Strong internal communication is the sign of a positive, thriving company. But for a corporate intranet to survive and thrive, it must be more than just a storage space for folders and documents.
A successful intranet has both a real purpose and a clear intent:
- To connect people across departments, locations, and projects.
- To encourage alignment company-wide. From company norms to corporate strategies, your intranet should be the go-to place for employees who have questions on standard operating procedures.
- To teach, inform and coach employees to help expand worker knowledge and improve work performance.
Achieve these goals with your corporate intranet, and you’ll have a tool that increases engagement and collaboration between people, departments and company locales, while decreasing turnover rates. Productivity will go up, while employee dissatisfaction rates go down.
Your corporate intranet must be organized, focused and meaningful, while still providing business value. And it must motivate because a motivated workforce is one that’s positive and productive. But how do you engage employees and get them to adopt and to embrace this most important form of intrapersonal communication?
You entice them. Here’s how:
1. Provide Value
It’s all about providing value for your employees. Those fine individuals who work for you are also consumers. Just like any other target demographic, they enjoy investing in items and services that give them want they want without making them jump through hoops to get it.
Your corporate intranet is a product just like whatever else your company sells, only it targets employees instead of the public. Provide great value for the amount of time people invest in it, and you’ll have a viable product that people want to use.
There are numerous ways to do this:
- Set clear objectives — Make it clear to your workforce what they can expect to learn, receive or enjoy when they log in. Maybe it’s job training that can result in pay increases or advancement. Or maybe it’s the opportunity to let their voices be heard in the upper office. Possibly, it’s the chance to interact and collaborate with employees from different departments.
- Make it easy — Incorporate tools for easy navigation, and make your intranet intuitive and responsive.
- Encourage interactive communication — Give employees lots of opportunities to engage online. Allow commenting on blogs and articles. Incorporate question-and-answer sessions. Set aside a space for employee feedback, where workers can go to suggest improvements and voice opinions. Your intranet should be your integration point for employees and executives to come together in a mutually beneficial way.
2. Emphasize Usefulness
One objective of every strong corporate intranet is that it enables employees company-wide to align on strategy. Keeping your workforce in the know is a big step toward keeping them satisfied.
Try these techniques:
- Post corporate news regularly. Keep employees abreast of what’s going on where they work.
- Use event calendars to help employees meet deadlines as well as daily, weekly and monthly goals.
- Provide clean links to necessary forms and documents, and make them easy for executives to upload and easy for the workforce to access and to print.
- Cull old information. Your intranet should appear as a streamlined, content-rich address where employees go to find information. Make sure old or obsolete content is removed regularly.
3. Build Community
The best workplace is one where people care about one another and feel connected. Your corporate intranet can be a useful tool in encouraging this feeling of community.
Allow workers to build personalized profile pages that are shareable across the company.
- Add a social feature that allows employees to carry on internal conversations about work-related ideas.
- Add images, charts and graphics to posted content to make people want to read and engage.
If you use these tips to build your corporate intranet, you’ll increase your employee engagement scores across the board. It will become less of a struggle to encourage employees to adopt the company intranet, and you’ll see higher production levels, more collaboration and a lower rate of turnover.
A corporate intranet is a tool that can help your organization thrive, but to be effective, it must be intuitive, valuable and have a clear and defined purpose. This is how you achieve it.