Modern Intranet: Creating engaging employee experience for 2023

What is modern intranet?

The term intranet as we know has been seen a paradigm shift over the years. Modern Intranet is now significantly integrated to accept the employee’s pain points as a key priority in:

• C-suite corporate executives, IT leaders,
• HR onboarding process while recruiting new hires.
• Planning a powerful internal communication to ease out from the grapple of handing the concept hybrid workforce.

In addition, integration of Modern Intranet will not only fix one piece of the puzzle but will also help in meeting the goals and objectives of the employee’s expectation to create an engaging employee experience.

A peek into history gives us a glimpse into the world of “Intranet” and the tremendous changes it has made since then. The emerge of the intranet, called “traditional intranet” in the mid-1990s began with a vision to find the ultimate solutions to bring easy access of sharing knowledge and information within the management.

At first, it started with the notion to fill-in the cabinets but slowly in the 2000s – intranet evolved to focus on adopting new technologies and additional features such as utilizing help desk for a simple transaction, building corporate apps to simplify complex issues in HR, finance and administration and integrating enterprise portals for brand identity, awareness through applications. Therefore, eventually – from 2019, rapid development in internal communication has transformed the modern-day social intranet into a specifically designed and featured employee experience intranet.

Adding to this, A recent survey conducted by the big four companies observed that employee retention increased by 87% utilizing well-equipped and strategized modern intranet solutions. Therefore, generating this significant effect improves employee satisfaction, productivity, and team collaboration in the company.

Have you been planning to incorporate a modern intranet for your organization? Are you wondering whether this new form of modern SharePoint intranet will meet the right set of strategies, expectations, and goals for creating an engaging employee experience? In that case, this blog will exactly provide what you are looking for and take you through the importance of modern intranet that will be the new digital gateway for companies. It will also emphasize on how Modern SharePoint Intranet would quickly facilitate the workforce collaboration, internal communication and implement easy access to share safe and secure data across the organization. This close look at the modern intranet is a concrete foundation to build an empowering employee experience and reinforce a positive company culture for the near future.

Why is a modern intranet important for organizations?

Intranets as we know for long has been pronounced “asleep” due to its inconsistency in keeping up with the demands and requirements of today’s modern workforce. With the digital workplaces transforming rapidly, the way of work is also changing. Team meeting sessions that would take place in the on-site office location are now happening across the globe remotely.

On the other hand, employees are now expected to solve complex tasks that require more amount of time, creative thinking, analyses and mainly collaboration. In such cases, A modern intranet isn’t only about having the perfect tools and technologies but also about enhancing the employee experience.

Now the question arises – Why are these collaborative tools important to enable the employee’s agility and engagement?

• Employees stay well informed and communicated
• Stay connected with internal experts and co-workers within the organization
• Easy access to import and export high-level secured files and data
• Accessing system generated applications save time and resources
• Social interaction turns out to be easy and flexible across geographical and departmental parameters

The role of a modern intranet acts as a personalized gateway to diverse internal communication through mobile and web-based applications are becoming increasingly important in today’s culture of the digital workplace. This newest prolixity of a modern intranet is specially designed for making the workforce task quick, collaborative, and accessible that will help the employees achieve more by putting in fewer efforts. Ultimately, this will benefit the organization to be more agile and accomplish defined goals and objectives.

To explain the importance of Modern Intranet, we need to take a closer look into how the traditional intranet was designed to be the resource of internal network for companies and to evaluate this understanding the key differences between traditional intranet and today’s new modern intranet is essential to examine how far we have evolved:

In a nutshell, both the intranet systems are private networks that are designed for employees to communicate with the team and gain access and knowledge to information about company news, updates, product status, project timeline etc. However, the traditional intranet today acts as a barrier for companies from meeting their efficiency, goals and productivity which is the reason many IT companies are inclined towards seeking to modernize their intranet that qualifies as follows:

• Integrating well-equipped corporate systems and applications that include business productivity suites, collaborative platforms, and engaging tools
• Meets mobile-friendly touchpoint
• Provides positive User Experience (EX)
• Complement cloud solutions like Office 365, SharePoint Intranet, Microsoft Teams etc.

Did you know? – According to the Gartner survey, as of March, it has been reported that 88% of organizations have integrated modern intranet to perform the same workflow systems remotely that they would perform at the office.[/vc_column_text][us_cta title=”Transform your digital workplace with well-integrated Modern Intranet” btn_link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fsaketa.com%2Femployee-engagement-platform%2F|||” btn_label=”Learn More”]Create – Connect – Collaborate to a holistic digital workplace[/us_cta][vc_column_text]

How Modern Intranet will set up a powerful employee experience

There are a handful of third-party tools that will help organizations with an effective intranet that binds the workforce together and enhances employee engagement and interaction. However, choosing the right intranet platform is essential as it increases productivity and builds internal and external interactions within teams from anywhere across the globe.

Now when we have identified the importance of integrating intranet in a company. The main question now arises of choosing a suitable intranet platform. Therefore, out of the lot in the marketplace, Microsoft SharePoint Intranet is one of the best technologies that benefit companies to set up a process of the document management system, employee collaboration, knowledge sharing and store employee information. According to Microsoft Ignite, As the rise of remote and Hybrid work post-Covid-19 SharePoint reports that the online users utilizing the platform have doubled when compared to the last year 2020.

Employee Experience Intranet (EX)

In this modern era, this framework of the modern intranet has created a new paradigm that is the Employee Experience Intranet EX. This new generation of EX intranet encompasses the entire journey of every employee right from the HR onboarding process to off-boarding focusing on every touchpoint during the process.

Holistically, an employee experience platform emphasizes ensuring all employees day-to-day aspects. Similarly, post-pandemic HR and leaders started giving more preference on health and safety requirements. According to a survey conducted by IBM, estimated that 42% of HR leaders in 2023 have set a vision to improve the employee experience and venture on more collaborative tools that will encourage the new form of Hybrid work while building a unified workplace culture.

The digital workplace is evolving and becoming more complex to handle, lack of approach affects the inconsistency and poor functionality. Employee experience intranet (EX) helps in regulating transparency and complexities reduction in the company.

Let’s dive into the top 3 employee experience intranet trends:

1. Strong internal branding: 

   This modern-day intranet builds trust by reinforcing internal branding and communication across all channels in the organization.

2. Mobile Reach: 

   To make successful communications easy, mobile reach is essential to create optimized modern-day intranet pages that are user-friendly and are highly potential for employees to convert their day-to-day tedious manual tasks to automated features like easy log-in access, flexible payroll methods etc.

3. Personal and Valuable: 

   The usage of the modern intranet should also focus on adding value and relevance to the employees choosing suitable personalized content that connects the interests, role, team ethics, employee journey creating an ever-lasting satisfactory user experience. Therefore, reducing the complexities and using desktop and mobile devices adds in the real significance of showcasing organizations to be fast-moving by eliminating all the barriers.

After gaining an overview of the top 3 intranet trends, we will now look into the specifically designed and practiced goals that are added as a key requirement for the modern intranet:

Goal 1: Communication

This goal is explicitly on the top priority in an employee experience intranet, as it helps in the distribution of all the internal and external information in the organizations by using integrated employee portals and collaborative social intranet platforms. This internal communication benefits organizations to perform active company-wide discussions, plan clear and defined objectives via such platforms.

For example, conveying specific communication during HR onboarding, enabling automated workflow systems to produce timely content regularly, distributing time-critical details, Explain the company’s vision, strategy, and goals through realistic data communication. Therefore, such distributed communication by using employee experience intranet helps employees better understand how to make an independent decision, ensures compliance and secured policies, enhances HR onboarding of employees faster and productive and such effective internal communication encourages best practices in the company.

Goal 2: Social Interaction

The primary purpose of this goal is about enabling and drive employee experience feedback within the organization with the perspective to learn regarding the ongoing operational and functional activities among the employee as well as satisfy and meet employee expectations, implementations to promote better and faster networking, exchange knowledge within communities. For example, conduct quarterly or yearly structured public or anonymous surveys, Virtual bulletin boards and incorporating employee digital support to support voting, queries etc.

Goal 3: Sharing Knowledge

Contrary to the initial goal of distributed communications, this goal is about sharing structured knowledge and information that is stored in the data and remains safely secured for the long term. Such pre-defined documents and files contain project-related contents, discussions, analyses, reports that are vital and confidential information of the company.

A collaborative platform like Microsoft teams provides templates and structured documents in a uniform way. The MS Teams application help in regulating scheduled video meeting sessions, making planning and strategy easy by using the in-built Microsoft Planner Apps, easy exchange of large files. This collaborative tool is implemented on increased team productivity, communication and helps to stay connected from anywhere.

Goal 4: Empowerment

The final goals related to providing a part of non-theoretical services and benefits that covers every employee’s day-to-day work routine, financial benefits, non-compensational perks, health insurance, tax etc. Companies improving employee experience by focusing on their pain points will lead to employees feeling prioritized and valued by the organization. In such cases, the willingness of using the intranet in an efficient manner increases.

For example, such benefits include Employee dashboard status, employee discounts, leave requests, attendance punch-in methods, payroll accounting, tax management, timesheets, carpooling opportunities, and other administrative benefits. Hence, such services help in creating a transformed digital workplace by unlocking the potential workforce.

Top 8 ways to reboot modern intranet to boost employee experience for 2023

The advancement of modern communication tools and technologies has changed the entire face of workforce collaboration and the lack of meeting the expected employee goals and objectives. Whereas, in the new age of modern intranet enhancing the teamwork, collaboration and productivity ratio within the business becomes highly crucial.

A study shows that most IT companies are competing to integrate contemporary and better-performing technologies that offer a high level of user experience. Nevertheless, if we talk about today’s digital-era post-pandemic completely relies on the new culture of remote or hybrid work with distributed teams. In such cases, conceptualizing a modern intranet solution becomes more efficient for companies to ensure better employee experience, engagement, and collaboration within the organization.

Let us plunge into ways to reboot the modern intranet to enhance employee experience:

1. Create an engaging employee experience strategy

Getting accustomed to using modern intranet directs to boost employee experience and builds strong communication. Prior to that, creating a well-defined engaging strategy will allow all the employers and employees within the organization to be on the same page. Similarly, drafting the right corporate goals and advantages of this modern intranet will keep the employees aligned. Setting up current and future goals and reevaluating employee expectations through structured feedback allows to track business performance and give actionable insights for redefining employee engagement and communication strategies.

In relation to that, according to a recent employee experience survey conducted by Gartner, states that only 13% of employees were reported to have met full satisfaction and expectations throughout their employee experience journey and a large bracket of about 46% of employees resulted to have an unsatisfactory employee experience.

Organizations across the globe are making a tremendous number of efforts in planning and investing to improve the employee experience by building efficient HR onboarding, specifically redesigning the new normal of hybrid workplace etc. However, the more investment to a better rate of employee engagement and satisfaction. Therefore, companies should focus on setting clearly defined objectives that not only focus on creating a better digital workplace but also deliver integration of intranet tools and decisions for a better employee experience.

2. Focus on usability

Once the modern intranet related tools and collaborative platforms are set up. There is a need to have a constant check on re-designing the modern features of the intranet. The objective is to facilitate new information among teams, perform productive tasks like filling paperwork, reports, targets etc. Such modern features in an intranet should also include captivated inherent search facility that allows every individual to get easy and quick access to information and knowledge.

3. Generate a user-friendly and easy to use intranet: 

Choosing an intranet that is comfortable, user-friendly help in making tedious processes easy and feasible like HR onboarding process, deployment process, internal and external communication etc. Implementing the platform and making it a user-friendly interface helps in maximizing the employee experience and bring a positive impact in improving workforce engagement.

4. Formulate two-way communication

During the 1990s the purpose of using traditional intranets was only for receiving messages but who thought today intranet could reach a stage where we could promote and facilitate two-way communication.

The use of modern intranet will benefit in producing all-in-one collaboration platforms that function to perform company information and acts as company news, updates, and announcement hub. This can serve as a seamless and secure channel to make employee interactions convenient by conducting brainstorming collaborative sessions, workshops relating to new projects or having a highly influential intranet profile that works exactly like social media platform.

5. Level up to publish employee-focused content

Rising the content games is crucial to boost employee experience via modern intranet. Companies should ensure on sharing of relevant, personalized, and valuable content that will increase the target reach and set a high level of engagement. However, in this case – companies should plan and strategies on publishing employee-focused content relevant to the specific industry regarding articles on the tips on retuning back to a hybrid workplace, up-to-date organizational news, social media polls etc. that will help curate defined results of increased productivity and allows employees to interact more and stay engaged.

6. Facilitate virtual water cooler atmosphere

Creating a space or Teams room on your company’s intranet where all the employees in the organization could involve in non-work-related activities like team-bonding activities, gaming sessions, Fun-Friday collaborative sessions, memes, affinity communities, experience sharing platforms will foster employees to stay personally and socially connected. This adds in like an employee wellbeing activity that empowers the work culture and core values of the company.

7. Upgrade to an automated integrated platform

 The best way to optimize your modern intranet to generate improved employee experience is by initiating internal communication. Adding fully automated workplace collaboration tools such as Microsoft teams, employee engagement platforms will boost workplace culture, ensure employees are meeting their expectations by interacting and communicating on projects efficiently.

According to a study conducted by social researchers from Pulse QA., states that about 51% of the respondents believes that it is vital and a few more other preferable to integrate an automated workflow system as an essential feature to support and regulate enterprise-wide internal communications and 54% of the respondents’ estimates modern employee database as a key intranet feature to enhance the employee experience that will help accelerate digital transformation in the workplace.

8. Conduct feedback surveys

Validating internal employees’ feedbacks is not enough, driving surveys from pre- HR onboarding candidates also help in clearly channelizing and improving the recruitment process. Keeping it authentic by re-checking the surveyed employees whether the issues raised are working and what more the company could do on implementing such actionable targets. Hence, the employee feedback in an organization is crucial to understand and work towards the area improvement to create an engaging and ever-lasting employee experience.

Wrapping up: 

The idea of modern intranet creating an engaging employee experience is still in its blooming stage, as the future of the digital workplace is evolving each day and there is a lot of room for implications.

At Saketa, our vision for the modern intranet is to improve the employee experience, engagement, and collaboration by focusing more on personalization despite diverse target groups, multiple channels and set expectations. The goal is to incorporate suitable modern intranet tools to measure the performance, results of the company. Therefore, a well-designed modern intranet ensures that employees gain greater experience – who are known for the company’s greatest assets

To learn more on how to leverage and enable an efficient and suitable modern intranet that will help boost better employee experience. Head to our blog that will guide you through the top 10 modern intranet features.

Keep following Saketa Employee Engagement Platform  that helps promote digital collaboration, boost productivity and leverage engaging employee experience. Know more about our high-performing applications that will help improve your business connect, collaborate and communicate.