30 Apr
How to build the Best Modern Intranet for 2021
The pandemic has altered the world and its effects still last. Countries have sealed their border, quarantined, limits have been imposed for human proximity and lifestyles have been changed to alleviate the health crisis. Apart from this, it has severely impacted the corporate world and has put all the companies on edge. The organizations are affected adversely concerning financial viability for their workforce and employment continuity. Many businesses are on the verge of shutting down and millions of jobs are at risk. It will have an everlasting impact on how people work going forward. Virtual workplaces are rising for business continuity, making work from home mandatory rather than being treated as a benefit to the employees. The switch from “work from office” to “working remotely/ from home” was immediate that has its own set of challenges to deal with.
When it comes to the corporate world, the remote workforce is the most affected one. Most of the remote employees report a lack of information from their higher officials as their biggest concern. It is also challenging to coordinate the team members working in different time zones. Most of the employee’s experience loneliness, keep themselves isolated and dissatisfied with their roles.
Lately, as restrictions began easing in a few areas, the attention from working remotely is shifted to bringing employees back to their offices. Keeping the pandemic in mind, few employees are not ready to work from office premises, at least not at full capacity. This workplace includes a mix of onsite presence of the skeletal and remote staff. It is always perceived that employee working from the office provide great output when compared to remote employees. Remote workforces have fewer opportunities to outshine the crowd as they have less visibility into overall company missions and values.
According to a study, around 74% of employees would work better if they were appreciated. Organizations should provide a platform that addresses the needs of hybrid workforce.
What is a modern intranet?
Intranets are considered as the digital gateway to the company. They are modified with time and presented to the employees in their best form. It acts as a doorway to a whole new world with a wealth of content and services to the workforce, owing to giving good employee experience. Any organization having the best modern intranet will enable the employees to view information, news, ask feedback queries, knowledge sharing, and get instant assistance. Modernizing the intranets will help the employees accomplish more with much ease and in return will help the company become more agile and meet its business objectives.
How is it different from traditional intranets?
Traditional intranets were designed to be the company’s internal communications tool. It acts as a gateway to the organization for the desk-based workforce at an office computer in a business day. They include company news from the internal team, resources maintained by IT, connections to the system like HR, expense management, payroll, etc. Most of the employees were not satisfied with these intranet features that were full of outdated information, limiting its usefulness. According to Prescient Digital Media, only 13% of employees reported using their intranets every day while 31% of employees have never used them.
These intranets are not agile enough for digital transformation, which fails to meet employee engagement, productivity, and efficiency goals. That is the reason many organizations are seeking to modernize their intranet.
What features should a modern intranet have?
There are ample reasons to invest in modernizing the company’s intranet. One of the prime reasons is to connect their employees to the brand further, bring positive work culture, and uplift employee engagement.
- Personalization: Content that is valuable to one employee may be spam to another in a different department. Personalized information based on the employee’s job profile, activities, interests, location, etc. will allow users to find the most relevant information on the corporate page. When considering an intranet, we need to make sure it has configuration flexibility for the employees to tailor the dashboards as per their interest. It will save the precious time of the employees and can focus more on productive work.
- Centralized Hub: Employees spend hundreds of unproductive hours annually to perform non-trivial tasks like searching an app and information that hardly adds any business value. This leads to revenue loss to any organization. Modern SharePoint intranets act as a centralized information hub for enterprises which will help us access business information and perform work-related activities from a single interface. Employees can access information from different applications from a single window, avoiding context switching. It will boost up employee engagement and experience altogether.
- Business Application Integration: Make your modern intranet a gateway to the corporate systems that should include business, consumer, and internal communications tools, etc. All the required business platforms and applications are built-in to give their employees everything they need in one place and eliminate the hassle of context switching.
- Mobile reach: Employees work in different time zones, distributed across the globe. Reaching employees has become a challenging task. Intranets with the mobile-ready feature will enable employees to go through the company information quickly without taking the pain of logging into the computer. They can open an app in seconds, which will improve employee engagement and productivity. Push notifications are an added advantage to mobile users ensuring they do not miss any notifications.
- Ideation platform: People in general, ideate in unexpected situations. So, a platform needs to be introduced wherein employees can put forward their ideas. An idea management tool integrated will help to capture the ideas of the employees. This will foster employee engagement in driving innovation and business growth.
- Communication platform: Employees need to have a good relationship with their team members and colleagues from other departments. Remote work culture has created a void among the workforce. They do not feel connected to the company and feel left out. SharePoint intranets with an internal communication tool will encourage the employees to connect with their team members. Also, employees sharing common interests can connect and build conversations across the departments.
- Centralized Search Experience: Workers spend a lot of time searching and gathering the relevant information. According to Mckinsey, workers spend 1.8 hours a day on average searching and gathering the relevant information. Modern intranets with smart search tools can reduce the time spent on searching and dedicate the time saved on productive work.
When provided with an array of features, the SharePoint intranets can provide employees with a wide variety of benefits, some of which include:
Improved Productivity: The modern intranets drive productivity when employees access relevant information, tool, and updates. Also, the company’s data and dashboard are customizable based on user needs and interests. Accessing personalized business data from one store will enable employees to do their job with maximum efficiency.
Employee engagement: A SharePoint intranet can drive employee engagement by guiding them through every step of their corporate journey. It provides a common platform where the workforce can connect, collaborate and communicate with their peers. The mobile-ready feature will enable the employees with quick connect, irrespective of the device used and their locations.
Improved Collaboration: Many employees struggle to find whom to reach for various tasks. The modern intranet with directories can help them to find the right person, thereby facilitating communication and knowledge sharing. Social and discussion forums enhance communication with others.
Empower your employees with the Modern Intranet:
Intranets are the future of any organization. Modern intranets encapsulated with advanced features will unite the distributed workforce into one. Enable your employees to focus on their core business activities by making it easy to access business-related materials from one store. An intranet customized as per your business needs provides endless possibilities for an exceptional digital workplace experience.
Explore Acuvate’s SharePoint intranet – Mesh 3.0 that breaks down silos with its centralized information hub feature. It can connect and integrate with third-party apps like ServiceNow, Salesforce, Workday, and many more to provide a seamless network. It caters to all the employee needs whether he is working at the office/ remotely. Mesh has it all! Plans to modernize your corporate intranet? Get in touch with our digital workplace consultants to start it today.
If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our digital workplace consultants for a personalized consultation.
Poonam Chug is AVP - SaaS Strategy & Business. She has worked in various areas, right from designing and executing sales & account management strategies to reengineering digital workplace solutions. With her determined focus on our mission and progressive approach, she has achieved customer delight in the space of AI, Knowledge Mining, Content & Collaboration, Virtual Assistants, RPA and more. Backed with a deep understanding of customer needs and technology, she leads the SaaS business unit with an upshot of maximizing revenue while ensuring customer satisfaction.
Poonam Chug