An effective corporate intranet supports employee productivity, helping individuals to get work done faster, meet quotas and achieve revenue targets.
Intranets work by helping management meet objectives for growth while also investing in your people, giving them time and inspiration to be more creative and innovative.
If your intranet is overdue for an overhaul, however, it’s likely to have the opposite effect, reducing efficiency and productivity. It’s hard to build a competitive company when your outdated technology requires employees to constantly reinvent the wheel.
A 7-Point Checklist For Your Corporate Intranet:
- Do you have a search engine? Having search capabilities built into your intranet is essential for knowledge sharing and knowledge retention. Search allows your users to find the content that they’ve been creating themselves as well as what others are creating and contributing to a central repository.
- Do you have a search engine that works? Your content management system might have a search engine, but is it effective? If your users can’t find anything they need, they get frustrated and are likely to give up on using that technology. Good enterprise search tools should allow users to find information they need, even when they don’t know exactly where the information is stored. Users tend to fall into two fundamentally different behaviors: browsing or searching. Browsers enjoy discovering content items as they go through project sites, document libraries and so on. But as people increasingly use search engines like Bing and Google in their personal lives, they’re looking for a similar search experience in the workplace.
- Are you still using paper forms in your organization? When employees apply for an expense reimbursement or submit a leave request, for example, do they need to gather signatures on a paper form or a PDF? In this context, PDFs often act much the same as paper forms; many are not searchable, for instance. Depending on the type of technology you have in place, your PDFs may have been made searchable by extracting the text using OCR (optical character recognition) software.Ideally, employees should be able to find your forms and policies on the corporate intranet and quickly process these types of requests without having to manually push documents around the office. This is increasingly important for today’s geographically-distributed companies, where physically gathering signatures would be extremely inefficient (if not practically impossible).
- Where do your new hires go to learn about your company culture? When you’re onboarding new employees, it’s a good idea to have a site, newsletter or other platform that communicates your company’s brand, image, culture, mission and values. The corporate intranet is often the ideal hub for your company culture, especially with a distributed workforce. Your intranet provides an efficient way to deliver corporate communications and a central location for the latest news and updates on what’s happening at the company.
- Do users have mobile access to key intranet tools? It’s becoming rare to have an entire organization under one roof where people have the ability to communicate with everyone in person. As a result, companies need to ensure that everyone has anywhere, anytime access to business documents, company culture updates and employee services. When you combine your intranet with cloud computing and mobile technology, you give employees the ability to access important documents and submit expense reimbursement forms while traveling or working remotely.
- Is it easy to find areas of expertise or previous experience within your company? To align the right people with a new client project, you need some way to track employees’ talents and experience. To create a winning proposal, a professional services firm needs the ability to leverage previous work to the best effect.While this type of experience management may be integrated with your corporate intranet, many organizations lack this capability. Instead, they tend to rely on a key individual to keep track of all that institutional knowledge. While it’s good to have a person with that talent, they’re likely to waste a lot of time fielding phone calls from others in the organization, reducing the firm’s overall productivity.
- Does your intranet facilitate collaboration across teams? Online collaboration platforms are increasingly important for employees and teams spread across multiple locations. In many companies, there hasn’t been a top-down push for standardized collaboration; as a result, teams tend to settle on the tools they prefer to use.The problem is that these probably aren’t the same tools the teams are using. As a result, the knowledge created by each team ends up in a silo, and there’s no parity or sharing of information across teams. Teams don’t know what the others are working on, leading to missed opportunities for sharing useful knowledge.
The relative severity of these problems depends on the needs of your organization and the pains you experience. For instance, your company’s greatest pain might be that employees on the road don’t have mobile access and aren’t getting enough support. For others, poor search capabilities may be holding back your employee productivity.
It’s a matter of figuring out which holes to plug with your corporate intranet in order to save money and effort. Then, start looking at your current infrastructure and see how new productivity tools could mitigate a lot of these challenges.
Learn more about creating the right corporate intranet for your organization by contacting Portal Solutions.
