16 Apr
Top advanced features to look for while choosing a modern Intranet
The traditional intranet was an employee pain point earlier but a sudden corporate priority now. Its difficulty in accessing, lack of personalization and clogging digital transformation efforts resulted in fractured workplaces.
With the current scenario, it is clear that hybrid/remote work is the new and next norm. It presented businesses with great demand to use digital tools more wisely and on a much larger scale. And, although it is just the embryonic stage, it provides all enterprises with an excellent opportunity to heal the clogged business transformational activities with next-gen technology infusion. Failing to transform or re-anchor an organization growth strategy might make them fall behind in the competitive race.
Digital workplace capability is one area that needs immediate attention. Though businesses have sealed the leaks to accommodate a sudden change of work from home, now is the perfect time to rethink legacy enterprise infrastructure. Intranets acted as an intermediary platform to support communication and collaboration needs in this transition.
The intranet should meet the varying needs and wants of its employees, equipping them to do their daily work without friction. The evolution from content management systems to internal communication portals to employee engagement platforms was an overwhelming change. The digital workplace experience platform is the upcoming change in the evolution cycle.
Gartner advises that Intranet renewal is an ideal opportunity to re-equip and modernize an organization’s architecture for the digital workplace.
Clunky intranets have no place in a modern workplace causing employees to be frustrated while using the company’s content and collaboration intranet platform. Organizations require looking for more efficient intelligent systems aligned with users’ needs and business success.
While choosing or updating the intranet, it is essential to consider certain features that meet the employee expectations. We hear the same repeating statements when speaking to intranet users: search is bad; relevant documents cannot be found; people work in silos.
Here are a few top features to be considered while renewing your intranet next.
Intranet top features:
1. All in one platform
A traditional intranet that being difficult to navigate employees’ needs is doomed to ultimately become ineffective with time. A well-designed intranet works smartly and helps employees carry out their tasks better, improve collaboration, communication, file sharing, engagement in a single platform.
The intranet smart single integration feature allows users to connect multiple apps quickly and securely, providing instant hassle-free access without needing to remember passwords.
It provides a single platform where employees can find all the necessary knowledge and information for their day-to-day business activities in a hassle-free manner.
2. Easy information discovery with Personalization
Employees are flooded with irrelevant information and content when accessing intranets. Often lower intranet adoption happens within an organization because it is considered as a content dumping yard. Modern intranet equips employees to reduce the noise. Intranet content customization and personalization features increase employees’ productivity by putting the information relevant to them at their fingertips.
By facilitating personalized content based on employees’ interests, roles, activities, geo, departments, and language an intranet navigates significant and intuitive information within the workplace. For example, manufacturing unit safety precaution information can be surfaced to the factory workers and give others a skip.
3. Smart search functionality
In daily business processes, information discovery plays a crucial part because the organization will be wasting a lot more time if the organization’s intranet does not equip its employees with a powerful search and tagging system.
As the business increases in size and scope, it will add to more difficulty in navigating the organization’s wealth of information. Information discoveries need to be very easy and as simple as possible. Otherwise, disengagement and frustration in employees will certainly occur, reflecting on business productivity.
Next generation cognitive enterprise search takes the search experience to a new height and brings in more relevant results, reducing the time to find information. The search feature supports employees to pull information linked to people or content by searching by keywords or categories, phrases, and tagging the content.
4. Modern UX/UI
An interactive intranet provides employees with the content, usability, and functionality they need – quickly and easily which boosts intranet adoption and engagement. Besides the ease of interaction, adhering to organization brand rules and UI guidelines helps intranets in maintaining consistency delivering value. The functionality and appealing interface based on business objectives makes the business experience purpose centric.
According to Forrester, the poor user experience and lack of employee-centric functionality found in most intranets has led many employees to rank it as their least loved workplace tool.
5. Crowdsource Innovation
One of the best parts of working from the office is those hallway conversations or a random encounter brainstorming an idea towards a common challenge.
For any organization to succeed, employees must be able to contribute and brainstorm ideas freely. The innovation capturing aspects of modern intranet makes idea sharing as easy as possible and nurture collaboration that will encourage employees to work hard and boost their morale.
This helps businesses to capture ideas, evaluate it, select the best among them, and implement them to solve a business challenge. Crowdsourcing innovation comes with a double-sided advantage; boosting employee engagement and churning out the best fit solution to an organizational challenge.
6. Mobile friendly
Anywhere and anytime access is the primary expectation of any business application. Organizations with mobile-accessible intranets fulfil the needs and expectations of an on-the-go workforce. The benefits of accessing organizational wealth with a click are to the next level.
It can help to quickly access information and connect to an employee from anywhere and anytime. Mobile-friendly intranets support the fact that employees are increasingly working remotely or working in flexible hours, can access information conveniently, and communicate with co-workers or customers.
For example, imagine a salesperson heading to his next meeting. He needs access to a document with industry-specific case studies and can help in conversion. Without an intranet, he has to check with his colleague manually or skim through his entire inbox. With intranets, information reaches employees than other ways around, saving time and effort.
7. Self Service
Round the clock availability and access from anywhere works perfectly when self-service options get implemented. The 24X7 availability of support staff for help on troubleshooting seems impossible, owing to its complexity and cost. Auto-tagging and document discoverability enhances the overall search experience and surfaces the relevant knowledge.
Besides, to further enhance round the clock support, an AI-powered virtual assistant can act as a cost-effective option in providing self-service help.
Over the last few years, companies have introduced AI elements into their intranets to increase employee efficiency, optimize costs due to process automation and deliver a better employee experience. The most popular applications of AI in intranets include- AI chatbots.
Quick responses to employee queries and immediate solutions with self-service are driving the adoption of chatbots. Chatbot act as a personal assistant to notify users about updates, policy changes, or events.
Unlike traditional notification alerts, chatbot’s messages hold a higher possibility of being viewed and responded to as well.
8. Intranet analytics
Tracking the impact of your intranet helps identify the status of intranet performance. Measure performance to plan actions in enhancing the adoption. Using intranet analytics helps understand which pages or parts of the content receive the most views, unique visits, and bounce rates. Whenever a new policy rollout happens or a different content type gets distributed, organizations can instantly measure the consumption rate. After collecting the data, organizations can utilize it to make the intranet a more beneficial, enjoyable resource.
9. Knowledge sharing platform
“Knowledge is power” is a buzzword frequently heard around. How can employees in the workplace use knowledge if it is inaccessible in a storehouse or confined inside knowledge workers’ heads?
The modern workplace recognizes the potential of the intranet to turn into a knowledge-sharing platform with its perpetual and uninterrupted flow of information in the workplace.
Intranets should act as a centralized information hub where all the organizational wealth gets stored and retrieved in a structured way. Besides the advantage of accessing information without logging into multiple systems, relevant information gets surfaces based on the document permissions.
Any kind of knowledge will be accessible on an intranet single platform. As every employee is an expert in their area of work, sharing their learning and experience will help other employees to excel and understand better.
Knowledge management works as a robust way to drive employees’ performance by providing quality content and avoids reinventing the same information which is time consuming.
Conclusion
More than ever, legacy intranets need makeover to meet the dramatic change pandemic forced upon us. In the era of hybrid working and flexibility, we need a new generation of communication tools.
A modern intranet facilitates an integrated experience in delivering employee experience. Use it to connect your people, keep employees informed and empowered, and make your customers feel looked after, too.
While you are here, check out our next-gen digital workplace accelerator Mesh. Built on personalization at its core, Mesh is delivering superior experience with the help of varied business application integrations and enhanced knowledge management capabilities.
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