Workplaces are drastically different than they were even a couple of years ago. Today, where employees work is different, how they work has evolved, and the way organizations tie it together with a culture that promotes productivity looks much different.
That’s why intranet software has become an essential tool for workplaces. Organizations need a secure platform that centralizes everything they need to connect employees anywhere, at all times. With an intranet, organizations can efficiently reach, connect, and engage teams, which boosts employee productivity and overall success.
For example, food franchises across a country can stay aligned with menu updates, and remote teams can access everything they need to work, while feeling united within their company.
In particular, research shows that implementing the right kind of business technology improves key areas, such as:
- Internal communication
- Productivity, especially for frontline and deskless workers
- Employee retention
- Customer experience and satisfaction
- Employee engagement and morale
Intranet platforms like Axero combine all the tools users need to do their jobs, while giving a digital identity to your company culture and brand. All of these factors culminate into a true digital workplace that adapts to various environments, unifying workforces and elevating how employees communicate. If you’re wondering what’s the ROI of an intranet or how your teams could benefit, here’s a list of top intranet statistics that matter for today’s work landscape.
Table of Contents
Top Company Intranet Benefits.
As the digital age surges forward, the modern workplace is continually evolving to accommodate the shifting dynamics of employee engagement, communication, and productivity. Companies are harnessing the power of intranet platforms not just for functional connectivity but also to foster a sense of unity, culture, and shared purpose among employees, no matter where they are.
- Organizations with strong online social networks are 7% more productive than those without. – Deloitte
- Organizations that installed social media tools internally found a median of 20% increase in employee satisfaction. – Deloitte
- Improved communication and collaboration through social technologies could raise the productivity of interaction workers by 20-25%. – McKinsey
- 76% of business leaders say communication/community platforms help hire talent. – IDC
Accelerates onboarding time.
Onboarding new hires takes a lot of time, resources, and money. In fact, it can cost up to $4,000 to train a new employee. You want this time and investment to count—and as a few stats show, you don’t want to allocate resources to an employee who will leave shortly after.
With a company intranet, you can streamline the entire process and start everyone on the right foot. Training materials, handbooks, videos, quizzes, and polls can live in one workspace and you can have separate training areas for specific departments.
- When intranets are effectively used, organizations can decrease employee onboarding time by an average of 20%. – Forrester
- 69% of employees surveyed at an organization were more likely to stay with their current employer for up to 3 years if they had a good onboarding experience. – SHRM
- The average voluntary turnover rate in the US is 25%. – 2021 Bureau of Labor Statistics
- 33% of respondents quit their job within the first 90 days. – Jobvite
- US businesses lose approximately $11 billion annually due to employee turnover. – Bureau of National Affairs
Improves access to information.
How can people successfully complete tasks if they can’t find the information to do their jobs? Studies show that employees are wasting too much time looking for information or people, which can be due to scattered documents in various platforms or employees receiving too much information that’s cluttering the communications they need for their specific roles.
Modern intranets can organize and segment information so that the right person receives the right data. This makes knowledge management tools one of the most important elements of a company’s strategy, and, as statistics indicate, the lack of knowledge sharing costs organizations. A lot.
- Improving employee access to information and tools could save organizations roughly $2 million a month for every 4,000 employees. – CFO
- Fortune 500 companies lose $31 billion from not sharing knowledge within their organization every year. – CFO
- The average worker spends 20% of the workweek tracking down information and people to find answers. – McKinsey
- 83% of respondents say they have problems accessing the data they need to do their jobs. – CSO Insights
- Workers spend an average of 18 minutes looking for one file. – Gartner
- 27% of employees and 38% of managers feel overwhelmed by too much information. – Gartner
Supports remote and hybrid work environments.
Research shows that more organizations are shifting towards a remote or flexible work arrangement, which is what many employees want. In fact, less than one-third (30%) of global knowledge workers are working from the office every day.
The problem is that if a company does not have the right technology to support hybrid or remote working, employees at large will not be nearly as productive as they could be. And as it stands today, many frontline workers who entered their roles already remote or away from a desk say they do not have adequate technology to support their jobs.
A company intranet is built for remote work because it houses resources and internal communication (which is accessible on different devices) and increases employee engagement by connecting workers near and far.
- Stanford conducted a study in 2020 and found remote employees were 5% more productive than in-office employees. By 2022, they found that remote workers were 9% more productive, which they correlate to workplaces better understanding remote best practices and investing in the right technology to support it. – Stanford University
- 58% of workers have the option to work from home at least one day a week, 35% have the option 5 days a week, and 87% will say yes to flexibility with workplace option. – McKinsey
- 90% of organizations have embraced a range of hybrid work models that allow employees to work remotely from off-site locations (including home) for some or much of the time—and 4 out of 5 employees who have worked in hybrid models over the past 2 years want to retain them. – McKinsey (2023 The State of Organizations)
- 77% of deskless workers want better technology to help them in communications, operations and logistics, onboarding, and training. – Emergence
- 25% of deskless workers see the lack of purpose-built technology as one of their major obstacles at work. – Skedulo
Elevates internal communications.
Without a doubt, internal communications is the number one challenge and complaint from employees. Communication is also the driver behind everything important in your workplace—employee engagement, knowledge sharing, collaboration, and employee morale.
When employees have strong communication, they are aligned with projects, up to date with company news, and can work together efficiently, which increases overall employee productivity. But when communication lags, silos build, and the number of disengaged employees increases.
- 57% of employees feel that they are not given clear directions, and 69% of managers report generally not feeling comfortable communicating with their employees. – HBR
- The cost of inadequate communication results in a wasted $4,200 per employee per year. – SHRM
- 46% of respondents believe their organization does not invest enough in communication technology. – Gallagher
- 96% of people think the businesses they deal with could improve when it comes to communication and project management. – Project.co
- 74% of employees feel they are missing out on company information and news. – Gallup
- 72% of employees do not fully understand their company’s strategy. – IBM
Provides more effective internal communication tools than email.
While the topic of email certainly falls under internal communication, we think it deserves its own stand alone section because it’s prominent in the modern day workplace and also a huge productivity barrier.
Many leaders agree that email is not the most efficient channel for many types of internal communication. When email is your number one source, employees waste time searching through cluttered inboxes, messages get missed, and, frankly, there are far more direct ways to move projects forward. Here enters a significant intranet benefit: replacing email with more effective internal communication tools.
- Employees spend 28% of the workweek managing emails. – McKinsey
- Removing email from the work environment would free between 7-8% of workers’ time for more productive tasks. – McKinsey
- The average employee spends 3.6 hours daily searching for information. – Coveo
- Employees spend, on average, at least two hours a day (25% of their work week) looking for the documents, information, or people they need to do their jobs. – The Harris Poll
- 77% of companies believe email is no longer a viable tool for effective communication. – Deloitte
Increases collaboration and employee productivity.
If your organization is made up of a group of people, your employees collaborate every day. In order to work together, people need to bounce ideas off of each other, delegate tasks, and ask questions. This is how employees innovate, complete projects, and grow within your company.
This is also why you want a clear strategy when it comes to enhancing collaboration, so teams are aligned to the tasks at hand. By leaning on a company intranet, you can bring together the actual tools teams need to work on projects and streamline project management so everyone stays on track.
- 97% of employees and executives believe a lack of alignment within a team impacts the outcome of a task or project. – Visix
- Highly aligned companies grow revenue 58% faster and are 72% more profitable than their unaligned competitors. – LSA Global
- To solve problems, employees need “the ability to leverage knowledge across the enterprise with online, seamless, integrated and intuitive collaboration tools that enhance your employees’ ability to work together.” – Deloitte
- ~40% of respondents point to complex organizational structure as a cause of inefficiency, and a similar proportion cites unclear roles and responsibilities. – McKinsey (2023 The State of Organizations)
- When Cisco implemented new collaboration tools and internal processes for their 80,000 employees, they saw:
- A 9x return on investment
- Saved $691 million in fiscal year 2008
- Increased productivity by 4.9%
Strengthens company culture and employee engagement.
Effective internal communication + a strong company culture = higher engagement, employee motivation, and productivity. When employees are engaged, they work with a purpose, which shows in numerous studies where engaged employees outperform companies with disengaged workers.
Your intranet can be a powerful tool for spreading your company goals and uniting your workforce with your company culture. Give your brand a digital identity that users can tap into from any location. By empowering a culture that people want to be a part of, you also empower a workplace where people want to stay.
- 94% of executives and 88% of employees believe a “distinct workplace culture is important to business success.” – Deloitte
- Workplaces with strong culture saw 4x increase in growth revenue. – Corporate Culture and Performance
- Profits are 23% higher with an engaged workforce. – Gallup
- 36% of employees are engaged in the workplace, and 13% are actively disengaged. – Gallup
- An actively disengaged employee costs their organization $3,400 for every $10,000 salary, or 34%. – Gallup
- Organizations with highly engaged employees achieved twice the annual net income compared to organizations with employee disengagement issues. – Kenexa
- According to the O.C. Tanner Institute, a positive culture increases engagement, performance, and retention:
- 4x more likely to have “highly engaged employees”
- 7x likely to have employees who are innovating and high performing
- 11x less likely to experience layoffs in the past 12 months
- “80% of executives rated employee experience very important (42%) or important (38%), but only 22% reported that their companies were excellent at building a differentiated employee experience.” – Deloitte
- Employees who are engaged and aligned with their workplace culture are 36% more productive. – ThriveMap
- 86% of workers who claim to experience omni-connection also reported upgrades to their company’s technology and skillsets, allowing them to work in new ways. – Accenture
Shines a light on employee recognition.
The key to improving both employee satisfaction and employee engagement is by celebrating your employees’ accomplishments and making them feel valued. In fact, employees want recognition.
Positive reinforcement is an effective motivator for higher performance and loyalty, which, in the end, increases overall engagement. To make this easy, digital workplaces (like Axero) have built-in intranet tools designed for recognition! You can automatically reward and acknowledge individual and team wins for your entire community to see, which ultimately improves employee productivity by igniting your workforce with goals to aspire to.
- 63% of employees said not being recognized for their achievements is the biggest issue with leadership. – Interact/Harris Poll
- When recognition is part of the workplace, employees are 2.2x more likely to go above and beyond. – Great Place to Work
The bottom line.
These intranet statistics underscore a compelling narrative: intranets are not just tools for connectivity, but catalysts for boosting productivity, fostering culture, and enhancing employee engagement.
Intranet platforms like Axero offer a holistic solution, ensuring that whether an employee is in an office or halfway across the world, they remain aligned with the company’s ethos and objectives.
As we peer into the future of work, the conversation shifts from the ‘why’ of intranets to the ‘how’—how can organizations optimize their digital workplaces to adapt to evolving dynamics? The time is now; not only do leaders need to recognize the profound benefits intranets bring, but they also have to continually refine their strategies in alignment with emerging trends.
