Intranets can be powerful communications tools for managing your business, but at the same time they can also provide an effective tool at driving employee engagement.
The modern social intranet has changed the traditional company intranet forever as their functionality and ease of use is no different to social networking sites, which makes collaboration much easier than before. By taking the key steps to boosting intranet engagement, you can foster better communication amongst your employees, helping to improve the performance and productivity of your business.
Top 10 steps for driving intranet engagement with your employees:
1. Share Updates with Employees
The key to successful employee engagement is to keep them updated regularly by sharing company news and information. This will help in making them feel valued and give them a sense of belongingness to your company. You can share intranet news articles where staff can like and comment, helping to promote a culture of openness within your organisation.
2. Use Social Networking and Recognition Tools
The achievements and efforts of your employees should always be recognised, and an intranet with social networking tools can be a good way to start this initiative.
Create a dedicated Employee Achievements channel so that this recognition can be shared, and allow other employees to add their voice. By giving other employees the ability to add Employee Achievement stories, it keeps your channel fresh with staff continually giving recognition and praising employees who have improved their performance and that of the companys.
3. Create Employee Suggestion Forms
Use your business intranet to create electronic 'suggestion boxes' for employees to share their concerns and ideas. Your company intranet portal allows everyone to have a voice, so inform staff that their input is valued and can enhance the office environment and business performance.
With intelligent social intranets like Hub, you can ensure suggestion forms reach the appropriate individuals, whether that's all staff or a specific group. By assigning a workflow, you can direct received suggestions to the right managers for further action, preventing them from stagnating in an inbox.
.
4. Provide Training and Development Tools
You can offer assistance in personal development within your workforce, helping your employees increase their knowledge and improve their skills by using your employee intranet as a learning management tool. Intelligent intranet features, like the Hub's Assessment Builder, allow you to create interactive courses within your intranet's digital workspace, making company training exercises quicker, easier and more engaging.
5. Share Fun Company Events
See a greater uptake on internal company events by making announcements on your intranet. Whether its charity days, bake-offs, office competitions, days out, quizzes or sweepstakes, Intranet Events allow you to not only shout about the event, but also send out invites and provide staff with the social networking tools that actively encourage engaged involvement with the event itself, with 'I'm Going' 'Maybe Going' and 'Not Going' options. Why not add a poll or survey to your company intranet to see what events staff would be interested in, encouraging further engagement.
6. Share Intranet Calendars
There are some vital tools on a social intranet that can be extremely useful when it comes to boosting the productivity of your employees and driving engagement through useful tasks. One such tool is the intranet calendar to keep your staff aware of important meetings and events within the company - plus with intelligent features that allow you to add these intranet events to your desktop calendar (i.e. GMail, Outlook etc).
7. Encourage Employees to Contribute News
Allow your employees to take charge of intranet content creation and share their creative ideas and suggestions by contributing to your internal comms via a blog. In this way, you may be able to identify talented individuals who may have a flair for writing. These blogs can provide a powerful platform for your employees to share and exchange ideas, and by having a staff member write the blogs, rather than management, you may find that employees are more engaged with the content.
8. Make Things Easy and Simple
The most fascinating aspect of the modern intranet is its ability to be customized to build a strong, engaged social community around unique organizational content. However, some people overcomplicate it, creating endless sub-menus that hinder navigation. The goal of any intranet should be to maintain simplicity and appeal, ensuring employees remain engaged rather than confused.
9. Organise Focus Groups
Intranets provide a great platform for communicating and sharing ideas, but it's important that everyone gets a fair chance to express their opinions. A focus or steering group can be used to help organise regular intranet content and activities, ensuring that the information being placed on your company intranet is always relevant and useful.
10. Keep the Intranet Engaging
It pays to have a company intranet that is fun and interesting to its members to help breakup the monotony of the working schedule. Sharing humorous videos, informative articles or memes, or creating spaces devoted to hobbies and interests of your employees, can go a long way in boosting employee engagement.
