An intranet is one of the most important tools your organization could invest in. In an age where employees can be scattered across states and time zones, if not fully in different countries, we need a tool that keeps everyone connected and collaborating. A company intranet is just one of the many tools that you can use to facilitate these conversations.
Communication and collaboration are at the heart of a harmonious company. 58% of people think they have a good idea of what their teammates work on, but this rises dramatically to 88% when they use a project management tool to talk to both clients and coworkers.
An intranet can be this central hub you need to encourage employees to stay connected and share updates easily. When properly optimized and aligned with the needs of your company, an intranet can take many forms. Let’s explore some of the examples an intranet solution can present.
What is an intranet?
Let’s start by explaining what a corporate intranet actually is. Intranet software should act as the home base for your workforce. This can take a variety of different forms; some might use it for company culture and employee engagement, while others want it to be the knowledge repository that everyone adds to and refers to.
From here, you can connect employees with peers, partners, and customers as needed. It should be the one-stop shop for everything someone might want to know about your organization.
What can an intranet do?
An intranet is truly what you make of it. When considering intranet adoption for your staff, you need to think about the ways in which you wish to use it. An intranet can be a one-stop shop for anything and everything, or it can be tailored to something more precise. Let’s examine some of the most common and practical uses of an intranet solution.
Centralized communication hub
One of the primary uses of a company intranet is as a centralized communication hub for all employees. Internal communications need to stay consistent. When they emerge from one place, they are easier for everyone to track, for both those tailoring and sending out the internal communications and those receiving them.
Studies show that 86% of employees and executives cite a lack of effective communication and collaboration as one of the main causes of failure in the workplace. Intranet software gives your comms team the power to create, distribute, and analyze all communication channels like never before. Reach every employee and mobilize your workforce to deliver their best.
One of our clients, business analytics provider Clearify needed a way to pass on information to customers easily. Rather than just repeatedly sending out the same information over and over, they were looking for a system that allowed them to hold all necessary responses in one place. Axero’s platform gave them the ticketing and knowledge management they needed for clear and easy communication with customers and one another, no matter the question at hand.
Team collaboration
Leading on from communication channels, we have team collaboration. External or internal communications can sometimes sit at the top level and funnel down; they have little to do with individuals on a team-to-team basis. A company intranet can provide individual hubs for teams, allowing them to integrate other collaboration tools and create a way of working that truly balances everyone’s strengths and weaknesses.
If you want to enhance employee engagement, whether this is across individual teams or your entire company, you have to give them a platform to do so. Studies show that 63% of people say they have personally wasted time as a result of communication issues in their workplace, and 59% of people have missed messages as a result of office communication issues. Give teams their own space within your modern intranet solution so that they can easily collaborate and communicate no matter where they are.
Axero client ARCO needed a solution that matched a range of needs, including but not limited to managing centralized communication. Their aim in setting up a new intranet was to ensure that it was a people-centric platform that gave their employees a hub that brought everyone together in one place. No matter the team they work with, everyone can come together and receive content that keeps everyone aligned and engaged.
Knowledge management
An intranet isn’t just a place to share company news and updates. It can also be a repository for all the information necessary to run a department. In larger companies with a lot of internal data, there is always the risk of valuable knowledge becoming siloed among teams, leading to frustration and disengagement as employees have to hunt out every lost bit of information they need.
From a company intranet homepage, users need to be able to easily navigate to any bit of information they need to know. Good document management practices and AI-supported search functionality mean that even employees at the start of their onboarding process should have no trouble navigating the intranet.
Cybersecurity experts Coro were struggling with internal silos and vital information becoming buried under rapid expansion. They chose Axero’s intranet software for our mobile accessibility, intuitivity, and easy integrations. Once fully launched and rolled out, Coro’s sales team saw a 40% increase in performance, attributed to the ease of access of their new document management system.
Workplace culture
A workplace is only as good as the people who want to work there. Boosting employee engagement is not an easy task, but it can be an incredibly important one in establishing the organization as a great place to work. A balanced intranet homepage design may feature more than just company news and important links; it can also share information about colleagues and provide social updates.
According to Gallup, only 31% of employees are currently engaged, a 10-year low. A good intranet page and a keen internal communications manager to populate it will not fix everything, but can make a real difference in laying connections and making people want to come to work and engage with their colleagues. Work to bridge communication gaps and create an environment that employees actually want to be in.
Another of Axero’s clients, Ohio Valley Bank, has over 300 staff working across 18 offices. They wanted to make sure their workplace remained community-first, ready to serve the rural areas they work in, and they turned to Axero to create a digital workplace culture that reflected that. With our help, they created a platform that put employee communication front and center, building an internal sense of community and their own internal social media platform to help everyone stay connected.
What should you include in your company intranet?
Thanks to the real-world examples from our customers, you will now hopefully have more of an idea as to what belongs on your company intranet. The beauty of an intranet platform like Axero is that it can take any shape or form you need. If you want space for an employee directory and company calendar to really promote those social aspects, you can have it. If you want tight document management built around an entire digital workplace, that can also be built for you.
However, there are a few key services and tools you should include in an intranet platform. They will include:
A homepage
The intranet homepage is one of the most important areas in the entire system. It is the first place employees see, the place where you share everything from company-wide news to important links to other pages. Though there are numerous company intranet examples dictating what the intranet might be used for, none of it can take place without a robust homepage at the heart of everything.
Employee directory
The employee directory lists information about every worker from the CEO down to the newest intern. At its absolute basic, it should have details like their name, email address, and working hours or location. If you want to inject a little more personality, you could also include custom fields like pet names or favorite songs.
Templates and procedures
Though every team may have their own preferred ways of working, there should be some set procedures and intranet templates that are the same company-wide. These also need to be easily accessible so that everyone can find them, regardless of the department they work in. What better place to put them than your intranet? Create a one-stop hub for all internal knowledge in your organization so nothing is able to slip through the cracks and get lost between messages.
Team portals
As well as the company-wide intranet that all employees have access to, it might be beneficial to give individual teams their own sub-sections where they can communicate and work efficiently. These can help to build cultures within your cultures and can help to strengthen interpersonal relationships between colleagues.
Benefits and payroll
Some important pieces of information should always be accessible to employees. Portals for payroll and benefits, like health insurance or PTO requests, should be easy to locate for all intranet users. In building an open and honest platform for employees to come together, information such as this needs to be on offer for all.
Create your ideal intranet with Axero
An intranet solution can be as stripped back or as complicated as you need it to be. Our examples above are truly just the tip of the iceberg. With the right software partner at your side, you should be able to build a solution from the ground up that perfectly meets the exact needs of everyone in your organization.
Remember, they can be as fun or as information-driven as you like. Whether you have an existing intranet solution that just isn’t working out, or you need to start one from scratch, your employees deserve an online hub that delivers the support they need to complete their jobs at full efficiency.
Ready to get started building your intranet? Book a demo with Axero today, and get ready to find out how we can transform your approach to online collaboration and knowledge management.
info@axerosolutions.com
1-855-AXERO-55
