COVID Crisis: 7 ways to use your intranet as a savior
It is difficult to predict when there will be a crisis, but businesses have to be always prepared for it. Just like COVID-19 has changed the way we live and work.
- Employees are working from home
- Professional lives have turned upside down
- Facing technology and demographic changes
- Communicating and collaborating with the team
- Understanding new security breaches
And a lot more has been changed in the last few weeks. If your company prepare for emergency protocols, then you can manage this unexpected and pressing situation in a better manner. With the rapid changes in the world of work, the intranet has become even more crucial for organizations. Today, intranets are no more just a communication site but they are more interactive, productive, social, collaborative, searchable, engage, secure, and easy to use.
Today, it is the right time to consider an intranet as a game-changer
Since we are living in a hard time, let your intranet handle the coronavirus. It can become your reliable friend that soothes with the right information and tools for digital transformation. Your internet can change the way you work and make it better for this crisis and forever. It is the time when getting the right information and utilizing it correctly is the most critical part of your business. Power up your work and collaboration with an intranet with Office 365 (now renamed Microsoft 365).
Make your workplace ready for COVID-19
Here are the highlighted 7 best ways to use an intranet as a savior.
Your intranet is a central touchpoint for employees but at this time of the COVID-19 crisis, getting critical information is critical. If utilized properly, an intranet can become your savior and powerful platform to manage your crisis.
Let’s understand how the features and functionalities of an intranet can help in this emergency situation.
1. Define the touchpoints for internal communication
Emergency situations start with the need for internal communication. Defining the communication touchpoints and aligning the teams can be leveraged well with your intranet during a crisis. The easy to use tools and applications manages the most crucial types of communication of your organization i.e. regular alerts/announcements/notifications, critical alerts, and sharing of the knowledge base. The right communication touchpoints can be identified on the intranet to provide your employees with the right information.
- Regular alerts/announcements/notifications
If you need to communicate to all employees, create a visible banner on the home page of the intranet and support this message with specific alerts. You can easily send these notifications on the web as well as mobile in one-go by using intranet settings.
- Critical alerts
Critical alerts appear on your phone and web mode to inform the crucial information related to emergencies. These notifications can be pushed to provide actionable information to the employees in response to the emergency situation.
- Knowledgebase sharing
Delve into more details about the crisis and engage them better. Like in this emergency situation of the coronavirus, you can post about “What”, “How”, and “Why” of COVID-19.
2. Specialized team for crisis management
Create a dedicated crisis management team can sever a lot of purposes. Your intranet can help you create a centralized area for the staff to coordinate with information, efforts, employees, and brainstorm about crisis scenarios.
Defining the crisis management team can include front-line staff and public relations teams, social media and web managers. This team can be aligned on the intranet so that they can lead the communication. And the employees will also have a clear point of contact in case of an emergency situation.
3. Create an employee toolkit during a crisis
Thanks to the digitalized world, no employees are internal anymore. Every employee can become the front face and promote the organization in the best possible ways. Rather than silencing the employees, why not empower them?
An employee toolkit for employees can help the staff to access verified information about the crisis and encourage them to go public. An intranet during a crisis can provide essential information, media content, questions and answers forum, marketing content, shareable content, support tips, and other collaterals to the employees. This toolkit can be used to respond to the emergency situation and allow businesses to carry out regular communication with the workforce.
4. Crisis Policies, Procedures, and documentation
Intranet has an important role in managing the information repository with an effective content management system, through the integration of selected folders of SharePoint, utilizing the cloud storage provider. It provides easily searchable and centralized access to the organizational information your employees need.
Unlike a conventional document management system, the intranet can manage the critical information, training practices, policies and protocols with advanced features like metadata, keyword tagging, assigning ownership, role-based permissions, keeping specific tabs of crisis management, and more. To manage the crisis, information is very important to ensure access to policies, procedures, and documentation by employees. An intranet can provide information based on the specific categories like field employees, and other remote working employees that streamline the business processes for a variety of departments.
5. Strong employee assistance and support
A crisis has major impacts on employees including physical, emotional, situational, and even financial considerations. And a ready human response is the need of the hour.
An intranet during a crisis can help you create a dedicated area for the support and assistance that can be very useful to answer the need of employees. This forum can also be used to address the employee requests, post blogs for the enhanced knowledge base of employees during the crisis, provide information related to fundraising efforts, relief initiatives, and more. It will encourage an informed and supported workforce throughout the organization.
When the employees are empowered and have the necessary resources, they can manage the crisis in an effective manner. The necessary customer service and support also reflect well on the organization and its capability to respond to the crisis situation.
6. Seamless project collaboration between teams
Your intranet provides the solution to collect your employees for specific project sites so that the workforce remains to stay updated and critical information. It allows a secure exchange of information about the project along with a role-based content permission system.
Most businesses, large and small, juggle a number of projects with endless tasks and need a system to keep everything organized. While managing projects gets difficult in an emergency situation, a cloud-based intranet platform during a crisis provides the much-needed flexibility of accessing and updating your tasks from anywhere.
7. Dedicated Solutions
Nobody wants to work under pressure and take last-moment actions. Preparing them for an emergency situation is a big task as you have to avoid panic and mismanagement of information.
Intranet can help you manage the crisis with the help of dedicated pages, communities, and social dashboards. By creating different departments or project sites, your employees will find the latest news and announcements about the crisis and other external links to relevant content. The specific sites and community help employees to manage the work dependencies, tasks, progress tracking, and achieve better collaboration. Finally, it is important to update the latest updates about the crisis to keep up with the social advocacy of the intranet.
Make your intranet a savior during COVID-19 crisis
There are so many ways that an intranet can be used in an emergency situation. Always remember that the intranet during a crisis delivers values to employees and engage with it. If it is well-managed, the employee will trust it, and come back again and again. You can also empower your remote workforce and raise employee engagement during this crisis. Schedule a DEMO to learn more about improving a crisis management strategy.