaining content in the social community by posting photos from company events, encouraging competitive programs like gaming sessions, meme challenges etc. to create a workplace culture that inspires and motives every employee that directly impacts employee engagement, collaboration, and satisfaction levels.

At Saketa, our vision for the corporate intranet is to improve the employee experience, engagement, and collaboration. To learn more on how to leverage an efficient company intranet that will help boost better employee experience. Head to our blog that will guide you through the Best intranet platform: Explore our list of top 5 intranet.