Organizations rely on their intranets to host a lot of internal company information. It can provide policies and procedures, training materials and important resources. Yet, 57% of employees see no true purpose for their intranet. 21% even believe it is an unorganized dump of outdated information. Unfortunately, they are often correct. What can you do to change that belief?
Many companies are still utilizing limited intranets with irrelevant information. Yet, there’s a great opportunity in bringing in modern concepts. By including exclusive content, documents that are only available by logging in to the intranet, you can drive a greater purpose to this system and boost the employee experience.
Make a Plan for Your Content Strategy
Before you go updating the intranet, you need a content plan. What materials are you providing? Who should be given access to these documents? Should it be hosted in large files, or can it be broken up into smaller chunks?
One of the most important aspects of an intranet solution is employee generated content. Some staff may want templates in order to make fast changes, whereas others require more specialized skills. Create templates so that employees may quickly move ideas from concept to publication without struggling. Add tags so that people may quickly find content using search and browse.
Collaborate with team managers and other participants to come up with ideas for recurring content, such as newsletters, monthly reports and group activities.
Lay Down Clear Objectives
When developing the content strategy, incorporate clear and concise goals. What is considered success? Without this to keep you grounded, you can haphazardly update your intranet with no consistency.
Creating goals for the overall plan is not enough. Each piece of content should have its own objectives. Who are you conveying this information to, and why should they know it? These aspects must all be carefully considered if you are to create the most engaging intranet system for your employees.
Keep it Simple
Aside from being open about your objectives, another simple but powerful strategy for increasing intranet engagement is to keep things simple. This applies to both the design and operation. By utilizing exclusive content, you can set a different tone in these documents that can’t be found anywhere else in your company.
Another suggestion is to make employee generated content accessible and understandable. Accessibility is vital, since the files are exclusive. Forcing staff members to drudge through a labyrinth of documents to find a single item can lead to disgruntled workers.
Finally, navigation menus and the intranet interface are critical elements. It should have a simple UI so that even a new hire is able to login and navigate the platform on their own. When browsing through the intranet for exclusive content, your employees know they are getting a streamlined experience.
Add Engaging Design
Beauty and simplicity entail a pleasing, eye catching and intriguing design experience. To compliment your brand identity, use the proper fonts, graphics, colors, and formatting. Design teams should work with project managers to create tabs and layouts that match both aesthetic and functional requirements.
Because your intranet is in a digital rather than physical medium, you have a lot of creative freedom. In printed safety manuals, add links that take employees to hosted videos that demonstrate proper procedures. When explaining the PTO policy, add interactive charts that show real time accrual of hours. In the pet policy, include a fun directory of people’s furry coworkers. There is a lot of leeway in adding special and unique documents.
Build Entertaining Content
Introducing appropriate entertainment and humorous content is a great strategy to keep workers engaged. Allowing writers to utilize memes and gifs in their content pieces accomplishes this. Set up interesting challenges for staff to take part in, such as photo competitions, nostalgic topics, quizzes and other fun exercises. Create forums for discussion on current events, such as news, athletic events, awards ceremonies or viral trends. For most other tools, this content wouldn’t be appropriate or relevant, but a casual section on the corporate intranet is the perfect location for such discussions.
Provide a Personalized Experience
Providing your users with a customized experience is one of the most effective strategies to increase intranet engagement. Nowadays, our society is used to customizing their social media feeds to their preferences, and the intranet should follow suit.
Make sure employees can subscribe and receive notifications for the information that interests them the most. Guarantee they get the most up to date and crucial information every time they log in. For the exclusive content, make sure they are able to get this important information, but allow them to opt out if they feel it is irrelevant.
Support the Creation of Content
Supporting content creation as an important engagement strategy. This can be accomplished by motivating the engagement, such as by presenting a prize to the employee who has the most seen or most insightful articles on the intranet. Intranet administrators can make the experience more fun for employees by establishing objectives for them to complete, similar to a digital treasure hunt.
Provide a Mobile Friendly Experience
Every day, 93% of the global workforce uses mobile phones at work. Even in workplaces with rigorous policies, workers are more likely to have their phones nearby. Furthermore, statistics show that mobile devices account for more than 60% of all internet traffic. This trend is spreading to the workplace, as more employees rely on smartphones for work related tasks.
There has been significant change in how workplaces operate. Even as organizations slowly return to work, there are still field agents on the go, floor employees directly facing customers and remote workers staying at home or even thousands of miles from an office.
To ensure that slow and inflexible internal communication alternatives do not weigh down your employees, mobile phone apps have been tailored to fit the modern working environments. This means modern intranet solutions should be mobile friendly and accessible via an app. Since it hosts vital exclusive content, this makes it easier for employees to incorporate the company intranet into their everyday routine.
Leverage Feedback Forums and Polls
One of the most successful ways to enhance activity after adopting intranet software is to conduct surveys and add employee feedback forms. The easiest way to figure out what your staff wants to read is to ask them directly. What types of exclusive content do they really want?
Beyond the types of content, there’s a lot of other information to collect too. What are their thoughts on the design and layout? Is the navigation easy, and how are the tagging and searching capabilities? Is the information provided clear and concise?
Finally, track employee engagement by collecting real time insights and statistics from every message you send them, as well as the performance of every program. Through dashboards and reports, you can see what your employees really care about and measure the effectiveness of your intranet in seconds.
A company intranet does not have to be a boring and outdated system. Start off with a content strategy, and add exclusive items to drive engagement.
