At a basic level, professional services firms produce a significant amount of content, similar to a manufacturing firm making widgets.
Just like manufacturers, professional services firms are always looking for ways to improve the efficiency and quality of production. A well-designed intranet plays a major role in driving those improvements, as well as supporting your firm’s innovation and creativity.
You might think of a corporate intranet as a hub: It’s a place employees go to find content relevant to their jobs and to communicate with teams and the larger organization.
Improving Communication
At a professional services firm, much of the work is project-based, and miscommunication is often the root cause of problems that arise in projects. That’s why these firms are using intranets, content management solutions and other tools to make communication seamless and frictionless, giving employees the tools and information they need to do their jobs.
When companies don’t have an intranet that’s facilitating internal communication, it tends to result in disengaged employees. For example, if a company is in a state of transition, many employees could be left in the dark without the right frequency and quality of communication.
If you look at what drives metrics for employee engagement, it often comes down to being informed, understanding what the company’s strategy is and knowing how they fit in. An intranet facilitates this kind of communication.
Document Management
While there are advantages to improving internal communication, the most important reason for professional services firms to build an intranet is to solve their document management problems.
Poor document management causes significant heartburn when you’re at a consulting firm or accounting firm. Without a good system in place, employees tend to develop different workarounds, which may get the job done, but come with their own inefficiencies and risks.
A related benefit of creating an intranet is that it makes it easier to give employees the basic HR documents and forms they need, making benefits information and forms readily available on the intranet.
When companies make thoughtful choices about the employee experience, perhaps by making HR information accessible through an employee’s smartphone or other mobile devices, it tends to improve employee engagement with the firm. It sends the message that the firm cares about making these tasks easy for the people who work there.
Here are four intranet must-haves for professional services firms:
- Easy-to-use publishing features: Look for a content management system that doesn’t require technical skills to publish content. It should be easy for authorized business users to publish different kinds of content to the intranet.
- Multiple channels: In order to showcase different types of media (videos, blog posts by executives, etc.), look for an intranet that supports multiple communication channels including access from mobile devices.
- Enable surveys and other feedback mechanism: This is a key capability for corporate communications, in particular.
- Social network capabilities: Newsfeeds and other social tools facilitate two-way communication, rather than unidirectional corporate announcements.
A corporate intranet is typically managed by some combination of the human resources, marketing, corporate communication and IT departments. In general, you want to avoid making the intranet IT’s sole responsibility, as this tends to result in a lack of clear governance across the rest of the organization in terms of who is maintaining content.
For professional services firms, it’s better to focus on the business side, involving human resources, operations, marketing or corporate communication in managing and maintaining the intranet at a corporate level. When you get down to the project level, the content management for project delivery is typically the responsibility of the chief operating officer, the head of professional services or whoever is in charge of the delivery of services.
If you’re ready to improve your communication and document management by creating a corporate intranet, here are the next steps you need to get started:
- Clarify your needs and pains regarding communications and content management.
- Define the problem you are trying to solve.
- Focus on the areas that stand to gain the most from an intranet solution.
Learn more about creating the right enterprise collaboration strategy for your organization by contacting Portal Solutions
