Leveraging an Employee Intranet for Internal Comms
With the rise of a hybrid-remote workforce model, organizations continue to realize the importance of an employee intranet that can be leveraged for internal communications and drive a sense of belonging to improve employee satisfaction across departments.
Let’s dive into the intranet trends we believe organizations should prioritize for the rest of 2023:
1. Improving user experience
User experience for customers and external users has been a priority for many organizations for years now, and companies are finally realizing that the employee experience needs to catch up. Organizations should aim to improve navigation, publish content to the right audience, and update their branding to continue to compete with others in the industry.
By focusing on user experience, organizations can drive adoption and witness an improved and more consumer-like intranet experience.
2. Multi-channel publishing
Organizations will be looking to strengthen multi-channel publishing within their intranets. Some common channels for publishing include Microsoft Teams, intranet mobile apps, digital signage, or newsletter subscriptions.
It’s quite easy to provide intranet features, or even the full intranet experience, in Microsoft Teams through Teams apps or Viva Connections. Publishing a mobile app customized to organizational needs is also an option, as it can be adjusted to meet the needs of selected target groups and white-labeled to accommodate specific characteristics. Another option is digital signage, including news articles, events, or announcements to selected users.
3. Personalization of content
The personalization of intranet resources is essential if you want your employees to feel connected to your organization. You can provide a more relevant experience for users by tailoring content to locations, asking users to provide their areas of interest in user profiles, add tags to your content, or even let users decide what features they want to display on certain sections.
By allowing users to tailor your intranet display as they see fit, you ensure they see what they want to and are being fed information that they find interesting or insightful.
4. All-encompassing intranet solutions
While organizations have often prioritized implementing solutions for white collar workers, we have been witnessing a shift, with many organizations now also focusing on including frontline and on-site workers in initiatives for improved communication, collaboration, and knowledge sharing.
Organizations are figuring out ways to easily communicate with employees that may not have user accounts, Microsoft licenses, company-provided devices, and more by creating accessible apps and platforms for these employees to collaborate and receive news about various company initiatives.
5. Improved knowledge sharing
Organizations are committed to supporting structured knowledge sharing between employees, and they can do this by using their intranet as a joint knowledge base or single source of truth for employees to find insights and tips they can use in their daily roles.
Companies are looking to improve knowledge sharing through discussions, shared documents, blog posts, articles, and opportunities for social interaction. Introducing a gamification framework for users to earn badges or points that demonstrate their expertise could also be useful.
6. Driving employee engagement
Organizations are working to support employees in every stage of the cycle, from pre-boarding to offboarding with resources that can provide a detailed introduction to the organization, learning centers that provide easy access to useful courses, highlights of promotions and anniversaries, and channels for feedback and improvement suggestions.
Through providing a library of resources, organizations can improve employee engagement, and HR departments especially can use these to go above and beyond in their roles.
7. Enhancing the search experience
The most common actions organizations are taking this year to enhance the search experience include using search categories and filters that make it easy to find necessary information, launching ways for end-users to provide feedback for improvements, and utilizing search statistics to gauge website performance.
While search experience ties in closely with user experience, we decided to shed some light on this separately as organizations narrow in on search.
8. Strengthening information policies
As the endless supply of content and resources only continues to grow further, every intranet will hold more pages, documents, posts, and folders than it did previously. In order to keep up with a growing intranet, users will demand a user experience that is continuously being improved and finetuned.
To help with this, many organizations are strengthening their governance with consistent information policies, templates, metadata, workflows, and archives. By following clearly defined processes, organizations will be able to manage content in a way that delivers a great user experience even as their intranet scales. Organizations want to see management of important business documents and improved Microsoft Teams governance for collaboration.
9. More effective Microsoft Teams collaboration
Organizations are continuing to look for ways to combine the simplicity of Microsoft Teams with their governance models. Since Teams is often used as the main point of communication within and across departments, organizations are prioritizing implementing improved support.
This includes setting up properties, policies, and templates for new Teams, integrating with other Microsoft 365 tools, and providing structured project portfolios.
10. Enhanced analytics
Lastly, you can’t focus on the above trends without also focusing on analytics. Decision makers in organizations often want to see quantitative data that supports their investment in various initiatives and campaigns, and because of this, organizations will be focusing on implementing metrics that can provide insights.
Some of these metrics include intranet engagement, content reach, employee satisfaction, top content, time spent on content, and more. Metrics can be compared with ideal targets and the data can be used to tweak or update the intranet accordingly.
Intranet Trends Beyond 2023
There have been various developments in the tech space, but not every trend is expected to be an intranet trend in 2023. While we’ve seen a rise in the use of AI, virtual reality, augmented reality, voice recognition, and machine learning in other initiatives, including for marketing, sales, and customer service, these are not expected to be integrated as part of company intranets in 2023.
That’s not to say that these trends won’t ever be important for an intranet though, as we have to continue to see how the market evolves, and they could very well be channels that employees are hoping to see included in company intranets in the future.
Work with Klarinet Solutions to Implement Intranet Trends that will Elevate Your Organization
Company intranets are expected to continue to increase in importance and evolve as a result, so we gathered the top 10 intranet trends that are important to think about for your organization.
If you are interested in learning more about improving your intranet and employee engagement, don’t hesitate to contact the digital workplace experts at Klarinet Solutions today!
