An intranet with multi-channel communication and outreach capabilities has the power to connect employees instantly across all devices and in multiple formats, magnifying important messaging across your organization.
Intranet multi-channel communication and outreach capabilities can include:
One intranet available both on mobile (and desktop)
A mobile intranet is a necessity, but there are many internal communications apps that are mobile-only. These are good solutions for a completely deskless workforce, but when many of your employees spend most of their day in front of computers: you want one intranet with the same information that can be accessed in multiple channels. Otherwise, the classic challenge with multiple sources of truth rears its ugly head. When evaluating the mobile app, make sure that it offers the same intranet for non-desk employees as the ones who are in front of computers.
Push and Desktop Notifications
Notifications are the most effective way to cut through the noise of your digital workplace, especially email. Your intranet should be equipped with these capabilities to deliver critical company news when announcements are time-sensitive.
Company directory
If the purpose of an intranet is to connect employees, a strong use case continues to provide employees the company directory so users can find experts and connect over many channels whether its by phone, Skype, email, or even messaging within the intranet itself. Your mobile intranet app should allow you to instantly search and find coworkers and contact them with a tap of a finger.
Collaboration and chat tools integrations
Your company intranet should be able to distribute important announcements and mandatory reads into your organization’s widely-used instant communications tool, such as Slack. When you have critical company announcements to make, it’s important that every employee in your company is aware. Distributing intranet content via these multi-channel communications tools will spur engagement and maximize readership.
Email Notifications
Even though intranets reduce email dependency and exist to curate critical information that gets lost in email, integrations with email workflows are still an effective use of broader outreach. Here are a couple of examples:
Newsletters
Many internal communications departments continue to use newsletters. Ideally, your intranet should have native newsletter capabilities to make it easier for you to share your content, pulling information right from your intranet as opposed to having separate tools to first create your content, then distribute it.
Email digests
Despite new technologies trying to replace it, let’s be realistic – email isn’t going away. Yes, there are popular apps aiming to eradicate email, but employees continue to use email. The goal of an intranet shouldn’t be to eliminate and disrupt your employee’s daily email habits. Rather, email should be leveraged as another channel to disseminate and package content. An intranet should offer email digests to highlight intranet activity weekly or daily, depending on your preference. Packaged intranet content distributed via email digests keeps employees in the know if they miss out in action.
Social campaigns
Multi-channel communication intranets can boost employee advocacy by enabling everyone in your organization to become a social marketer. Social campaign capabilities within the intranet empower every employee to share marketing approved company news with their enterprise social networks. This is unique because you’re able to magnify and expand campaign reach by leveraging your employees’ social networks, such as LinkedIn or Twitter. For example, if your organization wants to increase brand awareness, you should be able to easily create a campaign in your intranet and have your employees share the campaign to their social networks. The same goes for sharing media-worthy company news or attracting new talent. In addition, your intranet should make this process as easy as possible by including workflows that make it seamless for your organization to share social content.
Targeted digital displays
Digital signage is a great way to promote company priorities and looming deadlines. It also passively reminds all employees, deskless or knowledge workers, of what’s happening within the organization. Technology is improving to facilitate digital content straight from the intranet from within the administration. That way strategic communications are consistent and managed from one source.
Download our eBook: Intranet Features that Matter
The workplace is changing rapidly, and relying on a single method of distribution will not be as effective as multi-channel outreach capabilities. It’s also important that messaging and company announcements come from a single, top-down source. A modern employee intranet should target and address these needs, enabling your organization to effectively connect, align, and engage your employees across the entire workforce.
To learn more about the important features of a modern employee intranet, download our eBook: Intranet Features that Matter
