"It's all there, on your intranet"
Intranet: What is it?
Everyone loves a good town square or coffee shop, right? It's where you go to meet up, share information and discuss ideas. Your intranet is like that—a place for people to get together, collaborate and get things done.
A survey of organizations that implemented social intranets found that they had a 20% increase in employee satisfaction and an 87% increase in employee retention. (Deloitte)
An intranet helps improve employee efficiency by providing them with a space and the resources to work together as a team. It also allows them to connect with each other, share ideas, collaborate and even feedback their views and opinions to management. There are so many benefits to having an intranet in your business, we thought we'd share them with you!
Here are 20 benefits of an intranet for your business:
1. A Source of Truth To Boost Organization-Wide Clarity
If you're looking for a way to increase the productivity of your employees, look no further than role clarity.
By providing clarity around six basic questions, an intranet can improve your organizational clarity, providing your employees with a clear vision of their role and how to perform it...with the help of their trusty intranet resources!
The Who: who is responsible for what?
The What: what are the objectives and goals of my work?
The When: when will this project be done, or when's my next training event?
The Where: where do I find information to complete my tasks or projects? If I have a problem or question, where should I go to find the answer?
The Why: why should I care about these things? Why is this important to me and the company as a whole?
The How: how do I get started on my task or project?
2. Improve Partner Relationships and Team Collaboration
How do you make sure your partners are getting the content they need?
You don't want to overwhelm them with information, but you also need to make sure that they're not missing out on anything. There's a balance between giving too much, and not giving enough. Ralph Lauren found that balance by using The Hub as a partner collaboration tool.
The Hub enabled Ralph Lauren to upload and distribute content to their franchisees, track downloads and usage, and send reminders to partners who haven't downloaded the content yet. As a result, they saw which partners were accessing content and which weren't — and the automated reminders helped to boost engagement and drive a 34% increase in partners accessing marketing content. All of this has added up to better partner and team collaboration for Ralph Lauren.
3. Intranets Make Internal Communication Easier
A modern intranet makes it easier for teams to communicate, share knowledge and stay in touch with each other, no matter where they are in the world.
Teams can have open discussions in group forums, employees can share knowledge, and managers can stay in touch with employees. Thus no one loses touch with what is happening in the workplace, and departments can share resources and updates on projects.
Best of all, intranets make internal comms a two-way street. Anyone can give their opinion on a poll or survey, share information and news articles, and anyone can comment and provide feedback on the content you share as an organisation.
Intranets streamline communication by bringing everyone together. Intranet gives individuals a voice that's heard within your organisation, and advances their own knowledge about your company.
4. Improve Employee Engagement And Happiness
A well-designed company intranet can increase the level of reward for employees. When it comes to keeping employees happy, there's one thing you can't ignore: Recognition.
Recognising individual employees and their achievements is an essential part of the employee experience platforms, and it contributes heavily to employee satisfaction, engagement and retention. Research shows that recognition or reward doesn't have to be expressed in money, or given in excessive amounts, (it can be a simple 'thank you'), but it should be done regularly.
Celebrate the success stories of your employees in news articles, share kudos between team members, and shout out to a job well done. Even recognise and support employee activities outside of your workplace, such as charity events. Whether its praise from management, or a colleague giving them a pat on the back, your intranet provides you with the tools to deliver real value and recognition to your employees.
5. Decrease Staff Turnover Rate
Here's a fact: if your company's workforce isn't happy, they're going to leave.
And the numbers don't lie—on average, every year, a company will experience 18% turnover in its workforce. A business can expect on average to lose 6% of its staff. And according to some studies, up to 80% of new hires fail within 18 months!
Why is that? Well, a lot of it comes down to management styles and corporate culture. If you're not providing employees with the tools they need to succeed, or if you aren't listening to their feedback and concerns, they'll feel disengaged and unsatisfied with their jobs. That's why they leave.
But what if there was a way for businesses to keep their best workers around and their most talented engaged—and avoid losing them altogether?
Well, there is! It's called Social Intranet Software. An easy-to-use intranet can help the average employee collaborate better and work smarter. No more frustration because they can't find the information they need - it's now all there at their fingertips. Plus, it also helps you as an organization communicate better with your employees, by delivering the right internal comms to the right people, all the while promoting two-way communications. And when staff are happy and feel informed, they stay.
It's just like Joey says - it's all about having, and giving, and sharing and receiving!
6. An Improved Level Of Connectivity
This is one of the top advantages of intranets. Better connectivity is a key factor and perhaps the biggest benefit of a social intranet. The more employees can collaborate with their colleagues and connect to the tools they need to do their jobs, the more productive they can be. Which is a win-win scenario for everyone.
That's why we at the Hub believe in 'The Power of Together' - bringing people, resources and technology together within one digital workplace that becomes the hub of connectivity.
7. Improve Information Management
In the Information Age, employees want company resources all in one place, accessible from any device, and easy to find. A modern, responsive company intranet like Hub, puts knowledge management front and centre. We make sure your employees have all the information they need at their fingertips, so your intranet is accessible anywhere, on any device.
Traditional intranets and even some intranet apps, offer reduced information management on mobile. Whereas the Hub, gives you the same full level of access to your intranet content on mobile as you get on desktop, meaning you can easily access and manage information on-the-go. From editing pages, to changing settings, and accessing management reports, the Hub puts you in full control of the information on your intranet, no matter where you are.
8. Improve Human Resources Management
When you link your Human Resources Department to a social intranet, you can completely overhaul your internal recruitment and onboarding processes. When new people join your organization, your intranet is the perfect place to immediately get them up to speed with all of their information needs. HR employee intranets like Hub, allow you to create dedicated resource areas specifically for the onboarding of new employees. Conduct training assessments, get them up to speed with your policies and procedures, and even introduce them to the rest of the company through automated New Starter Announcements.
Your employee intranet isn't just about managing the paperwork side of HR, but also the people side. A HR-focused intranet allows you to better monitor the mental wellbeing of your workforce, by gathering feedback through surveys and polls. Human-centric HR Managers embrace the huge benefits a social intranet boasts for improving employee management and wellbeing.
9. Streamline Your Project Management
Projects often involve multiple people working on various parts of a project or have different roles and responsibilities. Keeping track of all these disparate tasks can be difficult, especially if they are handled by different people in separate locations.
Dedicated project management systems can help you keep a good overview of your project and all its processes. But so can a team intranet.
When everyone in your organization has access to the same resources, and can share, comment and collaborate on content in a shared group space, it makes it easy for project teams to see what's been done and what still needs doing. Team intranets like Hub provide dedicated Task Management tools, allowing project managers to assign and track the progress of tasks to other project co-workers, so it's easy to see where progress is being made, as well as any problems that arise along the way.
10. Analyze Your Internal Communication's Effectiveness
60% of companies don’t have a long-term strategy for their internal communications. (Workforce) That's a pity because, with an intranet, you can easily track your internal communications, to see what comms are working and engaging staff, and which aren't.
With intranet analytics, you can easily see how your internal comms are performing. You'll get all the key metrics, including employee usage and behavior, top-performing content by views, likes or comments, and much more. You'll even be able to track what internal comms alerts your employees are subscribed to, so you can ensure the right people are receiving notifications about important company news.
This is all critical information for measuring the effectiveness of your internal communications.
11. Streamline & Automate Employee Onboarding
The best way to save time is to automate it.
Modern employee intranets like Hub, allow you to plug your HR system directly into your intranet. This means new employees get their intranet profile automatically created and a welcome email sent, as soon as they are added to your HR system - saving you time having to set them up on two different systems.
With an intranet that supports smart forms and workflows, you can automate a ton of onboarding processes and more. From content management and approval, IT support ticketing, time off requests, expense reports, ideation, and more.
Hub's forms even have a smart feature that automatically know who an employee's line manager is. So even if an employee changes departments or roles, the Hub always sends form submissions to their correct line manager, without you having to manually update anything.
12. Improve Communications
When people work in the office, they usually spend their days near their colleagues, meaning communication is simple and effortless. But what about when you work remotely? Or what if your digital workplace isn't adapted to communicating online?
A modern intranet can help fill this void, allowing users to stay in touch with their colleagues by offering a wide variety of online communication tools.
An example of this is the employee directory, which allows you to quickly find your colleagues, and their user profile shows multiple ways to get in touch with someone. As an intranet on the Google Cloud Platform, The Hub can integrate with all other teams' communications platforms!
13. Secure File Sharing And Document Management
Working from home is great. But it can sometimes be tough to stay organized and gain access to the files you need to do your job.
If you're working with confidential or sensitive data, it's crucial that you have easy secure access to all your documents, whether you're in the office or on the go. And if you're managing a team of remote employees, it's even more important to keep everyone on the same page with the same information.
The solution? A modern intranet system! Intranets like Hub, provide employees with one source of truth - a knowledge management system where they can easily access information, or upload and download files from anywhere, any time, on any device.
Version control, audit trails and content ownership features, all make managing your files and information effortless. Plus easy search tools make finding the right information quicker.
If you use cloud drives like Sharepoint, OneDrive or GDrive, then you can plug those into your intranet too, so it becomes a one-stop-shop information resource.
14. Improves Company Culture
Your intranet is your company's heartbeat. It's the place where the pulse of your organization is felt most strongly, and it can be a great way to get everyone on the same page. So take advantage of that!
By using your intranet to promote peer-to-peer recognition, important brand messaging, or shout about the successes of individual employees and those of your organization, you'll be able to bring together all of the people who make your company what it is, celebrate them, and create a sense of community.
And why would you do that? Well, by creating a sense of 'togetherness', you'll be able to tap into the power of that culture and use it for good — whether it's helping employees feel valued, or getting them excited about new initiatives - and a happier, well informed company is a more productive one.
15. Increase Employee Productivity
The three biggest enemies of productivity are unnecessary meetings, excessive emails, and time wasted searching for information.
If you're looking to boost your company's productivity, an intranet is the way to go.
Cloud-based Intranets provide a single source for employees to find all the information they need—even if it's not in the email inbox. Employees can access the intranet using single sign-on, so there's no need to log into multiple systems or spend time searching for files on different servers.
Information is easy to search and easy to find, so employees don't have to spend hours trying to locate what they need. This can save your company thousands of dollars each year!
16. Encourage Employee Feedback and Engagement
If you want your employees to be engaged and productive, you need to create a culture of honest and open communication in the workplace. An employee intranet is great for this because it allows both bottom-up and top-down communication.
By encouraging two-way communication with your employees, you're giving them a voice within your organisation and showing them that their opinions and feedback are valued.
Use forms, surveys and polls to drive employee engagement and interaction on your intranet, and share the feedback you receive and how it is being actioned, so they know their voices were heard.
17. Strengthen Teamwork
By using the intranet to its full potential, we can improve teamwork and efficiency. Users can do a wide variety of work: from collaborating in group forums, to approval processes on new content that require teams to work together.
The content management and engagement features on your intranet make it easy to increase efficiency in joint project activities, regardless of the size of your company or its management structure.
Plus you can plug-in tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams to add that extra layer of team chat functionality. Display chat feeds on your intranet, or share intranet updates to your workgroup channels to keep teams informed.
18. Boost Remote Work Connectedness
In the past few years, we've seen a lot of businesses move to remote or hybrid working. And while it's been great for productivity, it's also meant that employees don't get to interact as much with their colleagues, and start to feel disconnected.
Not only is that bad for morale, but it can lead to a loss of social energy—the very thing that makes us human.
Enter the social intranet...
A social intranet is an effective tool that can allow you and your team members to stay connected and share information in a fun and productive way, even when you're working from home. A social intranet brings people and technology together in one harmonious digital workplace, and makes employees feel part of a team again.
19. Quicker Answers To Questions
Successful Intranet platforms are great for FAQ areas and Q&A forums, where team members can easily get the answers and information they need. They're also great for help desks, providing smart forms that allow uses to submit questions or requests to managers, IT etc, who in turn can monitor requests, prioritize and respond.
The most important thing about modern intranet solutions is that they are a one-stop shop for team knowledge. They give teams access to all the information they need, so they can spend more time doing the work they love and less time digging through files or emailing colleagues in real time.
20. Integrated Third-Party Apps In One Place
Let's be real: you don't want to get bogged down in the details. You want to keep your eyes on the prize. You want an intranet that's going to work seamlessly with all of your other systems so you can focus on what matters—your customers, employees, and suppliers.
That's why we've made sure our platform is ready for third-party integrations from the get-go. We make it easy to connect with systems like BambooHR, Slack, Sharepoint, and more, so that you can quickly bring in all of your data into one digital workplace, without having to worry about it being siloed away from your intranet or vice versa.
In conclusion
What do you want out of your social intranet?
The answer is simple: You want something that's going to get the job done. You want it to be easy to use, and you want it to integrate seamlessly with your existing systems. You also want it to be affordable—and don't we all?
But what if we told you there was another factor that could make or break your decision? We've all heard the saying, "You get what you pay for." It's a common saying, and most of the time it's true. But for some intranets, you end up getting a good price, but limited features - meaning you have to pay extra just to get the features you really want - or you pay the earth for a trusted big name brand - (coughs, Sharepoint🙄) - but you don't get half of the engagement features you need.
But just some times, you don't have to spend a lot of money for a great solution which has all the features you need for a fixed price. And you don't have to spend a lot of time managing it either! And that's where the Hub comes in...
So if you're not sure where to start or what to do next, we've got your back. We'll help you find the right solution for your business and make sure that it's easy for everyone in your organization to use.
We believe that every company deserves access to an efficient and effective social intranet solution—whether they're large or small, whether they're just starting out or have been around for decades (or even centuries). Whatever your needs are, The Hub can help!
Would you like to know more about The Hub?
Click below and talk to one of our intranet specialists: