Above everything else, intranets must help employees get their work done. A great intranet allows staff to complete simple tasks, makes key processes across your organisation more efficient and supports individuals in their role.
When an intranet facilitates everyday work then employees will visit regularly. And when individuals work more efficiently and effectively, organisations benefit. Productivity is increased, processes speed up, costs are reduced, risks are minimised and services are improved. A great intranet unlocks value across an organisation, resulting in a 'win-win-win' situation for employees and managers.
Our guide and workbook covers some of the key business processes and related tasks where intranet based solutions help employees and organisations become more productive.
This workbook outlines 12 key business processes where the intranet truly delivers. There are more, but in our experience working with customers and the wider intranet community, each one of these 12 processes has proved to be a highly successful intranet use case.
Our 12 key intranet processes include:
- Connecting people
- Accessing organisational forms, templates and documents
- Authoring, publishing and accessing content
- Producing and managing an event
- Managing projects
- Replacing paper forms and email with data-driven flows
- Facilitating learning and training
- Managing HR processes
- Onboarding new employees
- Supporting the IT helpdesk and applications
- Delivering customer service
- Supporting continuous improvement
This blog post will outline the first two processes; connecting people and accessing organisational resources.
1. Connecting People
Employee networking is perhaps one of the most important and successful tools intranets have to offer. Organisations benefit from the social, collaborative and communal aspects of an intranet platform as they facilitate strong connections between individual skilled employees, dedicated teams and different departments in a way traditional business processes or strategies cannot.
Connecting employees becomes even more important when the workforce is spread over different locations and time zones. The current trend for successful businesses to go global means intranets are more relevant than ever in fostering strong formal and informal connections between the people behind the company or brand name, no matter where they are in the world.
Here are a few examples detailing how intranet processes help establish connections within the workforce:
- Finding the right employee based on skills, location, department or role to establish contact, ask for guidance or assign to a specific task
- Providing a directory of contact details to reach staff easily
- Facilitating employee interaction through blogs, forums and comments
- Providing a dedicated online environment accessible to everyone
- Supporting teamwork and small or large group projects by providing dedicated workspaces
- Showcasing news and events to keep employees in the loop
- Extending all of these features to remote working employees or employees in the field on mobile devices
Some of the intranet tools and capabilities used to achieve these processes include:
- Staff directory
- Search functions
- Social tools: blogs, wikis, forum threads
- Community space
- Team workspaces
- Mobile accessibility
- News
- Calendar
These tools facilitate networking between employees, drive efficiency and effective processes that require connections, support teams and build communities, drive collaboration and build a connected organisational culture and stronger sense of community.
2. Accessing Organisational Resources
Every organisation has organisational forms, processes, policies and other related documentation that employees must regularly access. The intranet is the obvious place to keep this critical content, providing an essential reference point where staff can find support with operations, HR matters, project management, compliance, managing risk and other key areas. The intranet can also act as the starting point to access forms to start processes.
Having a resource intranet that stores a central collection of documents as a single point of truth drives efficiency and reduces risk. Documents are easier to find and more visible, and will also be the very latest and correct versions, avoiding any out-of-date files stored in drives and email. Sensitive documents can also be restricted to particular groups such as managers.
How intranet processes simplify document storage:
- Establishing one central point for documents, forms and content management tasks
- Ensuring the latest version of documents are available with version control and audit trails
- Making documents easily findable through labeling, tagging and search
- Giving access to the right people to manage the collection, ensuring its integrity
- Allowing only some employees to access sensitive documents
- Facilitating easy upload with custom workflows to ensure approvals for documents are obtained
- Displaying the document owner or author so employees can contact them with questions
- Archiving and automating review processes to help manage the collection
Some of the intranet tools and capabilities used to achieve these processes include:
- Document manager
- Dynamic widgets
- Workflows
- Access control
- Version control
- Tags, labels
- Search
Utilising your intranet for improved resource management will minimises risk by eliminating duplicate and out-of-date documents, increase efficiency by making key documents and forms easily findable, increase adherence to processes and procedures through one entry point, streamline management of the collection and restrict audience access to sensitive documents.
When an intranet is successful in making organisational processes easier and more efficient, employee engagement will increase and the entire workforce will benefit.
Feeling like your intranet isn't delivering its full potential for the business?
Our complimentary guide and workbook is available now. Download it today and start increasing productivity with your intranet!