SMLWRLD

How Do You Make an Intranet Effective For Your Workplace?

Whether you have an existing intranet, or think your business needs a platform to help employees be more collaborative and engaged, a top priority is ensuring that it’s effective, and that you get a good return on investment (ROI).

Below is some helpful guidance on how to ensure your intranet platform reaches its full potential.

Understanding your employees’ needs

Gaining insight into your employees’ needs and problems within their daily work will help shape the intranet platform and determine what functionality and integrations are needed to get the best usage. The insights may uncover hurdles that many employees in businesses experience such as:

Difficulty in finding documents and assets
Employee contact information is not easily available
Lack of communication regarding internal business operations

You can gather employee insights through 1-to-1 conversations, surveys and polls.

Training for new & existing employees

Training should be provided throughout the lifecycle of your intranet, for existing users as well as new employees. Regular training on the platform’s new features and integrations can help improve productivity, as users learn more about how to use them optimally.

Training can be provided in various ways that best suits your employees’ needs, such as:

1-to-1 training
Group training
How-to guides
Product tour videos
Frequently asked questions (FAQ)

You can find examples of product tour guides and videos here, providing an overview of SMLWRLD’s intranet software platform features and functionality.

Create a personable experience

If you want your intranet to be actively used by employees, you need to ensure that your intranet platform is enjoyable to use, and that it becomes a central hub for employees’ daily work.

Besides making documents or contact information easier to find, you can improve the experience by:

Ensuring the intranet is visually pleasing and branded in company colours to give a sense of ownership.
Tailoring relevant content to each employee that they may wish to engage with.
Providing greater transparency by keeping employees up to date with business news and events.
Celebrating your colleagues’ achievements by posting thank yous and/or awards for their work.

Continuous feedback & improvements

If you want your intranet platform to reap its full potential, then getting continuous feedback from employees will be essential.

The work lives of employees are constantly evolving, and the tools they use need to evolve with them. For example, modern intranets need to be accessible from mobile devices if an employee is working off-site, something that was unheard of decades ago, with smartphones in their infancy.

Insights and feedback into the usage of a digital workplace intranet platform can be done in many ways such as: