A key goal of intranets today is to streamline company processes to ensure efficiency of the workforce. This is true regardless of where an employee is working from, whether it be in the office, at home or on the frontline. Features implemented include responsive design, comprehensive search, document management and social intranet tools to boost collaboration and engagement among users.
Serving organisations and businesses with a variety of job roles, these intranet features are set based on needs and specifications of the users.
One of the rising components of intranets is its social side. It is considered best practice to include social intranet tools such as blogging, forums, wikis, corporate directories, social feeds, Q&A sections and team workspaces. More and more businesses are turning to intranet social media platforms to foster a positive, open workplace - no matter whether your team is sharing an office space or working remotely.
Interested in how to develop or use a social intranet to improve collaboration and engagement? We’ve summarised the different intranet tools that best employ the diverse structure of this modern platform.
Employees, Collaboration and Engagement
Engagement and productivity are directly related when it comes to intranets. It’s one of the reasons why many organisation's today focus on finding effective ways to improve collaboration and engagement with their employees. It is said that collaborative and engaged workers exhibit enthusiasm, inspiration, confidence and empowerment. This in turn, leads to increased profitability.
Disengagement not only affects ROI; it also contributes to employees feeling under-appreciated in the company, leading to high staff turnover rates.
Traditional intranets tried remedying these problems but they failed at certain levels. Old intranets were more focused on information handling than the importance of collaboration within the workplace, however thanks to today’s technology, modern intranets are considered the foundation of employee engagement platforms, with in-built features to foster a shared connection and purpose.
For more information on driving collaboration within your workplace, read our online collaboration guide.
How Intranet Social Tools Help
The variety of social intranet tools can overwhelm organisations. What was once a lofty dream among developers and organisations has now become reality; about half of intranets now have some form of social integration. Social tools have become an avenue for business communication and marketing, be it external or internal. Social media is a great way to inspire employee support and advocacy.
Modern employees now firmly believe that their companies should do more to become social enterprises. This, they believe, will help contribute to overall employee satisfaction. Social enterprise and internal communication is believed to help users complete their tasks efficiently. It can also help build skilled project teams and work to clarify role and task identification.
Many users consider the prime function of an intranet to be connecting and sharing. Intranet social media is believed to give the following benefit based on employee surveys:
- Sharing of ideas
- Connecting with more people
- Fostering a sense of belonging
- Fostering employee engagement
- Reducing email
- Increasing user generated content
- Reducing meetings
- Providing better resources
- Increasing productivity and employee satisfaction
Among the many social intranet tools, most experts choose the following as their top tools since they help establish the above mentioned benefits of intranet:
Blogging: This is one of the widely sought features of intranet social media. Most employees find it beneficial to publish their own content which can be localised based on the department an employee is in and be moderated by people within the department. The blogs contribute to the company wiki and internal information source. Although the Internet can offer a wide array of information, the establishment of blogging in intranets helps localise and personalise the content and address the needs of the searcher from within the company.
Forums: A threaded discussion tool or forum tool in an intranet social media platform which helps in employee engagement. Aside from blogging, this also helps employees find answers on specific topics and even prods them to speak up and offer their own insight on the matter. This, for example, may be used by IT department employees to share technology updates or by Project Managers to give an overall view of their current projects.
Wikis: This knowledge-based tool for social intranet offers employees the chance to edit team documents. Together with search functionality, the wiki tool will allow users share their knowledge while assisting in current queries within the organisation.
Corporate directories: By enabling an 'expertise finder', a social intranet tool, you can search and identify employees within the company and access details about their expertise. Employees get the chance to create profiles and include their skills as well as other information. To further enhance the feature, social tagging and ranking may be included in the social tools. Tagging helps in keyword search and improves the influence of a search result. The better the credentials, the better the profile ranks in searches. A good intranet social platform will enable you to integrate with other identity management systems such as Active Directory. When new employees are added to Active Directory and tagged in groups, they can then be automatically added to the intranet in the equivalent group. This means new employees have access to intranet with the right access level and personalisation set up, from day one.
Social feeds: Social feeds are one of the key features of intranet social media. Social feeds provide real-time updates and help establish internal communication momentum, as well as providing visibility of employee skills. Intranets generally have built in tools for employees to use. However, organisations often use third party platforms such as Microsoft Yammer for their social updates. These can be embedded into intranets. For example, if you have a section on your website for HR tasks, you can embed a Yammer thread focused on the topic of HR on a page in this section. This makes the thread contextually relevant.
Q&A section: The Q&A module is one of the rising features in many social intranets. Let’s discuss it in detail below.
Q&A Module as an Intranet Social Tool for Businesses
The Q&A tool harnesses the power of crowdsourcing and puts it right in the intranet of an organisation. It provides the following capabilities:
- Ask questions. Within the intranet, users may ask their questions and wait for answers from the community. This question may be asked if the above features do not already provide an answer to the question.
- View unanswered questions. This feature is for those who may have an answer to a question. Users who are in the mood to answer may go to this section and give the best responses they have.
- Vote for best answers. This helps in establishing the best and most useful answer based on user opinions. This helps reduce spamming and trolling while rewarding those who dutifully answer with helpful responses.
- Self-service environment. Instead of relying on direct contact with concerned people, Q&A intranet users may opt for the self-service environment. They pose a question, look for their own answers and act upon their concerns. This rising tool is now a main feature among big companies like Apple and eBay.
Q&A sections on websites help potential customers answer their pre-buying questions about a product. This feature focuses heavily on productivity, saving the searcher valuable time. It is these web facing benefits that are now being brought within the organisation and feature on their intranets so that employees can save time searching for answers and thus increase productivity. Giving employees the answers to their questions right away helps reduce frustration and increases satisfaction with the intranet.
Key Takeaways
We have always known intranets help improve company communication. Now that social intranet tools have been integrated by many companies, there’s no doubt intranets are continuing to become more useful and increasingly important in business.
The key things to remember:
- Intranets are on the rise. They are proven to increase engagement and internal communication for organisations
- Better engagement means better productivity and increases in ROI
- The effectiveness of an intranet is further upheld by its social intranet functionality
- Social intranets are shown to increase collaboration
- One of the key features of social intranets is the Q&A module which aims to answer employee queries through peer answered questions.
If you are planning to use social media tools for collaboration and engagement in your intranet, you're on the right path. Keep these key takeaways in mind when developing and using your new social intranet tools and you’ll experience a boost in employee engagement, collaboration, company productivity and intranet ROI
For further resources on how to successfully integrate new features in your intranet, check out our blog post on the
10 Digital Workplace Trends Set to Transform Productivity.
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