Imagup General Magazine 2024
An intranet is an extremely useful tool that can help your business by allowing you to streamline internal and external communication. This powerful tool is simply an irreplaceable addition to your modern workplace toolkit.
“A simple intranet definition would be a number of sites, linked together and available to only a select group of people within a company. It’s essentially a small-scale private version of the internet,” say the intranet security experts over at Simpplr.com
The latest intranets don’t have issues like the clunky 90s software – they provide useful information on demand, are easy-to-navigate, and the user-friendly interface will help you get your work done quickly.
With that in mind, let’s see what benefits a business can reap from using intranet in the workplace.
1. Improved internal communication
A business is as efficient as its internal communication. Organizations that encourage multi-directional communication are more likely to improve employee engagement and productivity, which is where a modern intranet can help. Teams can benefit by:
- Having open discussions
- Sharing knowledge
- Staying in touch with their leaders
- Providing updates across all departments
Businesses need communication that goes both ways. This includes employees being updated with all the latest information, and leadership getting their feedback. An intranet helps keep all vital communication in one place, easily accessible, shareable, and editable.
To improve employee productivity, your staff needs access to development and learning opportunities, updates about the core purpose and mission, clear role expectations, and the ability to show their strengths. Improved communication also improves engagement, which plays a crucial role in the productivity of your team.
2. Intranet helps bring multi-location teams together
You can turn an intranet into a fully-operational, omnichannel central hub for your business online and use it to make plans, plan events, share company news, and maintain conversations.
You can connect your business across a wide range of different time zones and locations, providing each location and time zone with valuable insights into what the company has been up to, regardless of where you’re based.
This is essential, especially now that remote workplaces are trending. In fact, more people are considering remote work a big perk and priority as they navigate the job market. Surveys have even found that employees were willing to trade in a portion of their salary in exchange for remote working benefits. And many teams around the world have been able to successfully build entire companies remotely—Gitlab, Buffer, and Stripe are among the more popular brands that have no physical locations.
Fully remote companies—and even companies that work with remote contractors and freelancers—need to have a proper system in place to bridge the gap in communication. When you can’t always walk over to another staff member, having everything you need in one central area can make all the difference.
3. Keep your employees informed at all times
Your employees can’t be productive if they can’t find the information they need or if the data they have isn’t up to date. Nowadays, data is the primary currency in the business world, and businesses that invest in data accuracy have a better chance of outsmarting the competition.
Providing accurate data and making it accessible has become mandatory. Think of your intranet as a pool of data. Everything regarding your business is in that pool, and your employees can access it to find, retrieve, locate, and share every piece of information they need at the moment.
In a world where the internet is king, this means a lot. Your employees need a way to stay connected and get the work done.
An intranet with a user-friendly interface is an excellent search tool that allows your employees to stay up to date and find all the information they need quickly and easily. Your intranet will act as a search tool just as Google is a search tool during research. For instance, if one of your teammates is looking for a particular asset, you should be able to search for and locate that asset with ease.
4. Boost employee recognition
Recognizing your employees should be something you embed into your company culture. Reward and recognition are essential parts of the employee experience. Leadership can use them as tools to improve your employees’ engagement levels and satisfaction.
It doesn’t have to be anything excessive or even monetary. It just needs to be timely and orderly. You can recognize your team for reaching simple milestones and improving metrics. An intranet allows for peer-to-peer recognition, and it can add to the culture of the organization. This employee recognition and reward is an excellent way to motivate your staff.
You can also recognize employees for their leadership abilities. After all, managers play an important role in motivating team members to perform well and leverage their exceptional talent. Without this level of guidance, it can be difficult to see real results. Through collaboration tools embedded in your intranet, it’s easier than ever to appreciate one another in a transparent manner. Simply put, the long-term benefits of employee recognition are plentiful.
5. Employee onboarding simplification and organizational clarity
Onboarding can be easily simplified through the use of an intranet. You can provide all the relevant news, updated company charts, and easy-to-access files new hires need to find their way around.
An intranet is your central business hub, providing all insights and information across every department. This is especially important when it comes to communicating updates across the company. In this case, you don’t always want to rely on email—you want a dedicated area where your staff can reference it. This digital ledger of news can be useful for years to come.
You can easily make sure that your employees are on the same page with your business goals and ongoing projects by introducing exceptional and dynamic organization into every segment of your company.
Customize the shape and setup of your organization to add enhanced layers to your organizational strategy and ensure that each employee clearly understands their roles and responsibilities on an individual level.
Allow your employees to personalize their individual approach to the pool of company data and achieve a higher level of organization within each department. When all segments of your enterprise work as one, there’s nothing keeping your business back.
