In an increasingly digital-first world, your intranet becomes a front door for your employees. It should be your brand and culture in digital form.
It's not merely a box of information but a virtual reflection of your company's identity. By embodying the brand and culture in digital form, the intranet becomes more than just a tool; it becomes a cohesive platform fostering engagement, unity, and alignment among employees.
This digital representation serves to reinforce organisational values, promote transparency, and facilitate collaboration, ultimately driving productivity and employee satisfaction.
Delivering a solution to your employees, must not focus on technical requirements, but on outcomes you want your employees need to achieve in their daily engagement with the intranet. Organisations that start with the tech and forget about employee needs do not deliver an intranet that delivers value…
In our experience, Productivity, Collaboration and Communication are key themes for focusing on your employee needs.
Productivity Focus
Employees are more likely to engage with an intranet if it enhances their productivity and simplifies their workflow. If the platform provides easy access to the tools, information, and resources they need to perform their tasks efficiently, it becomes a valuable part of their workday. Conversely, if it complicates or slows down their tasks, employees may avoid using it altogether.
Make it Mobile
What Impact Does a Mobile-First Experience Have on Usage and Satisfaction?
Most of us are now mobile-first. A powerful, positive mobile intranet experience will increase usage. If employees can easily access information, connect and collaborate from anywhere, engagement and usage will increase. It can also reduce the need for manual processes, increasing staff satisfaction and making their working lives easier and more fulfilling.
Navigation
How Can Intuitive Design Improve User Engagement and Accessibility?
Easy navigation is essential to making your intranet user-friendly.
Making it intuitive from the outset means that employees are more likely to engage long-term and less likely to fall back into old ways of working. Familiar interface and search functions will make using the intranet a logical step from previous applications, driving engagement usage. Ensure that the pages and links that users access the most are easy to find, with a targeted home page where employees can see news relevant to their role and location.
To-Do Lists and Upcoming Meetings
What is it that indicates that the purpose is being met?
Incorporate tools such as joint calendars and to-do lists to encourage workplace collaboration, improve time management, and ensure organized task prioritisation. By providing employees with a clear overview of upcoming meetings and tasks, the intranet becomes an indispensable resource for daily productivity and team coordination.
Personalisation Focus
One size does not fit all and your employees will only use your intranet if it is useful and relevant to them. If their homepage is overwhelmed with content that is irrelevant to their individual needs and job requirements, they will switch off.
Design
Why Is a User-Centered Design Critical for Intranet Success?
The digital experience might look different for every company, so you need an intranet that can be customised to cater to your requirements and employees’ needs.
The first impression of your intranet will boost early engagement and increase adoption. If it’s unappealing and difficult to use, employees just won’t access it.
- Remember that their digital working experience will be judged against consumer apps and websites. It needs to have a user-first design that is visually appealing, modern and inviting.
- Build it in partnership with your organisation, involving them in the design and functionality so that it closely meets their needs. Incorporating features of your brand will reinforce and strengthen the culture of your organisation.
- Using language employees relate to will create an environment where they feel included and understood.
User Personalisation
How Can Tailoring Content to Different Departments Boost Engagement?
Some information and functionality will be useful for your entire organisation but different departments will have their own specific needs.
Creating separate pages for individual departments builds a sense of belonging and creates a base of relevant information for each user. Intranet sites for specific parts of the employee journey such as onboarding or moving into management allow focus on those needs and requirements.
Personalising your intranet experience will promote engagement. Assigning personas when they first sign on to the intranet, such as HR, Frontline, or Internal comms will help you create a targeted experience. The opportunity to customise their own home page with personalised quick links to the apps, tools and content most relevant to them will give a sense of ownership as well making their experience more intuitive and accessible.
Communication Focus
Making sure your Intranet is customised and personalised for your employees is the first step, you now want to make sure the different instances of your platform are optimised to facilitate smooth and fast communication.
People, Knowledge and Office Search
How Can You Make Employee Collaboration More Seamless and Productive?
In an increasingly virtual workplace, creating opportunities through your intranet for your employees to connect and collaborate both personally and professionally is vital. Making it easy for employees to find each other on your intranet means they can collaborate on projects, improving productivity and increasing opportunities for creativity.
The easier it is to access knowledge and information, the quicker employees can use that information for personal growth and tasks, improving efficiency. It’s important to make sure your search function is powerful and as simple to use as searching on the web. This will make your intranet the go-to hub for knowledge and will empower your employees to find answers for themselves.
Organisation News
How Can Your Intranet Drive Engagement Through Organisational Updates?
Your intranet site should be the centre of communication for your organisation and should reflect the tone and culture of your workplace. It’s where you will share communications and announcements in a single, centralised space. Keep your content fresh by regularly updating news and updates to employees, as well as advertising internal job opportunities and announcing birthdays, work events and promotions: this is where personalisation comes back to play a huge role.
This is also a place to encourage praise and recognition. Motivate employees with relevant statistics on your organisation's health, such as customer satisfaction, sales targets and financial performance. Everyone, whatever their role, responds positively to praise. Using your intranet to acknowledge achievement will boost employee satisfaction, self-worth and overall retention. The chances are that it will also encourage others to do the same, contributing positively to the overall culture of your business.
Microsoft Team Activity Feed
How Does the Microsoft Team Activity Feed Foster Community and Engagement?
The traditional office has radically changed. Workplaces now function with hybrid, remote and deskless employees across different locations. A strong sense of purpose and community is key to motivation and your intranet solution needs to reflect this. It should be an accessible digital community and a safe space to express opinions and ideas. Establishing your platform as a place employees feel they have a voice will increase engagement and break down barriers.
The Microsoft Team Activity Feed has user friendly features found on many social media platforms which will be familiar. Employees can create and share posts, videos and stories with colleagues. This opportunity for front end content creation can have a snowball effect, with users encouraging each other to get involved. This is where you can create a workplace culture of feeling good and working well.
Brand Links
Why Is It Important to Integrate Brand Identity Into Your Intranet?
Your intranet design should accurately reflect and promote your brand identity, with links to your company website and your products. Putting your own branding on your intranet helps create a more immersive experience for employees and keeps them engaged with the company’s purpose.
Getting The Right Input
To deliver true engagement, your intranet has to be employee-centric.
Here’s how to get the input you need:
- Survey and interview stakeholders in internal communications, IT and HR to find out about their challenges and how an intranet could help.
- Speak to a range of employees about how an intranet could help them.
- Create and test an initial layout.
- Develop the full intranet in conjunction with beta users.
- Set a clear timeline for launch.
- Launch with training and support to drive adoption.
- Monitor usage and gather feedback.
- Continually improve and optimise based on feedback.
Summary
Here are the most important things to consider when creating an intranet that your employees want to use:
- A visually appealing, user-friendly design.
- Familiar, intuitive navigation
- A powerful search function
- Personalise the user experience
- Easy access to people and information
- Social communication tools to establish a digital community
- Clear brand identity
A well-planned and deployed intranet can become your organisation’s central hub. It can enhance the experience of your employees, leading to happier employees, better employee performance and high employee retention – which will improve your ROI and overall business success.
Why Cocentric?
At Cocentric, we work with some of the world’s fastest-growing businesses to help them overcome their internal communication challenges and integrate digital systems through tailored strategies, cutting-edge technology and ongoing support. Our award-winning approach can help you implement new processes effectively across your organisation.
If you would like to find out more, get in touch with our team.
Our E-Books ‘Planning and Deploying a Successful Intranet’ , ‘‘How to boost employee engagement using your intranet’ ’ and '10 Reasons To Opt for a SharePoint Intranet' can help you get started.
