If you’re looking for an intranet solution that will meet your company’s needs, start by evaluating the intrinsic goals of your team. This will help you identify your must-haves.
IM, forums, project spaces, and more. Social feeds offer a modern look that’ll encourage employees to use the portal. Directory searches are a must, as well.
Communication
An Enterprise intranet can transform the way your company shares information with its people. For some companies, that means enhancing internal comms and collaboration; for others, it may mean better processes or greater efficiency. To make sure your intranet achieves its goals, ask your team what they need most from it. This will help you choose the right tools and features.
A modern intranet provides many tools for sharing content, with customisable notifications that let employees control their alerts. It also uses automation features, such as an auto governance engine, to manage the health of information on the platform by ensuring it stays fresh and trustworthy. Intranet systems also often feature integration functionality, allowing employees to access important documents, email systems and employee recognition apps without leaving the platform.
For businesses with dispersed workforces, the intranet can connect remote workers, field-based teams and satellite offices, increasing morale and engagement. The platform can even automate workflows, reducing time spent on tasks like sending out forms and requests to departments.
While it was once standard for critical information to be communicated by bulletin board, phone and fax, an intranet system makes this task easier and faster. The software can even help to increase productivity by enabling employees to bypass cumbersome and outdated processes, such as emailing colleagues for information or files.
Collaboration
The digital workplace is a collaboration- and interaction-oriented place. In a previous era, an intranet was merely a portal that served up centrally stored documents alongside internal articles and communications (often one-way communication). Today, a firm specializing in’social intranets’ can deliver a full range of features designed to connect employees across divisions, locations or teams.
Frontline workers, particularly, need a single accessible hub that brings together disparate information and communication systems, which must also work on any device. Today, forward-thinking organizations realize this hub doesn’t need to be a physical office; it can be a cloud-based intranet solution that delivers the same features as historic workplace solutions.
These modern intranets have a social focus that leverages every employee’s innate desire to interact with their colleagues meaningfully. They have document-authoring tools, team calendars, content management and a people directory that make them more effective than traditional workplace portals. They also offer collaborative tools like forums, blogs, tasks, and chat rooms for a better user experience.
They’re also able to automate workflows for faster approvals and more streamlined operations. Whether it’s submitting vacation requests or ordering critical supplies, custom online forms are routed to the appropriate departments for action. The centralized news feed keeps everyone informed and current, breaking down departmental siloes. And the knowledge tagging and indexing feature allows staff to search, find, and access important information.
Engagement
An intranet is the perfect place to communicate company news, events, and initiatives. Modern intranets can also become social communication tools, fostering connection and engagement across the team.
Employee engagement is an important metric for business success. It impacts everything from absenteeism and turnover to productivity levels. A good way to measure employee engagement is to look at their level of involvement in the company’s intranet. However, it’s important to note that employee engagement is different from employee satisfaction. While employee satisfaction addresses how happy employees are at work, engagement measures how committed and invested they are in their job.
The first step to boosting employee engagement in your company intranet is to ensure that the platform is easy to navigate. People are often turned off by a company intranet that is difficult to navigate, with outdated content and spam. This can cause employees to lose interest in the platform altogether.
Another way to improve intranet engagement is by integrating the platform with other corporate systems. This enables employees to access and retrieve data quickly, so that they can make better decisions. This can also help to eliminate duplicate processes by making the platform a one-stop shop.
Finally, it’s important to provide employees with the ability to share information and updates on their social media platforms. This allows employees to create awareness about the company, and it can even lead to valuable brand advocacy.
Security
The digital workplace opens up new opportunities for securing business data and processes. However, these advancements can also expose the organization to security threats. Keeping hackers and disgruntled employees out of intranet systems, preventing confidential or sensitive information from being displayed online, and maintaining version control on electronic documents are all crucial to intranet security.
It is important that companies train their workforce on intranet security best practices. Providing education on password use, never sharing a password with colleagues and making sure that passwords are at least 20 characters in length and include letters, numbers and keyboard symbols is essential. This can be combined with a two-factor authentication system to ensure that only authorized users are accessing the site.
Encryption is another simple but effective way to protect data. Using an intranet that includes this feature allows for files to be sent from your servers in an encrypted form, so they can only be read by computers on your internal network. This is cheap insurance against cyberattacks and should be part of every company’s security arsenal.
Ultimately, a good intranet solution will be designed with security in mind from the start. Including firewalls, SSL connections, HIPPA compliance, backups and version controls should all be included in your platform design. Many modern intranet solutions, such as Happeo, incorporate these features into their product and make it easy for businesses to use them.