Modern intranets are so much more than a place to store documents. Next-generation platforms provide enterprise social media channels for employees to share, connect with peers, contribute to enterprise-wide discussions, and react to content posted by senior leadership. The modern social intranet has replaced the office water cooler as every enterprise’s go-to platform to communicate, connect, and share ideas.
"We needed the design to be super elegant and the UX had to be really strong. It needed to be multi-sensory so users want to reach out and touch it, then talk about it and use the social features to take that message, and what they've learned, and share it with other employees."
"The Unily platform allows our employees to access relevant content more quickly, choose how and when they stay informed and take advantage of opportunities to collaborate more effectively with colleagues."
"As our colleagues are used to using Facebook, Twitter, and so on - to have the same great user experience with an internal tool is a gift for them."
Fuel community and collaboration with open and closed social channels segmented by topic, department, or project. Keep discussions focused and let communities thrive. Post, share, react, comment, mention, and #hashtag with familiar social features like emojis, gifs, and rich text. Give every employee a voice.
Control your feed by following your favorite authors and topics to stay up to date on the conversations that matter to you. Build relationships and internal networks to discover useful insights. Get push notifications that tell you when your colleagues and influencers are posting so you never miss a beat.
Uncover the best practices for creating an intranet employees love.
Putting a face to a name is easy with user profiles that let people establish their professional identity complete with skills and experience. Org charts provide an at-a-glance view of organizational structure. Synchronize and merge user profile data from your IDP or HRIS to ensure a smooth migration and maintain consistent identities for your people across the digital workplace.
Improve employee engagement with enterprise social networking at its finest; bringing feeds to life with engaging rich media, native video, rich text, and your favorite emojis🔥. Upload photos or record live from the scene and post to your social communities straight from mobile, tablet, or desktop.
Give your people the tools to thank each other and spotlight their colleagues for the little things that go a long way. Build a culture of appreciation with kudos, badges, and leaderboards that celebrate the people behind every success.
Keep conversations on track with social moderation and prohibited language. Take the light-touch approach to moderation that gives your people a safe space to raise their voice. Automate the blocking of words or phrases not suitable for your corporate social intranet.
Connect your internal experts and facilitate unlikely connections with a searchable people directory. Filter search results by department, location, experience, and skills to find the right match.
Going beyond what surveys and forms can provide, social engagement analytics gives enterprises new ways to tap into the zeitgeist. Track comments, #hashtags, and reactions to find out what really matters to your people.
Intuitive blogging and front-end content creation let your people share their insights and take an active role in comms. Capture and retain insider knowledge and make it findable for future use. Permissioning and automated workflows keep governance intact.
Turn your intranet into a home for ideas with a pre-built ideation hub. Give employees a way to submit new ideas and use social features like commenting, upvoting, and leaderboards to keep track of what's popular.
What exactly is a social intranet? Social intranet platforms take the social functionality users have become so familiar with via networking sites like Facebook and Twitter and extend these capabilities into the digital workplace.
You can think of a social intranet as an enterprise social media platform that performs the same functions as social media applications but within the digital workplace. Rather than communicating with millions of users across the globe, enterprise social intranets are designed to enable employees to connect with colleagues within their organization. Social intranet software encourages employees to share information and makes it easy for team members to interact with one another and work towards their shared goals.
Thanks to the internet and social media, technology has advanced to the point where we can connect with more people around the world than our ancestors may have met in a lifetime, and there’s no reason for an enterprise intranet not to offer these same advantages.
A social intranet is a platform that takes the networking opportunities and familiar features from social media and places them within an organization’s private network. Social intranet software boosts engagement, encourages collaboration, and drives efficiency by giving employees a voice and forum for raising it, helping to drive valuable conversations and bring people together around shared interests.
What differentiates an intranet from a social intranet are the same capabilities we’re used to with consumer technology: social feeds that let employees post and make their voice heard; commenting and @tagging that bring others into the conversation to add their insight; #hashtags that create topics others can easily search across and find; even rich media and native video that bring feeds to life and engage more than text ever can.
These features make it easy to build a community of equals and offer channels for your people to share knowledge, locate expertise, connect with colleagues, and collaborate seamlessly. But, best practice reveals key differences that must be considered when launching a socially enabled employee experience platform.
Even though Unily’s employee experience platform comes with native social features baked in, it doesn’t mean you have to give up on your existing social platforms. Whether you’re using Slack, Viva Engage or another alternative, Unily integrates seamlessly with third-party social apps to unite conversations happening across the digital workplace. Bring your Viva Engage feeds into Unily sites and pages with plug-and-play integrations delivered from our market-leading Feature Store. Use Viva Engage for conversations and Unily social for commenting and reacting across documents and stories, or opt to turn off Unily social altogether. Take control over the social features you want to enable with complete flexibility to create the social intranet that’s right for your people.
Connected enterprises benefit from social alignment through a more engaged workforce, more channels to reach and communicate with their people, and more opportunities to hear from the voices that make up your organization.
Hybrid and remote working relies almost entirely on technology to collaborate. When you give people the tools to connect with each other at will, you open up valuable channels for collaboration and innovation.
Social feeds make for an excellent open forum for interactions while also keeping a searchable record of this knowledge exchange for everyone to benefit from, breaking down silos that are formed when knowledge is shared face-to-face or over email. Users can simply reach out to experts within your organization, or ask open questions for others to offer their insight, and that knowledge can be recorded and stored for future use.
Social intranets have been shown to drive engagement across global workforces and, on the flip side, give enterprises more ways of accurately measuring and analyzing employee engagement. By giving users a voice on your intranet, and a platform to make it heard, employees engage better with the platform, with communications, and with each other.
The platform trusted by the largest workforces to deliver world-class employee experience.
From scientists to engineers, Wacker’s workforce is comprised of experts that have set the enterprise apart as a pioneer of modern chemistry for more than 100 years. To pave the way for the next century of innovative work, Wacker sought to launch a user-led solution that would reimagine collaboration across the enterprise.
Oil and gas giant Shell required a solution to power engagement and productivity across their 135,000 global employees. As the sixth-largest company in the world, the solution needed to reflect the utmost quality in terms of design and delivery.
For nearly 40 years, Canon has delivered products and services across the Oceania region to inspire and innovate. With more than 2k staffers spread across areas including Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines, Canon sought to launch a centralized digital workplace that would connect, engage, and drive efficiency in a dispersed workforce.
UNITE YOUR SOCIAL CHANNELS
Take advantage of plug-and-play integrations with third-party apps to unite every conversation happening throughout your digital workplace. Instantly share news and insights to Viva Engage, Slack, and Teams to keep everyone in the know.