With the new world of work on the horizon, competitive enterprises are in a race to review their digital infrastructure to ensure employees have the tools and communications channels needed to thrive in their next chapter. Throughout the pandemic, modern intranets - or employee experience platforms as they are increasingly referred to - emerged as an essential technology that can keep employees connected and underpin more agile ways of working. As leaders recalibrate their strategies and assess their digital workplaces, the value of a modern enterprise intranet cannot be overlooked.
Reinvent your intranet for the employee experience era.
Over the last year, intranet technology has experienced a rise in visibility. Where previously the enterprise intranet may have been considered a supplementary technology, in the hybrid era it has become essential to managing the challenges associated with a disconnected workforce.
For global enterprises and SMEs alike, connecting people throughout hybrid work has been the key to sustaining success. For SMEs, the intranet provides a valuable lifeline for collaboration and knowledge sharing. Channels for file sharing and unified search centers help employees find the information and documents employees need instantly, breaking down siloes within organizations that may typically have relied on face-to-face interactions. Where third-party collaboration systems, like Dropbox, for example, may be able to ‘get the job done’ for SMEs, they inevitably lead to information siloes that put a greater strain on employee productivity as they search for resources.
For enterprises, the intranet forms a go-to hub for everyone. User targeting ensures that content and communications remain highly relevant for individuals, regardless of role or location. Social feeds and familiar features like commenting, @tagging and #hashtags help to build an inclusive culture that encourages everyone to make their voice heard across their organization. Departments with colleagues spread across the world can rely on dedicated team sites for sharing updates. Third-party integrations allow organizations to get the most from existing investments by seamlessly bringing them into the intranet.
For sprawling global enterprises, intranets represent the opportunity to consolidate channels, technology, and conversations into one platform, making it easy for employees to access everything they need.
While legacy platforms were often difficult to navigate and lacked two-way communications channels, their modern successors are equipped with the capabilities needed to enhance employee experience with a single tool.
The enterprise intranet can be thought of as a platform designed to provide your employees with the same kind of top-tier digital experience that they’ve grown accustomed to as consumers. Just like shoppers enjoy personalized product recommendations and an omnichannel buying experience, your employees have now come to expect targeted communications that they can access anytime and anywhere. An enterprise intranet is the platform you need to deliver this consumer-grade digital experience and in turn, improve engagement and performance throughout your organization.
With many budgets still tight following the COVID-19 pandemic, every leader wants to feel confident that their digital investments will deliver an impressive ROI. So, when it comes to launching an enterprise intranet, what kind of benefits can you expect your organization to reap?
There's a multitude of compelling reasons why introducing an enterprise intranet will improve your bottom line. Top advantages associated with an enterprise platform include:
As the pace of change continues to accelerate, your employees are going to need to work better and faster to ensure your enterprise stays competitive. What can leaders do to plant the seeds for next-level productivity?
An enterprise intranet serves as your workplace’s go-to hub for the tools, resources, and information employees need to do their best work. A unified search experience ensures key knowledge remains at every user’s fingertips, while seamless integrations reduce the sense of distraction that comes with application-switching.
Curious to see an enterprise intranet’s productivity-enhancing work in action? After launching their platform, Shell reaped a productivity saving of over $41m annually thanks to their new intranet’s ease of access and unparalleled functionality.
Collaboration in the hybrid era can be challenging. Your people might not be able to tap their colleagues on the shoulder and ask them a pressing question about a project that they’re working on.
However, with an enterprise intranet, you can recreate the experience that colleagues get when they’re working side-by-side. People directories make it easy for employees to pinpoint peers with niche expertise and initiate cross-functional collaboration. Your employees can also leverage team sites and departmental pages to update teammates within their specific business function.
While remote work has been shown to enhance productivity, it often comes with an increased sense of isolation. More than 50% of employees are struggling to feel connected to their colleagues and their organizational culture while working away from the office.
Rather than letting loneliness set in, your enterprise intranet makes it easier than ever to build meaningful relationships with colleagues near and far. Employees can chat with their peers via social networking functionality, like content updates to show their support, and leverage user profiles to learn more about their colleague’s interests and identities.
Your enterprise intranet can fully transform your employee messaging strategy. A next-generation platform provides internal communicators with an array of internal communications tools that will drive enterprise-wide engagement, including social networking functionality, discussion forums, user-generated content, email newsletter creation, and so much more.
Enterprise intranets are most effective when used to empower employees, be that with powerful tools, connection opportunities, or by providing access to information that people need to do their best work. As more employees around the world rely on technology, particularly intranets, to support their work in a hybrid age, enterprise search engine intranets have become key to maintaining knowledge bases that give access to everything you need in one place.
With targeted search experiences that surface results relevant to individual users and deep integrations that enable people to instantly search across all your tools and knowledge bases, enterprises can now provide Google-like search experiences to employees. As well as boosting productivity by streamlining access, these tools increase engagement with the intranet via consumer-grade UX, and help to maintain knowledge bases that employees can benefit from for years to come.
Particularly during times of change and challenge, employees look to leadership messaging to understand the direction that their enterprise is heading in and what they can expect for the future. In a chapter of work in which disruption is already a hallmark, your employees need leadership communications now more than ever.
Your enterprise intranet can give every member of your C-suite a platform that they can leverage to speak directly to your people. From blog posts written by your CEO to video updates with the entire senior leadership team, take advantage of your enterprise intranet to strengthen relationships between stakeholders and employees.
Onboarding is one of the most pivotal parts of the employee lifecycle. However, many workers believe their enterprise’s approach is lacking, with just 12% of employees noting that their organization excels at onboarding.
Your enterprise intranet is here to help change this. Sidestep the miscommunication and silos that typically occur during an employee’s first weeks on the job and upgrade their experience with a platform that will guide them throughout their journey with your organization. Develop a preboarding portal so new hires start off strong, and centralize learning and training resources on your intranet to give everyone the information they need.
Deciding you want to launch an enterprise intranet is just the beginning. The next step to debuting a top-performing platform is understanding what features and functionalities you need to look out for to ensure your intranet is a success. Some top priorities include:
Eliminate time spent switching between applications by uniting all of your workplace tools into a single pane of glass experience that drives efficiency and user satisfaction simultaneously. Your enterprise intranet should have an integrations framework that brings together all the content, information, and tools your people need to do their best work.
Every employee should be able to access your enterprise intranet, whether they’re working from their home office or based on the shop floor. Next-generation platforms take mobile experience one step further with offline reading capabilities that allow employees to stay updated at all times and native push notifications to cut through the noise.
How can you know what content is resonating and which messages are in need of an upgrade? By choosing an enterprise intranet with built-in analytics, you’ll be able to measure success, learn what employees care about, and leverage these insights to finetune your messaging strategy.
Your employees may not have a chance to work with everyone at your organization, but that doesn’t mean they can’t get to know them. Advanced social features such as liking, commenting, and reacting enable employees to interact with colleagues in every role and region.
Your enterprise intranet needs to evolve to thrive. Rather than a stagnant offering, your platform should come with built-in agility and an ongoing commitment to innovation. Make sure your intranet software includes an evergreen roadmap that ensures that your platform stays up to date with the latest features. To take iteration to the next level, look for a vendor with an ideation portal that encourages customers to share their insights and shape the progression of the product.
With an average cost of 8.6m, no enterprise can afford a security breach. To prevent the unthinkable from happening, make sure your enterprise intranet has both ISO and SOC-2 certifications, which ensure that the systems and processes that are implemented offer the greatest level of protection from external threats.
Launching an intranet is not an overnight process. Without proper planning and a considered launch strategy that reflects the wants and needs of their workforces, enterprises can encounter any number of issues that limit the impact of the platform. Common enterprise intranet launch challenges include:
To overcome these pain points, what can organizations do to ensure the launch of an enterprise intranet is an all-around success? Keep the following best practices in mind for a seamless intranet launch experience:
Your employees are going to have different needs and priorities depending on the role they play within your enterprise. Instead of making assumptions about what your users might be looking for in their workplace technology, don’t be afraid to ask them.
Generally, the most successful platforms are driven by employee research. To ensure your intranet is user-centric, carve out some time to uncover what your people are really looking for in their digital workplace. While it might not be possible to interview every team member within your enterprise, consider creating personas or breaking down your organization into sub-audiences for a more balanced perspective.
Leadership sets the tone for every element of your workplace, and your technology is no exception. If you want to create a platform that your people will use, you need to make sure leadership is onboard from the very beginning. Consider choosing an executive sponsor with high visibility, such as a member of the C-suite, and engaging them throughout the design and launch of your enterprise intranet.
Given that poor governance is the top reason why intranets fail, it should be evident that the right platform management strategy is essential. When it comes to devising your approach to intranet governance, there are several considerations to prioritize, including choosing a content management model that works for you and implementing freshness dating to prevent your messages from becoming stale.
If you want your people to take full advantage of your enterprise intranet, it’s important to get the word out. Start to build buzz several weeks before your platform’s debut by creating a comprehensive launch campaign. You might wish to include a welcome video that showcases how your enterprise intranet works, explainer content on specific features, and an interactive challenge like an intranet scavenger hunt to encourage employees to start exploring your new platform.
Even the best intranets will fail without ongoing iteration. After you launch your platform, make sure employees have opportunities to share their thoughts about your new workplace technology. Consider including a feedback form on your enterprise intranet’s homepage so users can easily add their insights. Take advantage of pulse surveys for more information on specific topics, such as how supported employees feel at work or what they think of your onboarding experience.
Intranets have been upgraded from nice-to-have to need-to-have status in the hybrid era. Now that your employees are dispersed, your platform has the potential to replace your corporate office as your new digital headquarters.
As the center of digital workplaces, intranets played a particularly crucial role when employees transitioned to remote working. Our own data illustrates how heavily leaders relied on their platforms to keep employees connected and updated throughout the pandemic. Articles that mentioned COVID-19 were viewed over 3.1m times in 2020, with an additional 722k views for wellbeing content.
This reliance on the enterprise intranet will continue in the new, hybridized world of work. The digitalization of your corporate headquarters comes with several distinct advantages. Unlike your brick-and-mortar flagship, your workforce can access their digital headquarters anytime and anywhere. It will also help you save on real estate costs while supporting the hybridized blend of remote and office working that the majority of employees look favorably towards.
An enterprise intranet will be a prerequisite for a compelling employee experience in the new world of work. If you’re looking to enhance productivity and cultivate connectivity in your next chapter, get in touch with our digital workplace experts to begin your intranet launch journey.
