The Tenets of a ‘Dynamic’ Intranet and How it Benefits Your Business

“The first thing I do when I log in at work is to open either Facebook, Youtube or a News portal. Though the default homepage is that of my company’s intranet, I find it neither exciting nor work efficiently for me to execute my tasks”

“Logging into my firm’s intranet after browsing external websites is like taking a detour onto a dirt track from a 4 lane express highway and getting stuck in the sludge”

If these rants by professionals working in an MNC are something you connect with, then this article should be of help. Despite the intranet having the potential to be one of the most effective collaborative technology tools at the disposal of organizations, we at Hubfly attribute its low adoption down to three factors:

•   Paucity of new content resulting in not-so-frequent updates (therefore boringly static)
•   Outdated technology and information design layout resulting in a poor user experience
•   The failure to make it evolve from a one way communications medium into a medium for collaboration 

The cure lies in making the intranet ‘dynamic’. Here are 7 tenets that Hubfly believes in, which can transform not just your intranet, but also your business enterprise if implemented:

Making the Workforce Go Social

While there are social networking sites dime a dozen, an Intranet with social profiles of employees containing their bios, images, contact details, designations, domain expertise, projects assigned and avocational interests will be beneficial to your organization in the following ways:

•   Aids in resource discovery and team selections for projects that demand cross functional inputs. Much in the similar vein, it helps employees with common interests and hobbies to bond, which results in more cohesive teams.
•   Going social entails every employee to be able to blog/ microblog and thereby share their knowledge and opinions on topics pertinent to the business. These blogs can be curated and shared to the workforce at large, thereby encouraging greater communication among the employees.
• Helps facilitate peer-to-peer recognition wherein achievements can be highlighted and validated.

All in all, it keeps the intranet dynamic as there is something new in terms of content that is always added. Greater the adoption of the social intranet, greater the scope for collaboration.

Encouraging Social Feed of Business Relevance

Every business organization is subject to external factors that determine its success. Management gurus have coined the acronym PESTEL which can be broken down to Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental and Legal factors that have a tangible impact on a business enterprise’s day to day operations.

Your organization’s intranet can become the preferred medium through which every member of your workforce gains access to news, analysis in the form of published news reports and expert opinions of influencers in the space your organization operates in. While the onus of curating the content to be shared and choosing the news sources, influencers and the keywords to track lie squarely on the management and the communications team, the benefits that accrue will be manifold.

•   Besides keeping the intranet dynamic by having something new added, your organization will have employees who’d be empowered with knowledge of the ever-changing business environment.
•   The intranet dons the role of a content aggregator, thereby helping your employees to save time spent in browsing scores of external portals.
• Collectively, you’d be better placed to take on the resultant challenges or be fleet footed to tap into opportunities that a news event presents.
• Your organization can considerably reduce the time lag between a news outcome, its dissemination to employees and the analysis of its impact which in most cases works out to be anywhere between 3 to 30 days of a yawning gap at present.

Forums Facilitating Knowledge Transfer

Organizations today can reap the benefits of tapping into the cross functional, inter-departmental wisdom of their workforce by using the intranet in order to stay competent. Intranets with moderated forums created for specific topics yield the following benefits:

• When moderated by select experts, employees gain access to accurate and timely answers to their questions. As in the case above, if there’s an economic event that has an impact on the business, employees can look to get insightful guidance from the domain expert on the course of action the employee and the organization as a whole must take.
• It encourages a culture of collaboration, enhances employee engagement and can even reduce the quantum of internal emails.
• Forums are the best internal communications tool for business enterprises to crowdsource ideas from the workforce and thereby encouraging bottom-up communications. Opinions can be solicited on topics ranging from product development to creative solutions to overcome business challenges. 

Intelligent Search

The problem most organizations with an intranet confront today is that foraging for the right document or content yields in search results that are either insignificant in terms of numbers or in too many results but insignificant to the keyword searched – both resulting in a waste of employee time.

Much like how organizations spend considerable amount of resources in optimizing the content of their websites so that they rank better organically in search engine results, the same effort of meta tagging content with titles, content summary etc. are imperative when it comes to the intranet as well.

•  Faster and more tailored the search results, higher the savings on time and better the employee productivity.
•   The more integrated the search results, the better the user experience and higher are the adoption rates of the intranet.

A Customized User Interface

Imagine empowering every employee with an intranet interface that they can customize making their user experience unique and truly personalized.

•  Personalized information on the homepage relevant to the employee’s department, past searches, expertise and interests would increase the employee’s engagement with the intranet.

Real Time Project Dashboards and Business Applications

A dynamic intranet will ideally have easy to access tools, business applications and widgets that allow tasks to be monitored and executed more efficiently. On-demand project pages with real time dashboards can be set up on the intranet wherein team members are invited to collaborate

• When employees know the real time status of their team projects, their KPMs (Key Performance Metrics) with live graphs and how much their contributions make a difference to meeting their organization’s business goals, there will be an impetus to workforce efficiency.
•   Automation of day to day tasks using intelligent business applications integrated into the intranet will have a cumulative effect in time and cost saving.

Lastly…

A dynamic Intranet needs dynamic content

Having a steady stream of content apart, complementing textual content with visually appealing multi-media content is essential from an engagement standpoint.

If you are convinced of the benefits a dynamic intranet would accrue to your organization, Hubfly ought to be your go-to destination to help you build one. Let’s start an Intranet Revolution to make your workplace truly digital.