We all know that times have changed, but the extent to which this applies to the workplace is quite eyebrow-raising. Remote working has become a reality, and it’s common to have staff – and sometimes entire teams - based in different countries and continents. Such arrangements not only raise obvious requirements for secure VPN connections and collaborative working solutions, but also place a much greater strain on an organisation’s ability to present and share information amongst this increasingly diverse and wide-spread audience.
Many organizations are using cloud-based software like Synergist, JIRA, and ZenDesk to modernize their work environment and improve efficiency. However, relying on multiple specialized tools can create a confusing array of logins and browser tabs, leading to siloed work and reduced social interaction, which diminishes workplace cohesion.
Instant messaging platforms like Slack can encourage online social collaboration and have been incredibly successful, valued at nearly $4bn in April 2016. However, they don't provide a central digital workplace for sharing information securely. This is where company intranets like Hub excels, combining social messaging with a permanent online space.
When it comes to information sharing, your intranet has two key functions:
1. A Knowledge and Resource Centre
An intranet should provide an organisation with a central repository of all the information that employees or members might require, i.e. - HR policies, contact directories, how-to guides, holiday calendars, or system logins. Ultimately, your intranet platform should be your one-stop-shop of information about your organisation, and provide you with the resources to conduct your job more efficiently.
2. Drive Engagement & Collaboration
Intranets help to present these resources and information in a clear, relevant manner that's easy to navigate and visually engaging. Employees are more likely to engage with social media than their own company communications, so by embracing a social intranet like Hub you can actually help boost employee engagement with your company comms by up to 25%, plus encouraging communication and collaboration around your company resources.
Easy Access and Flexibility are Key to Every Intranet
Having all your organisation's resources stored centrally in one digital workplace is exceptionally useful, however the ability to restrict access to information and tailor the intranet environment to your users is a vital piece of functionality for any company intranet software. For example a company's System Administrator in Spain won't need to see the organisation’s cash-flow report for Q1, but they do need to know who to send invoices to when buying new hardware. Or, the outsourced cleaning contractors need to know who to notify when the office’s alarm system malfunctions, but they won’t necessarily need to be invited to the Christmas social event.
The flexibility to entirely customise an intranet's user experience, completely changing the content, branding and navigation from one person to the next based on their access permissions or department, is something that really sets intranets apart from your niche silo software.
Now, all this might sound like an administrative nightmare – but that isn’t necessarily so.
Setting up an intranet from scratch requires some initial effort. Organizations often form a small committee to compile content, create a user list (and organize them into groups), determine access levels and user requirements, and decide on the intranet's design. While this may seem like a lot of work, investing time in refining functionality, access, and styling during the initial stages will make maintenance easier and keep the intranet looking great. A couple of administrators can effectively maintain an intranet for hundreds of users. Once the intranet is operational and users engage with it regularly, you will start to enjoy the most important aspect of a digital workplace – collaboration.
Employee Engagement and Collaboration
Content is no longer top-down, it’s driven by employee feedback, engagement, and user-generated content. With a flexible permissions model you can put people in charge of their own sections on the intranet, where they can happily curate and promote the content that matters to them and their team. You can embed forms, surveys and opinion polls in your content to transform users’ experience of the intranet into a proper two-way conversation, rather than relying on the old “log in, read content, log out” model from the days before social intranets were invented.
Many companies aim to minimize the pain of setting up a new intranet by offering a consultancy period (as Pancentric Digital do with their Hub), which helps to reassure administrators that they are getting the best use out of their intranet software. For all the hype around social intranets, an intranet should still provide administrators with insights into how users are interacting with the system. A common feature is a “search report” which shows what users are searching for and when, and how many results were found, and if monitored regularly this can highlight gaps in your intranet’s content and its navigability. Similarly, allowing users to ‘Like’ or 'Comment' on a piece of content will gradually reveal not only what’s popular, but also what isn’t, which will inevitably lead to you refining your intranet content and making future content more engaging.
A well-organized intranet is a valuable asset for any organization, helping to prevent the issue of ‘knowledge islands’ in a distributed workforce. Even before the digital workplace era, fostering a culture of information sharing and collaboration was challenging, and with teams now spread globally, this issue has intensified. This trend is unlikely to change; a 2014 Deloitte report found that 64% of employees would opt for a lower-paying job to work remotely. Thus, the importance of a social intranet is paramount in any digital workplace policy.
Driving Online Information Sharing
Modern intranet software offers a wide array of content generation tools, including form and assessment builders for capturing holiday bookings, health evaluations, and employee inductions. These tools often include workflow steps, allowing data to be tracked and shared seamlessly among users without printing. New policies can be communicated through ‘Must Read’ items, the digital equivalent of a noticeboard, with the added benefit of tracking who has read them, enhancing efficiency for HR and Compliance departments. Groups can share documents privately and engage in discussions not visible to others. Events can be targeted to specific audiences, and to-do lists can be converted into formal tasks assigned to users with detailed notes and time estimates. Additionally, Theme editors provide design-minded users with hours of creative engagement to enhance the intranet's appearance.
Once your intranet is up and running and full of content, the next challenge is to integrate it with as many of your other systems as possible, in order to make it a true ‘one-stop shop’ for your staff. At its most basic level this might simply involve embedding a Google Calendar into a page, or you might add a custom module to interact with Office 365 documents, read your Outlook emails, or provide automatic logins via Google or Facebook. This step is about breaking down the barriers of use and encouraging people to use the intranet as a central starting point which leads in to the other systems they need to do their jobs, rather than logging into everything separately... thus making your intranet a more efficient and beneficial digital workplace. Users on mobile devices will find this particularly beneficial as it will minimize their potentially cumbersome system interactions, and in content terms it will make for a truer reflection of what your staff need to see and use on a daily basis. By not integrating, you risk turning your intranet into “something to look at when time allows”, rather than making it the heart of your organisation.
The digital workplace is changing rapidly and will continue to present new challenges as technologies evolve and new innovations are introduced. A well organised and engaging intranet plays an essential part in this continued evolution, underpinning the foundations of your company communications and providing a consistent, engaging voice for both the organisation and its employees.
Collaboration and engagement are core assets that encourage digital workplaces to thrive and should be embraced by every organisation, so embrace the benefits of a social intranet and unlock the potential hidden within your company communications.