In recent years, intranets have made a huge impact in boosting employee engagement within many organisations across the globe. These company intranets are provide the key tools that their digital workplaces required, helping businesses to foster better internal communications among employees, 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. Make Your Content Interactive To Your Readers
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 Typography used in your content can make a huge difference to the way in which the content is viewed by your employees and is the best way to captivate them. Eg: A large font size or a bold typeface in the introductory paragraph of your content can be used to provide useful information. Their purpose is to help in breaking up large chunks of text to make it easy for them to grasp information. Similarly, use of bullet points and headings can also help them navigate easily through vital company information 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 Makes For 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.
1. Improved Workload and 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
A collaborative 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).
See how a collaborative intranet can transform your company.
hub@pancentric.com | 020 7099 6370