5 Essential Elements of a Corporate Intranet
In today’s fast and increasingly complex business environment, every organization is looking for tools to organize and simplify work. Some are deploying different digitalization tools to manage different aspects of their business and others are allowing their employees to use whatever tools and apps they like, if the IT department is fine with it. But in both these cases, information gets scattered in different applications and affects the searchability and manageability of information.
A corporate intranet is a solution that can play a central role in solving this problem.
The core components of intranet are:
- Collaboration and Communication
- Employee Engagement
- Productivity
In a corporate setup, the intranet enables people to store, secure, manage, and access documents and information seamlessly. Moreover, it also helps the organization to create a healthy workspace with engaging and personalized content and automated workflows.
Below are the essential components of an intranet that help businesses create such a support ecosystem that is productive, unified, collaborative, and delivers employees, a great experience.
1. Collaboration & Communication
Global businesses often find it harder to bring an increasingly dispersed workforce on the same page. A corporate intranet can help you reach and engage your entire workforce and provide your employees with a centralized platform to collaborate, get personalized company news, and have easy access to corporate communications.
Instead of cluttering your mailboxes with project discussions, questions, sharing information or documents, and exchanging ideas; a corporate intranet can become a forum where all of this communication can take place. Apart from reducing the back and forth of email it also makes sure that all knowledge is captured and secured in the intranet. Additionally, the corporate intranet can also host an FAQ where employees can find answers to common questions and post new questions.
It is also a really good platform where top-level management and stakeholders can share news and information about their vision, company financials, mergers, and acquisitions, or offer encouragement and appreciation to the staff.
The corporate intranet essentials promote a two-way dialog between employees and the executive team, which is important for today’s modern businesses.
2. Employee Engagement
Employees are bound to access the corporate intranet to create or access documents, assign or change the status of tasks, submit forms, and of course for collaboration purposes. But this doesn’t mean that the intranet is interesting and engaging. Employees are coming to it because their work mandates it.
The essential components of intranet for corporations provide you with the tools to make it appealing and attractive:
Create surveys and polls to gauge how the staff perceives the intranet, what they like about it, what areas can be improved, what other features they would like, etc., which can guide you with requirements for future upgrades.
Appoint content creators for each department, who will publish new material every week. This will keep content fresh, vibrant, and relevant to each department.
Recognize employees with achievement stories, publish feeds about birthdays and work anniversaries (very easily achieved if employee profiles are complete), and stories about happy customers.
Have personalized employee workspaces where the logged-in user sees his bookmarked sites, documents, conversations, people, upcoming tasks and reminders, calendars, etc.
Have social features so users can like, comment and share an article or blog, or have a discussion on matters that interest, influence and affect your organization.
3. Unified Experience
Many businesses invest in several solutions which they use for different purposes. For example, a separate document management tool, project management software, chat, communication apps, etc.
Apart from causing an overload and being expensive, each tool will have separate logins, require staff training, and need periodic maintenance and upgrades. This also means that the information is dispersed across multiple systems and that users have to switch between applications to complete one task. This results in a loss of productivity, high costs, and more burden on your employees and IT.
The well-built components of an intranet for corporations unify all your useful and relevant applications in one power-packed solution. It serves as a one-stop shop to access your Department sites for collaboration, Documents, News, Announcements, and Employee Directory. It also provides modules for HR and Employee Management, Goal Management, and Project Management, and gives access to common office forms; digitized and ready to use.
4. People & Information Management
According to a McKinsey study, employees spend nearly 20 percent of the time during their work week looking for information or people (colleagues) who can help with specific tasks. And the fact that digital workplaces are becoming more dispersed and remote only escalates this problem.
Businesses need a solution that centralizes and organizes all content – documents, knowledge, tasks, and people – in a meaningful manner so it is easily accessible. A corporate intranet offers team spaces, document libraries, content lists, and employee directories, all of which help with the organization and quick availability of these assets.
5. Business Process Automation
A corporate intranet makes tools available so you can easily automate your business processes, workflows, and tasks. It helps you simplify employees’ lives – easily and inexpensively.
Form and document approvals are the most common tasks that generate manual, time-consuming work. Automated approval systems save a lot of time and avoid errors. You can set up reminders and notifications to be sent in case of approval delays and forms can also be set up to route to different people depending on the dollar amount that has to be approved, for example, IT purchases.
The onboarding process can be set up such that a list of tasks that need to be completed before the first day of joining is created and assigned to various users and notifications are sent. Document governance processes can be set so that IT doesn’t have to keep track of the thousands of documents and the dates when they have to be moved into archives or deleted.
All of this automation saves a lot of time and of course, money!
Conclusion
To sum up, a well-built corporate intranet helps promote your company culture, enhances your brand, and provides tools to keep everyone in the loop. It establishes connections between teams and colleagues and streamlines routine and complex operations. It also helps your employees track projects, tasks, and deliverables, and manage meetings and events with calendars.
A corporate intranet’s essential features enable employees to make use of state-of-the-art tools to establish connections between teams and colleagues with chat, social, and video conferencing features. It acts as a single point of access that integrates external applications and systems to have a unified and simplified experience.
BizPortals 365 is an industry-leading, comprehensive corporate intranet and digital workplace solution for Microsoft 365. It includes all the above must-have solutions and features of a corporate intranet.