Eight Ways to Use an Intranet for Better Employee Engagement

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An intranet can be a valuable tool in keeping your staff’s commitment. Read this article to learn how to use an intranet to engage employees.

Are you worried that your employees are not learning new skills at the pace needed for your business to keep its market position? If you are, the first thing to look at is your employee engagement level. HR managers should always be on the lookout for ways to improve it, and a corporate intranet can help them win employees’ loyalty.

How Intranets Influence Employee Wellbeing

According to Office Vibe, 51% of workers are looking for new jobs and are ready to leave their current workplaces. There can be so many reasons for them to quit both from personal and corporate standpoints. If you consider the corporate aspect, information unavailability and confusion is among the most frequent reasons for employees to feel unsatisfied at work.

Traditionally, using corporate solutions for finding particular content, employees expect to get a Google-like experience. Unfortunately, if an organization doesn’t pay attention to how their information assets are stored, users feel lost in a content chaos.

For example, when an employee searches for a document they need, they typically search by keywords. Quite often, it takes several attempts for an employee to retrieve the required document from a corporate document base. So here is the question: if you were searching for something on Google and it took you a dozen of times to find it, wouldn’t you get frustrated and leave it?

However, if you play your cards right and use the great potential that intranet development offers, you can prevent this content mess. A basic keyword match may not work for your employees in this case. Instead of it, you should look towards an intelligent intranet that will provide powerful content indexing and search capabilities. Overall, a great enterprise search should be:

Predictive, thus able to analyze and optimize recommendations in real time.
Non-fragmented and able to pull information from different informational silos.
Proactive in recommending related content, people or products depending on users’ original search queries, roles or projects they are working on.

Methods to Engage Employees with an Intranet

Search optimization described above is just one of feasible ways to improve your employees’ experience within a corporate intranet. Yet to truly boost their engagement, you’ll have to go an extra mile, and here are eight ways to do it right.

Transform Your Intranet into a Personal Development Portal

Employees’ engagement depends a lot on the goals they need to reach. No one likes obscure objectives, so be clear on what you expect from your staff and communicate precise working targets to them in a straightforward way. Your corporate intranet can become the place where employees will see their working plans, tasks, accomplished training and professional achievements. Using your intranet capabilities, you can also continuously communicate with your employees, provide feedback on their performance, share useful working tips and hear employees’ preferences and concerns back.

Don’t Neglect Your Intranet News Feed

Your intranet news feed can be a treasure trove for information that will be invaluable to your staff in performing their work assignments and in staying tuned into team and enterprise activities. But there is a caveat. Don’t post too often or you’ll risk information overload. Posting should be consistent and regular but not overbearing.

Use Time Management Features

If built right, your intranet should be loaded with useful tools to help you make your employees more productive. Time tracking features, calendars, planning apps are just a few things that can become a part of your intranet. This can help you improve employee engagement by making it simple and user-friendly to track important events, meetings, deadlines and respect project timeframes.

Train Employees to Use the Intranet

Every company has a unique intranet. This can often create a problem for newcomers, as they have to learn how to handle the system from scratch. A good way to help them make that transition easier and smoother is to provide personalized training. Yes, it takes time to teach someone to use an unfamiliar piece of software, but it’s more than worth it. To reduce your effort on each particular training session, you can prepare a detailed manual or a video guideline on the intranet use and upload it directly to your corporate portal so that employees access it in a click.

Make the Navigation Intuitive

Your employees want to find information quickly and easily. An intuitive site navigation that helps your users find data without hassle is a way to enhance their engagement. People expect to find information with the least amount of clicks necessary, and this should be your guiding light when designing navigation for your intranet.

Offer Interactive Features

You can’t hope to improve your employee engagement without listening and interacting with them regularly. Because of this, interactive features have an important place in your intranet design. Dedicated collaboration areas, corporate chats, polls, and surveys will let your employees share comments, opinions, and views on corporate matters.

Keep Things Simple and Fun

Can you work effectively in a noisy office or sitting at a cluttered desk? Of course not, so why should you expect your staff to be able to work with anything less than an intuitive intranet with clean design? You might think that cramming as many features into the interface as possible is a good idea, but it’s not. At the same time, you should find a way to make your intranet entertaining. Throughout the day, your workers are entitled to a break from time to time, so offering them a fun way to vent through the intranet is always a good idea.

Make the Intranet Mobile-ready

Not all of your staff members will be in the office. Many of them will be on the move while on a business trip, meeting with a client, or vacation. Because of this, you need to make your intranet mobile-ready. It should be available to all of your employees, regardless of the mobile platforms they use, their location and type of contents they should work with.

Conclusion

The intranet shouldn’t be the place where you store corporate content only, but an enterprise-level platform that can directly influence employee engagement. A finely tuned intranet can help your employees find the information they are looking for easily, follow their activities and performance, stay tuned into corporate life and keep connected to their peers, thus getting support from the professional community and feeling more satisfied with the working process.