How an Intranet Can Elevate Employee Engagement

Over the last few years, intranet technology has evolved tremendously. From a simple online notice board to a technological opportunity with endless capabilities. Intranets have the ability to elevate employee engagement, enhance customer experience, and so much more.

According to Dale Carnegie, 90% of leaders think an engagement strategy will have an impact on business success, but only about 25% of business leaders have an employee engagement strategy.  Some other interesting statistics include:

• Only 40% of the workforce knows their company’s goals, strategies, and tactics (Dale Carnegie)
• 49% of employees are “not engaged” and 16.5% are “actively disengaged” (Gallup)
• Companies with engaged employees earn 2.5 times more revenue compared to their competitors with low engagement levels (Officevibe)
• 90% of companies using social technologies report business benefit from them including an 18% higher revenue per employee (Jive Software)

So, how can an intranet elevate employee engagement across your organization? This article will discuss how embracing technology can lead the way to employee engagement and higher productivity.

Centralize information

Digital isn’t just about marketing. An intranet can work across all departments, from sales and marketing to support and operations. It brings everyone in your organization together as you work to exceed client needs. One aspect of an intranet is the centralization of company information. Centralizing your organization’s information can help to improve the accessibility of information, and thus the productivity of your employees.

Accessibility

Working in a large organization, it can be frustrating when you require different logins, passwords, or applications in order to gain access to pertinent information. The good news is that modern intranets can help to empower employees with accessibility to information and insight. Intranets can centralize all pertinent information within a single login and application. On top of that, it can be accessible to every individual in your organization – not just those in the C-suite. According to Jive Software, using an intranet can reduce email use by 25% by minimizing “locked up” information in inboxes and folders.

On another note, the Internet has eliminated the significance of geography, and it’s now easier than ever for employees to work remotely. Centralizing your organization’s information, using an intranet, can make information accessible 24/7 to everyone in your organization, regardless of geography and time zone. This can elevate your employee engagement as it helps employees do their jobs more efficiently by having all of the information in one place, rather than moving from program to program or hunting down individuals with that information.

Within every organization, there is sensitive or confidential information that is only accessible to certain individuals. With an intranet, you have the ability to implement a role-based information setting, meaning that sensitive information can be made accessible to certain individuals based on their role within the organization. Intranets also support organization hierarchy so that you can easily accommodate formal organizations and informal teams of any size.

Productivity

69% of employees surveyed agreed that intranets help reduce unnecessary email and improve efficiencies within their organization (Jive Software). An intranet can help your employees make decisions, author content, and share information and ideas.

With tools like blogs, forums, wikis, and knowledge base, employees are able to share and grow their knowledge. A well-built intranet that includes some, if not all of these tools, has the ability to streamline entire business processes. With the ability to add, edit, share and collaborate real-time on essential data and projects, your employees can resolve problems more quickly. As a result, this will increase your productivity levels and help elevate your employee engagement rate.

Personalization leads to higher productivity

Personalization involves building an intranet that allows each employee to have a dashboard that they can customize to their interests, preferences, and job. Allowing your employees to add a personal touch to their intranet view can create several benefits such as improved company culture, increased levels of employee engagement and productivity, and easier navigation. Personalization can lead to higher productivity because employees are more informed, motivated and engaged.

You can also reflect your organization’s culture throughout your intranet through its branding, colour scheme, content, processes and contributions from employees. The best kind of intranet is not only aligned with your current organizational culture, but also continues to shape and influence it. There are different ways to promote a positive company culture through your social intranet including:

• Sharing company news
• Highlighting internal job opportunities
• Feature stories focused on employees
• Focus on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives
• Share your organizations history and heritage
• Broadcast company and individual accomplishments
• Contests/gamification
• Ask employees for feedback
• List community events
• Q&A forums
• Employee profiles

Modern intranets are easy to use and empower employees with information and insight. When effectively developed and utilized, an intranet can produce endless opportunities and benefits to your organization. Intranets have the ability to centralize your information, increase your employee engagement, collaboration, and productivity levels, promote a positive company culture, and help your organization gain a competitive edge.

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Has employee engagement become an issue within your organization? If the answer is yes, it may be time to search for a solution that can help to drive your employee engagement. As an organization, it can be difficult to choose a technology solution that best fits your business. Many organizations are turning to Liferay, a leading open source platform, to help them build a fully integrated intranet that connects their people and systems. For more information, feel free to reach out to us.