10 Steps To Improve Intranet Engagement
Intranets can be powerful communications tools for managing your business, but at the same time they can also provide an effective tool at driving employee engagement.
The modern social intranet has changed the traditional company intranet forever as their functionality and ease of use is no different to social networking sites, which makes collaboration much easier than before. By taking the key steps to boosting engagement through your intranet, you can foster better communication amongst your employees, helping to improve the performance and productivity of your business.
Here are our top 10 steps for driving effective intranet engagement with your employees:
1. Share Updates with Employees
The key to successful employee engagement is to keep them updated regularly by sharing company news and information. This will help in making them feel valued and give them a sense of belongingness to your company. You can share intranet news articles where staff can like and comment, helping to promote a culture of openness within your organization.
2. Use Enterprise Social Networking Tools
The achievements and efforts of your employees should always be recognized, and an intranet with social networking tools can be a good way to start this initiative. Create a dedicated Employee Achievements channel so that this recognition can be shared, and allow other employees to add their voice. By giving other employees the ability to add Employee Achievement stories, it keeps your channel fresh with staff continually giving recognition and praising employees who have improved their performance and that of the company.
3. Create Employee Suggestion Forms
Use your business intranet to create electronic ‘suggestion boxes’ so that employees can share their concerns and ideas. Your company intranet lets everyone have a voice, so let staff know that their voices are being heard and that their suggestions can contribute to the improvement of the office environment and business performance.
With the intelligent social intranets like The Hub, you can make sure your suggestion forms are seen by the right people, whether that’s all staff or a select group of individuals. By assigning a workflow, you can make sure that any received suggestions go to the right managers to progress it further, rather than stagnating in an inbox.
4. Provide Training and Personal Development Tools
You can offer assistance in personal development within your workforce, helping your employees increase their knowledge and improve their skills by using your intranet as a learning management tool. Intelligent intranet features, like the Hub’s Assessment Builder, allow you to create interactive courses within your intranet’s digital workspace, making company training exercises quicker, easier and more engaging.
5. Send Invitations for Fun Company Events
See a greater uptake on internal company events by making announcements on your intranet. Whether its charity days, bake-offs, office competitions, days out, quizzes or sweepstakes, Intranet Events allow you to not only shout about the event, but also send out invites and provide staff with the social networking tools that actively encourage engaged involvement with the event itself, with "I’m Going" "Maybe Going" and "Not Going" options. Why not add a poll or survey to your company intranet to see what events staff would be interested in, encouraging further engagement.
6. Share Intranet Calendars
There are some vital tools on a social intranet that can be extremely useful when it comes to boosting the productivity of your employees and driving engagement through useful tasks. One such tool is the intranet calendar to keep your staff aware of important meetings and events within the company — plus with intelligent features that allow you to add these intranet events to your desktop calendar (i.e. GMail, Outlook etc).
7. Encourage Employees to Contribute with Blogs
Allow your employees to take charge of content creation and share their creative ideas and suggestions by contributing to your internal comms via a blog. In this way, you may be able to identify talented individuals who may have a flair for writing. These blogs can provide a powerful platform for your employees to share and exchange ideas, and by having a staff member write the blogs, rather than management, you may find that employees are more engaged with the content.
8. Make Things Easy and Simple
The most fascinating thing about the modern intranet is that it can be tweaked and customised in different ways to build a solid social community that’s completely engaged with a site and content that’s unique to your organization. However sometimes people just stretch it too much to make their intranet far too complex, especially for navigation purposes — with a never ending sub-menus of sub-menus etc. The goal of any intranet should be to keep things simple and enticing to ensure that your employees stay engaged and not confused.
9. Organize Focus Groups
Intranets provide a great platform for communicating and sharing ideas, but it’s important that everyone gets a fair chance to express their opinions. A focus or steering group can be used to help organize regular intranet content and activities, ensuring that the information being placed on your company intranet is always relevant and useful.
10. Keep the Intranet Engaging
It pays to have a company intranet that is fun and interesting to its members to help breakup the monotony of the working schedule. Sharing humorous videos, informative articles or memes, or creating spaces devoted to hobbies and interests of your employees, can go a long way in boosting employee engagement.
Want to discover how a social intranet could help transform your workplace?
Speak to our intranet specialists to see how a Hub could help you boost employee engagement and productivity, and make your office communications seem seamless.