In recent years, intranets have significantly boosted employee engagement globally by providing essential tools for digital workplaces, enhancing internal communications, and improving knowledge sharing and collaboration.
One of the key factors that can help drive continued employee engagement within your intranet, is to focus on sharing compelling content that gives your employees a reason and a want to engage with it. Whether the content is informative, useful, part of a workflow, or just fun social stuff that interests them, your content is the make or break factor when it comes to attracting and retaining your employees attention.
Many companies are coming up with new and innovative ways to engage their users. Let’s take a closer look to understand how you can effectively transform your intranet with more engaging content.
The Growth of the Collaborative Intranet
The traditional concept of an intranet was a resource directory with top-down communication. However, businesses are now starting to fully embrace the “social aspect” that includes having a digital workplace with open communication amongst its users - known as a collaborative intranet. According to research studies, organizations using collaborative intranet have been able to see 17% rise in employee engagement yearly compared to those who are not using them.
Top Tips For Creating Engaging Intranet Content
1. Making Content Interactive For Employees
The best way to boost employee engagement is to create opportunities for them to share content, comment or discuss as they would do across social media platforms using the intranet. Blogs, discussion forums, interactive news feeds and collaborative workspaces are a sure fire way of keeping them engaged.
Use fun ways such as quizzes, surveys and quick polls to gather their feedback and opinions in an interesting way to capture their attention.
2. Use Typography Tricks In Your Content
The typography and font styling you choose for your intranet content can have an incredible impact on how your employees perceive it and is a key way to capture their attention. Consider starting your content with a large font size or impactful typeface in the introductory paragraph to convey key information—it can really transform how your intranet content stands out to your users.
Don't just keep typography to your headers. Appropriate use of subheadings in your intranet content are design elements to break down large blocks of text, making it a breeze for your team to absorb the information. Likewise, incorporating bullet points and headings can significantly enhance their ability to effortlessly navigate through essential company updates or news shared in the content.
3. Detailed Employee Directories
Employee directories can be a valuable source of information for employees. It not only provides easy access to contact details, but it also gives employees valuable insights into their colleagues, in terms of team management, skills, expertise, hobbies, interests etc. This information helps to encourage a sense of ‘family’, and stops the people in your organization being faceless, impersonal individuals.
4. ‘How To’ Content Creates Better Productivity
Your company intranet should be the ‘open-stop-shop’ of company resources. It should provide information that your employees need to do their jobs (whether that’s HR forms or marketing assets). But it should also provide even more valuable ‘how-to’ resources that help your users understand how to use your intranet and the resources it holds. By providing ‘how-to’ guides, you are providing your employees with the means to do their jobs properly and with confidence. You can even run assessments or quizzes on your ‘how-to’ guides to encourage your employees to learn and retain the knowledge – this also helps you to pick spot the employees that are struggling and need some help.
Benefits of Better Intranet Content:
1. Improve Workload & Employee Management
An engaged employee needs to have clear goals and a proper sense of direction regarding their specific tasks that need to be completed. With the use of a collaborative intranet, it’s possible for your managers to have dedicated team spaces where you can assign tasks to individual employees or teams. By providing a dedicated space where your team can converse, share and work on projects together, you are ensuring your team need to actively engage with your intranet to do their daily tasks.
Task management systems also provide a great way of monitoring and managing individual and team workloads more effectively, helping managers to provide valuable feedback to the employees which encourages them to learn and improve further.
2. Employees Feel Valued With Open Communications
An employee intranet helps in sharing opinions and gathering employee feedback on key issues related to the organization, which helps in boosting their self-esteem and they feel more connected and engaged within the community. In a collaborative environment, the focus is on reducing the communication barriers that exist in the organization to promote an open company culture and improve intranet engagement.
Provide your employees with forums and conduct surveys and polls to provide safe spaces for employees to share their opinion, as well as allowing them the freedom to like and comment on the content you upload to really get a sense of community and intranet engagement from your content.
3. Increased Productivity with More Accessible Content
Easy access to training materials and programs, as well as other intranet resources sounds obvious, but not everyone gets it right. A hard to navigate intranet can cause a huge hurdle in engagement, and is one of the main causes for employee disinterest in company intranets. Plan the navigation of your intranet content and regularly check to see what your employees are searching for on your intranet – if they are searching for it, it normally means they can’t find it or you haven’t added that content to the site (and you probably should if they are searching for it).
Discover how a more engaging intranet can transform your company.