4 advanced features a modern intranet must have
Because most organizations transform into digital companies, businesses are facing a huge challenge – how to support employees to improve their engagement in a digital workplace.
Modern businesses need high-performance employees to remain competitive in a highly dynamic business landscape, and only those with a well-organized workplace will be able to stay ahead of the competition curve.
Since a lot of business success depends on internal-external communication and the way employees engage with leadership and each other, communication tools, have become imperative. One of these communication tools is an intranet.
What is an intranet?
Before we move on, we must answer one important question – What does intranet mean? An intranet is a network of web-connected sites. This special network is designed for internal company use with restricted access to the company staff, such as leadership, stakeholders, and employees.
Businesses use intranets to share all sorts of company-related information such as processes, policies, charts, updates, and news with their employees.
On the other hand, employees use these intranets as central communication hubs where they can find all up-to-date information, connect with other coworkers, send their feedback to leadership, and more.
Businesses use intranets for:
- Driving operational efficiencies
- Streamlining business procedures
- Improving internal business functions
- Reducing the costs of operations
- Enhancing internal communication
- Advancing collaboration between partners, suppliers, managers, and employees
A modern intranet is an excellent addition to your business server, making a pool of relevant data available and easily accessible to your entire staff. With that in mind, here are some of the most advanced features a modern intranet should have.
1. Content provision capabilities
Relevance and time matter the most today. Therefore, modern intranet needs relevant and timely capacities to provide content on-demand.
Since this is a central hub of information for all your operations, the content stored has to be duly updated and relevant to aid your business functions. This can be easily managed by using the content manager.
This smart tool makes publishing and updating relevant content timely and easy. To make sure that information is relevant and valuable, you need constant feedback from employees, and they can use an intranet to provide it.
2. Employee- and culture-centric
Since an intranet is a central repository, businesses use intranets as communication hubs to convey company culture. You can increase intranet adoption rates across your organization by making its culture- and employee-centric. Consider the following features:
- Push notifications – employees get notified about all relevant announcements, news, and updates.
- Employee engagement – highlight individual engagement of each employee in a way that reflects your company.
- Update channel – set a channel to update birthday wishes, work anniversaries, recognition, and rewards.
- Know your team – enhance people’s search to allow your employees to connect with each other.
3. Mobile experience
Employees need simplicity, accessibility, and ease of use to improve their engagement and productivity, especially if they are required to work in a mobile-driven culture. Since almost all modern employees are mobile, you need to allow them access to mobile devices of their choosing.
Implementing an intranet with a user-friendly interface and responsive design provides excellent user experience and efficient intranet access.
A mobile intranet allows employees to access any data regardless of their location and time zone. If they can access data in a timely manner, they can interact effectively.
4. Personalization
Most businesses don’t pay enough attention to the user experience when setting up their intranet, but this is a huge mistake.
Your employees won’t adopt an intranet if they have to struggle with using it. An intranet is a smart tool design to improve your operations, not make them more complicated.
You can increase user experience by allowing employees to tailor content according to their needs. If they can make communication more personalized, it will be easier for them to interact with each other and other departments.
Modern intranets have features that allow users to personalize content according to specific personal or professional interests, job role or type, location or administration, or according to social media they prefer.
This level of personalization makes your employees more engaged while improving adoption rates. An intranet is an investment, and to increase your ROI – you need to make sure it’s adopted across every department.
Conclusion
When your entire organization is connected, you can use intranets to improve employee engagement, reinforce company culture, and boost overall adoption. Making your team more productive is also an excellent way to beat the competition.
An intranet makes all data regarding your business more consumable, dynamic, relevant, and fresh but, more importantly, accurate and up to date. This gives you a competitive advantage while taking your business one step ahead in your business niche.