Social intranet plays a crucial role at an organizational level – it’s a communication and collaborative medium that encourages employees to socially engage within the community. A user-friendly intranet software provides every employee better culture and workplace environment by combining powerful search functionalities, engaging features and flexible content management including onboarding and HR workflow systems.
Over the years, the centralized hub of communication enables to build an easy to navigate and interact with relevant engaging information doesn’t only persist to contain benefits, but it also has its share of hurdles that come in the way of reducing intranet success.
Social Intranet
The idea of connecting internal communication, team collaboration and engaged productivity all under one roof has been the most exciting yet challenging concept to tackle. However, this social hub enables the widespread participation of employees to author rich content specific to the company. The objective here is to simplify this user-interface site where users could contribute and share knowledge as well as provide opportunities for real-time collaboration seamlessly.
Social intranet is a ready-to-use company-wide platform that specializes employees within the workplace to connect, collaborate and engage the right company updates, information without friction
Top 5 Major challenges while using a social intranet platform:
To have a better grip on the major pain-points of the social intranet, we have conducted a self-analysis survey on LinkedIn that dive into 4 key bottlenecks that is
- Lack user-friendly device
- Poor search functionality
- Low user adoption and
- Lack of consistency
Post evaluation, it was observed that organizations struggle with consistency in their internal communication, and this is essentially conveying that repetitive, irrelevant, and outdated communication channels levels down to poor user experience and performance. Therefore, to get a complete picture of the concerns with this user interface of intranet
Here is a quick glimpse on the 5 major social intranet challenges companies face and how we can efficiently solve them:
1. Poor search directory
The “Search” tab is one of the main functionalities that surround everything you need to know about your intranet. It is a quality search engine that allows employees to find all company updates and content under one platform instead of being stuck in a series of hoops. Unfortunately, post-pandemic most companies evaluated that a non-operative company directory causes a stressful work environment and will no doubt spill the beans to intranet failure.
This inadequacy is affected due to 3 key reasons, such as:
- Lack of customization,
- Inefficient features that encourage teams to connect and engage,
- No mobile friendly support
A need for a robust, searchable corporate directory with optimized functionalities will amplify the search process by integrating features like keyword analyst that will keep a track of what kind of niche content employees are looking for, even if the information is incomplete. The easy-to-use intranet tool will find the solution of interest. Therefore, the incorporation of a user-friendly search function will automatically update frequent information by involving HR workflow and onboarding systems.
2. Reshape Hybrid Workforce:
A robust, searchable corporate directory with optimized functionalities will amplify the search process by integrating features like keyword analyst will help keep track of what kind of niche content employees are looking for, even if the information is incomplete. The easy-to-use intranet tool will find the solution of interest. Therefore, a user-friendly search function will automatically update frequent information by involving HR workflow and onboarding systems.
Did you know – Onboarding a collaborative digital intranet platform across your workplace enhances engaging social communities 2X times.
Offering exceptional digital collaboration tools will improve hybrid capabilities and try to brush up on the bottlenecks and help provide maximum workplace and collaboration solutions across the organization. A recent event conducted by Microsoft Research Summit revealed that digital communication tools set a high level of engagement
Thus, organizations should facilitate strategies like publishing employee-centric information, conducting surveys or feedback via polls to keep the employees hooked, curating a defined analysis of the intranet improvements, and lastly organizing collaborative team-bonding sessions to foster distributed collaboration and productivity.
3. Lack of consistency and outdated content
One of the primary duties of a social intranet is to support employee interaction and communication. Whether it is regarding company-related guidelines, local updates, channel information, HR – Employee specific content or niche content for leader and C-suite groups. The intranet platform is an all-in-one solution for leading internal communication across the workforce. Perhaps, this frequent need for new digital communication, content and news is in constant flux if there is no scope of implementation or consistency.
Thus, inconsistency and outdated content is a huge pain point when it comes to using a social intranet. As per the survey conducted it was observed that 39% of users implied a lack of consistency and innovation that lead the intranet tool to nowhere. Therefore, conducting employee feedback via intranet and keeping track of tool insights will help measure current and future intranet performance and effectiveness.
4. Low user adoption
As the workplace demographics are rapidly changing, companies are struggling to manage their business needs with the use of the right digital technologies that enhance internal communication and collaboration. To amplify key employee engagement metrics and justify ROI a successful intranet environment is a must.
A recent survey by Gartner reveals– At least 40% of employee intranets fail to deliver ROI due to inadequate adoption
However, despite having an effective intranet platform, user adoption remains to be a concern area. The real problem occurs when a complex intranet user interface is involved more employees feel disengaged and minimizes efficiency.
Let’s take a sneak peek into the 5 reasons leading to low employee adoption:
- Lack of employee consideration during the initial stage of intranet implementation
- Data is scattered between different sources instead of one central hub for sharing all information.
- Poorly structured content can drive complicated site navigation
- Inadequate intranet training and education
- Lack of personalization leads to low user adoption rates
Develop a social intranet as a go-to place for all the company updates and latest content by easily navigating and tagging your workforce to get effective, optimized results. In addition, ensure standard navigation functionality that can be easily customized. Therefore, modern intranet features can deploy and boost employee engagement and productivity accelerating internal communication seamless leading to successful user adoption.
5. Limited to no analytics
Many organizations are still not tracking their day-to-day activities and company progress with an effective analytical tool. Poorly manage or limited access to track daily insights can cost companies a million of lost productivity ratio and could be a critical warning signal for the company’s intranet site.
Thus, with intranet reporting tools you can check daily insights of elements such as user adoption, internal communication, knowledge-based management, Click-through-rates of likes, shares and comments that keep track of the distributed workforce interaction and finally checking user engagement per content. Therefore, these analyses help monitor, manage, and control any problem or error detection that leads to intranet failure.
Wrapping Up:
If an employee is the spokes of the business wheel, then a social intranet acts as a centralized hub connecting all the dots of communication, collaboration, productivity, and engagement. You have checked out the key challenges that obstruct social intranet success that does not end there. Implementing and measuring this intranet solution to drive great employee experience will manifest potential business progress and accelerates the future of the digital workplace.
Curious to know about how to measure employee experience via intranet? So, buckle up and head to our blog ways to measure and optimize improved employee experience and transparency with the game-changing digital intranet. Do you have any queries regarding how to implement your company intranet by overcoming the challenges? Our expert team at Saketa would love to connect and answer any questions. Reach out to us by commenting and sharing your thoughts.
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