Is Your Organization Making the Most of its Intranet?
The importance of your company’s intranet has never been more evident. With employees increasingly adopting remote and hybrid workspaces, your intranet becomes the source and home of company culture and internal communications – roles that physical locations may have held in the past. Why does this matter? Your company culture is crucial for maintaining an engaged, happy, productive workforce, and internal communication is the mechanism by which company culture is displayed, shared, and passed on. This is how your company defines who you are as an organization, what you stand for, and what being a part of the team signifies. Without it, employee engagement with the organization is much less likely.
The Right Intranet Can Make a Huge Difference to Your Team’s Engagement
Right now, as we all deal with unprecedented change and uncertainty, and a record number of employees are quitting their jobs, company culture and the sense belonging that brings can be the differentiator between a company people leave, and one that retains its employees. In fact, a recent McKinsey report showed that a “sense of belonging” is one of the top three reasons why people stay at a company (or to leave it, if belonging is absent). While employees want pay, benefits, and perks, there’s also a much greater emphasis on how work makes them feel. They want to feel a sense of purpose in their work, feel connections with their coworkers, and feel valued by their managers and organizations. Organizations that don’t grasp the importance of company culture to create shared purpose will struggle to attract and retain the talent they need. On the other hand, a strong company culture can lead to a more engaged workforce, which means a happier and more productive team.
The impact your intranet can have in maintaining and disseminating company culture is huge. That’s why you must carefully consider the choices you make when planning, building, and deploying your intranet. Here are just some of the ways your intranet can help to maximize employee engagement.
1 – Design Your Intranet with Your Users in Mind
While this may seem obvious, it’s surprising how often user experience and needs are overlooked in the development phase of an intranet. The first step should be doing your research and figuring out what your team needs/wants in an intranet.
2- Make Engagement Part of the Plan
Employee engagement doesn’t just happen – especially in a remote/hybrid work environment. If you want your intranet to be the site of employee engagement, you need a strategy in place to ensure it happens. This includes setting clear goals and expectations for engagement on the intranet, and communicating them to everyone.
3 – Keep Your Intranet Up to Date
No one will be likely to visit or engage with an intranet that seems stale or unused, so make sure you keep it updated with relevant news and content for your team. Develop a content schedule that mixes news and company updates with more fun posts, such as contests, to increase users’ incentive to log in and engage.
4 – Employee Recognition
Remote and hybrid work arrangements have made recognizing employees’ accomplishments more difficult. When people don’t feel appreciated, that’s when employee engagement really starts to slip. As your organization’s common area, your intranet is a natural place for managers to call out employee wins through announcements and newsletters. But it’s not just top-down recognition that your intranet can facilitate – think about including a way for employees to highlight and praise their coworkers as well. That allows all team members to engage in the process.
5 – Encourage Participation and Content Creation
Give employees a sense of ownership over the intranet by empowering them to create content for it. Encourage them to share their successes, highlight articles that may be of interest, or post blogs. Providing a platform where employees are expected to share stories with their colleagues will help them maintain a sense of connection to one another despite the physical distance between them. This goes a long way to building culture and community, and promotes even more employee engagement.
6 – Ask for Feedback – and Act on It!
Your intranet is a great place to survey your team – but if you simply gather their feedback and nothing changes, they’ll soon disengage with the process and with your organization as a whole. On the other hand, if you demonstrate that the organization is serious about listening to feedback and making changes based on it, your employees will feel heard, valued, and engaged.
7 – Use Your Intranet to Measure Engagement
One more way your intranet can help promote employee engagement is by enabling you to measure that engagement. The first step is to determine what KPIs you’ll use to monitor engagement. It’s important to look not only at how many people are accessing your intranet, but also at what they’re doing there. Tracking comments/reactions on posts, the creation of new posts, people tagging their co-workers etc will give you a clearer picture of how engaged your team is.
How Do You Get Started? Klarinet Solutions is Here To Help!
Considering an intranet upgrade? Modernizing your intranet is one of the best things you can do to improve employee experience and performance. When your employees understand their role and feel connected to the business, they work faster, communicate better and produce better work. Klarinet Solutions is here to help! We invest in customer relationships to understand and solve the digital workplace problems you face every day. Get in touch with our team of intranet experts today!
