Thanks to the advancements in technology, today's businesses are using a wealth of different tools to communicate within their organisation. Across all these tools, Company Intranets still remain one of the most popular and beneficial platforms for businesses to improve communication within their workplace, helping to build successful relationships between employees, management and office. Intranets provide businesses with a more efficient communications tool that stores all the assets and information users need to work more effectively, helping to boost the productivity with the workplace.
Your intranet platform can continue to grow by integrating new technologies and apps that focus on providing the best user experience. Besides, the benefits of collaboration and effective engagement, your intranet serves as a great platform for enhancing company-wide communication, both from the top down and the bottom up.
Here we look at some of the benefits of improving your internal communications using your intranet platform and how it can be used to get the best results.
Top five ways your company intranet can help boost your internal communications:
1. Improve Employee Engagement It’s essential for your employees to have a sense of belonging within your organisation, and for them to be clear about their goals and company expectations. Your Company Intranet can be a vital tool in boosting employee engagement, not just by sharing company news and updates in a more effective manner, but by providing a more personal, employee-focused experience through your company communications. Instead of delivering dry company updates and talking at your employees, use your company intranet to celebrate employee successes and providing them with a space to participate in your company’s communications - doing so will ensure your employees are more engaged with your comms output, and will help your staff to feel like it’s truly their intranet.
2. Encourage Multi Way Communication Your Intranet serves as an excellent medium for gathering valuable feedback from your employees on important issues, business topics, and even employee satisfaction. Staff surveys and polls are a great way to engage your users and help give you valuable insights into employee morale, which is critical to the success of every organization. From serious company surveys to fun little quizzes, providing your employees with a space to participate in your comms is crucial, while social tools such as Liking and Commenting will help increase your employee engagement levels even further.
Ensure your employees know that their voice is being heard and their opinion is valued. Many organisation use their company intranet as a safe, open space where staff can make suggestions that could improve the office environment, staff morale and even company processes. Some organisations have even introduced an ‘Ask the CEO a Question’ initiative, allowing employees to contribute and gain feedback on their suggestions - ensuring a two way communication between management and employees, and a satisfaction to know that their voice is being heard. By providing a safe, open space for multi-way communications is one of the key steps in ensuring that your employees actively engage with and value your company’s internal communications.
3. Promotes Company Culture The culture of your company can have a huge impact on how your organisation is viewed by your internal employees and external customers. Companies that are Intranet-centric have been able to build closer relationships with their employees and customers, by establishing a unique company culture that is much more immersive and engaging than more traditional forms of communication. The Intranet news channel has become a powerful platform for sharing announcements that can provide every organization with its own brand culture and promote them within the organization. Use your intranet news to showcase the great work that your employees are doing - whether that’s in the office or outside. From ‘Employee of the Month’ news stories, to social or charity events outside of work, or showcasing great customer feedback, make sure the news feed on your company intranet truly reflects your employees and customers as people. By personalising your news feed and making it more social, you are guaranteed to have a higher engagement rate than if you merely showcased industry news. Remember - management should never use your company intranet to preach to staff - instead your intranet newsfeed should showcase stories from across the levels of the organisation to be more representative of your company culture.
4. Improves Connectivity and Networking Social Intranets can provide your business with an effective way for your employees, departments and offices to communicate and collaborate within a secure digital workplace. Your company intranet helps create an environment where employees, irrespective of their job, function, role or geographical location, can form relationships with each other, share knowledge and collaborate on projects without any restrictions. When your employees feel more connected to each other, they feel more connected with their jobs and the organisation, which not only makes them more efficient, but it also helps to increase employee retention rates and ensure your employees are more switched on with your company’s ethos and internal comms.
5. Train and Motivate Employees to Perform Better Many organizations are using different innovative ways for training and motivating their employees such as ‘gamification’, which can help in creating healthy competition and collaboration amongst your employees. Gamification is essentially pulls on the influence of online gaming by introducing competitive elements and rewards into your different business activities to help encourage user engagement and drive productivity. Intranets are a fantastic way to drive this competitive motivation amongst your employees, providing a centralised location to implement these gaming mechanisms and track the progress of employees. Whether you are running a point scoring systems, leader or, achievement boards, and even ‘levelling-up’ perk opportunities the more targets you hit, all of these gaming elements really help to showcase employee engagement and drive productivity in your digital workplace. Your intranet is a fantastic way to showcase employee performance, and by having a competitive ‘leaderboard’ that continually changes will help encourage your employees to stay engaged with your intranet comms.
Your Intranet provides your business with a single point of access for all the employees within your organisation, which means it plays a vital role in improving internal communication. Whether it is through internal storytelling, sharing company news or updates, distributing company policies and procedures or sharing knowledge and celebrating each other’s successes, always remember to keep your employees at the heart of your internal communications.
Find out how Company Intranets can transform your internal comms.
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