Improve Employee Engagement Within Your Company With Creative Social Intranet

What are the essentials for creating an Intranet your employees love?

Creative Social Intranet brings to you top tips for designing an Intranet your employees will desire to keep coming back to. Inspiring from real-life insights from top companies from around the world, we bring to you few Intranet essentials guide to inspire you in planning your own intranet strategy.
To give you an insight into an ideal intranet features that proves most effective in driving engagement, check out top tips for developing an intranet your employees will love to connect to.

• Intranet that promises Employee engagement

How do you create an intranet that may just not meet your technical requirements completely, but reverberates with your employees and harvests true engagement? Very often it is noticed that technically sufficient platforms collapse down as users simply don’t feel comfortable or motivated to use them. Why? Just because they’re not engaging enough and don’t motivates employees to achieve their personal goals as well as company targets. So an Intranet that promises Employee Engagement is an essential aspect of Intranet that is loved by your employees.

• Creating effective digital workplace

Years of experience supporting Enterprises designing effective digital workplace platforms teach us as to what can work and what cannot. Studies state that the key to developing an intranet that turns into a central part of working life is taking a user-centric approach.
By understanding and accepting the mentality of your employees and placing their needs at the centre of your planning strategy, you can create an Intranet solution that naturally fits well into their working lives and grows them at personal level too.

• Allow mobility.

Your intranet should have ample mobility to run easily on any device, anywhere. This is particularly for those employees who are always on the go or who don’t operate most of their
day from their desks.
Almost every worker today has his personal mobile phone and thus expects to receive all internal communications in the similar way as they get other information too. The most important point here is to be mobile. And thus it’s important to create the Web version of the intranet that fit on a mobile phone, and also redesign it so that it is appropriate to people who are not working from their desk all
the time.

• Offer internal social capabilities.

One of the latest trends in Intranets is making them a social platform where employees can communicate, converse and collaborate with each other, as they do on other external social media platforms.
Social business starts when employees are allowed to comment on articles where they can ask questions, share their perceptions and post links. People in large organizations can also find all other related information and knowledge they couldn’t otherwise access from social media. Internal social capabilities have permitted organisations to connect people to people and also people to content so they are able to work smarter together. Such social businesses have shown an increase in knowledge-sharing and collaboration across various business units and also their external partners. These new social capabilities have allowed employees to access information and knowledge anytime, anywhere and from any device.

Other Benefits of a Modern day Intranet Solution

Intranets are capable enough to deliver several dazzling benefits. You might have known about many of them earlier. Let’s learn about few other lesser known benefits about the modern day intranet solutions.
Every organization will have a vast collection of information to be managed and shared with their people. The right data and communication facilities must be served to employees, prospects, customers, vendors, clients etc. Let’s know more about those benefits that are lesser known about the Intranets.

1. Process Coordinating and Merging

Earlier companies used to outsource multiple software’s or applications from outside to get tasks done. Along with coordinating everything on a single platform; Intranets also merge down tasks and processes in a manner that reduce the difficulty level.

2. Calendar Management

An intranet maintains and updates calendars with all big and small meetings and their schedules are marked accurately. Shared calendars make collaboration across entire organization processes easier. They also solve conflicts, if any and make the most of the available time and place.

3. HR Portal

Having a superior HR portal makes an intranet portal complete. Furthermore, managing the complete workforce and all its related processes is a vital part of running any business. An HR portal has the caliber to completely change the way your organization is running currently.

4. Extranet Portal

Interacting and communicating with customers and vendors are also a significant work process to be handled carefully. With an extranet portal, this can be easily made possible by allowing them a certain section of the intranet. Again it will make sharing information and collaboration between them more efficient.

5. Work mobility

Working from home is a great concept that allows employees to operate and complete their
tasks whether they are placed in the office or at home; away from their desk. Today, intranets
are designed to allow users to stay connected with other team members even while traveling
outside office, from outdoor workplaces or any remote area. This also proves beneficial to
companies who want to manage their remote employees proficiently.

Knowledge is power. We all agree to this. And we all are acquainted with the truth of it in our everyday personal and professional lives. Yet, recently it has become clear that worldwide, we’re still lacking behind in terms of technological and ‘high-end’ skills that many businesses and big organisations require for success.
Naturally, it takes a certain amount of investment if you want to gain highly qualified employees. However, one of the most important considerations for modern enterprises is recognising and promoting those that have knowledge in the very first place. The knowledge economy comes with a growing demand for education that encourages new knowledge and capabilities which includes positive response to change, thinking in novel ways that cross traditional boundaries like culture, accepting technological understandings, budding critical awareness or subject disciplines and imagining many futures.
Organisations today worldwide need to be innovative to attract and retain employees that can move them forward.
Thus you can say that these days, knowledge is not just power, it’s also something that can be used by an organisation to foster innovation.

Why is Knowledge Management important?

Listed below are some of the many reasons why knowledge management is important.

• Ensuring all relevant and important information, data and resources are accessible by employees when they require it
• Vital knowledge and information is kept within the organisation even after employees quit the organisation.
• Keeping away from duplication of efforts
• Ensuring your organisation is effectively taking advantage of existing expertise in the company
• Standardising processes and procedures for better knowledge management

Finally, to conclude, this all leads to faster and more valuable decision making and easier collaboration. Most importantly it also encourages innovation and growth.

The New Digital Workplace

Smoothing the progress of knowledge sharing indicates ensuring that knowledge is retained within the workplace.

The difference in the way we work today and the demands put on by modern organisations is the most common problem that organisations worldwide today face and this has changed beyond our imagination.

Today’s workforce is no longer confined to a single office environment.

As the new diversified digital workplaces have emerged, the need for team-based, collaborative and digitally connected work environments becomes important for knowledge sharing, retention and admittance to the digital workplace.

In this digital workplace, the owners must give their workers the support that they require to make easy sharing which can take the form of:

a) Training by means of intranet/ e-learning platforms
b) Online workspace that will ensure easy collaboration
c) A joint voice within the organisation

All this is possible by adding social and learning aspects to the Company’s intranet social tools which often forms the basis of an effective digital workplace.

Retaining Employees

Today we’re witnessing the younger generation lot that is leaving jobs that don’t live up to their expectations. This is something that organisations must recognise and attempt to stop as soon as possible.

The Intranet is a great facilitator of knowledge as it provides a central hub for easily sharing and accessing resources for better communication of information and collaboration between employees in various departments and areas.

To further understand the organisational requirements, it takes a little knowledge gathering and prior-planning in your Social Intranet to do the job effectively:

1. Frequent Audit of the existing digital workplace to spot areas for improvement
2. Find out areas can be expanded upon to increase value to clients and the employees
3. Keep Enriching the knowledge base with further information
4. Enable organisation-wide sharing of valuable knowledge
5. Assess future knowledge sharing to the next level

The Social Intranet

Much of this can be eased by adding social to the digital workplace mix.

This indicates that everyone, from the senior-most to the junior-most employees, can pour what they know about their work into the organisation’s knowledge pool and this can then be easily accessible by fellow colleagues.

This can be done with the use of

• Employee Profiles
• Wikipedia’s
• Blogs
• A collaboration of team workspaces

It’s necessary to consider the following three key areas for planning:

1. People/culture
Certainly, the employee’s ability to add info to wikis and blogs will state that the knowledge base of the organisation is continuously growing and that it belongs to the organisation on the whole, rather than an individual.

2. Organisation
Organisations of various shapes and sizes can add aspects easily into the intranet platform to form an efficient digital workplace that will ensure that the working culture turns and remains more innovative and collaborative. This is important for providing excellent customer service and retaining workers which then become an asset.

3. Technology
Technologies every now and then come and go and most organisations are fairly resistant to change. This is essentially what creates the problem in the first place, so it’s highly necessary to place people in a prime position.

So now What’s Next?

We strongly recommended you watch our Creative Social Intranet’s Introduction video.

It will present you with actionable insights into the important elements of a digital workplace. It further assists you on how it can assist you in effective capturing, storing and providing access to valuable knowledge and information in form of databases, documents, policies, programs, FAQs, online workspaces and much more.

Databases, documents, policies: all of these are USP assets that an organisation possesses. The same should be said about an organisation’s employees also and see them as business assets, it’s time to ensure you do so.

Thus all organisations must provide employees with the essential tools to ensure that they can share the knowledge they possess.