From SharePoint to Mobile Apps, New Intranet Tools Give Employees the Info they Need, When and Where They Need It
When you mention corporate intranets, don’t be surprised if you see an eye roll or two. For many employees, traditional intranets were unrolled to great corporate fanfare, only to become a clunky, limiting, time suck of a user experience. But today’s modern intranets have solved that problem, giving organizations plug-and-play platforms for customizing and distributing employee news and resources. If you’re considering a corporate intranet for your company, you’ll find new features and functionalities that have totally changed the game.
What Is A Modern Intranet, and What Makes It Different?
The traditional intranets of yore tended to be available only on an employee desktop, and have limited opportunities for customization, direct messaging or more. As a result, not enough information was centralized and available to employees.
Workers who don’t sit at desks—like warehouse, retail or hospital workers, for instance—often didn’t have access to company information at all. Information that an employee might need, like a form for making vacation requests, might be buried on a back page. After wasting precious time sifting through information that was irrelevant to their teams, most employees just stopped using the intranet, at all.
The legacy of those failures lives on. According to the latest stats from Social Chorus, 78 percent of employees are using six or more tools simply to talk to each other and get important company news. And that’s a stat 74 percent of IT leaders say is way too high.
A modern intranet design provides one centralized platform for company news and resources. These intranets are mobile-enabled, and viewable on any kind of device. And they provide customization options that make each employee’s intranet feed relevant to themselves and their team.
What Features Can You Expect From a Modern Intranet?
A true, modern intranet design provides more than just a pretty interface. It can be an engine for driving employee productivity, inclusiveness, and engagement. Companies like Social Chorus and Staff Base provide robust tools that play nicely with modern full cloud and hybrid work systems, offering a whole host of features such as:
Campaign automation—Need to send out a survey to a select group, or tailor internal stories to just one team? You can do that with most modern intranet systems.
Mobile connectivity—Send out emergency alerts via text, direct links to all-hands CEO messaging, and more. And all intranet content can be read on an employee’s phone or tablet, increasing the likelihood of engagement.
Decentralized Publishing—While most companies will always have centralized communications teams that publish corporate news, the decentralized functions allow for employees from engineering to post a blog about the new product release, IT to send out messages about the latest security patch, or photos from the charity event at one of the company’s locations to be posted. This removes bottlenecks to communication, and increases the amount of information available exponentially.
Customization—Companies still have the ability to decide what news is mandatory for all employees. But on the employee level, modern intranet design allows them to configure the information they want. They can prioritize certain feeds, like those from their department or location, and configure forms they often need where they can easily find them.
Surveys—Whether you’re planning a lengthy survey or a short, one-question quiz, companies wanting to know what their employees think on a subject simply have to ask. Surveys can be delivered on desktop and mobile, and results come complete with report-worthy pie charts.
Tracking—From your admin panel, you’ll be able to see exactly how many employees read or interacted with your posts, and what types of information is trending in popularity. If you need to make a quick pivot, you can. You’ll have all the information you need to make the right call.
It’s important to note that Microsoft SharePoint offers many of these features too. It’s an enormously powerful tool that also interacts seamlessly with other Microsoft products like Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Windows 365 products.
Modern Intranets: The Benefits
Sure all the features a modern intranet can bring your organization are great. But what will the real benefits be? Here at Integris, we help clients set up these new intranet platforms all the time. In our experience, whether companies are using Microsoft SharePoint or other intranet platforms, they drive corporate goals, including:
Saving Costs: Intranets eliminate the need for costly in-person company events. You’ll never need to waste time printing publications, sending out emails that don’t get read, or fretting over newsletters again.
Saving Time: Eliminate news bottlenecks and communicate in real-time, all the time, on whatever device employees use most.
Reduce Risks and Improve Compliance: With a modern intranet design like Microsoft SharePoint, employees can find any document they need, teams can communicate fluidly and HR/Payroll forms are easily found. And this kind of transparency reduces errors.
Get Feedback in Real Time: Ask a quick question, get a quick answer. Intranets give you the information you need to move on decisions.
Engage Remote and Hybrid Workers: As companies decentralize and more workers work from home, Intranets become the keeper of employee culture, and a company “campfire” that improves team morale and cohesion.
Want a Modern Intranet Design for Your Company? Try These Resources.
If you’re wanting to do your homework on Intranet options, Integris has you covered. Check out our recent blogs on the topic, including our recent FAQ about working remotely with Microsoft Teams, our discussion of new technology and its impact on the modern workplace, and our advice for using Microsoft Teams for remote workers.
Of course, the quickest way to get a modern intranet going at your organization is to call a quality managed service IT provider like Integris. Want to know more about how to shop for the right managed service provider for you? Download our comprehensive IT Buyer’s Guide, free!
