Personalize your Intranet

Intranet is your private space to allows you to communicate, collaborate and share information effectively and efficiently. But is it just a space to communicate, collaborate and share information? Well no. A company Intranet is the representation of what company is, what is its attitude towards the issues or challenges. It is very much like the choosing the infrastructure and color for your organization. You can either go for a cooling and soothing green color or an aggressive and power hungry red color or any other just any color which you think represents your motto. Not just the designing part, an employee should feel part of something big, and for that they should understand the company policies and work culture. Which can be easily done on such a platform.

Update Content

Keep on Updating!!!
As Bill Gates said in 90s “Content is King”, it is still true.
May it be for a website which is competing with other on a broad spectrum or an internal intranet site.
If there aren’t any updates on the intranet, the employees will slowly start losing interest on the platform and would miss some important updates. On the Contrary, if the content is being updated on regular intervals, employee is more likely to check for those updates. From a psychological perspective, employees are likely to interact more if they are somehow benefited by it. Therefore, if the employees are rewarded certain points for their engagement, they likely to be more motivated to engaged within the content this is often called positive reinforcement.

Digitally connect with remote employees

Intranet is a tool to digitally connect with the employees, its features like news, blog post and messaging allows user to connect with the employees on various levels. This very thing can be used to connect with employees located in remote locations and assign them with task and projects that require their contribution. It can also be used to track the status of the task or project that has been assigned to them by the employer.

Add Calendars and Events

If your company constantly holds variety of events and seminar, then intranet can be a great platform.
Company can display all the events and seminar and the employees can plan their schedule accordingly.

Keep your employees engaged

Engaged and motivated employee are the biggest asset to the company.
If you want your employees to be engaged and motivated you need to post content that is engaging and motivating.
CEO Blog post, published articles about company, sales success articles, IT announcements, etc are few of the examples of content that employees can interact with and react to it with a like or dislike or a comment about their views and opinions on the post. Company can conduct an online survey via polls and get employees opinion on various topics to keep the employee engaged.

Create call to action

Engagement is not only about reacting to the post and giving feedback or filling form or applying for a new position.
Some other engaging calls to actions are welcoming a new hire, subscribing to a new training program, congratulating someone else’s achievements, giving feedback on new product releases, inviting colleagues to attend webinars or special events, etc.

Sitemap

A sitemap sets the infrastructure of the website. It reflects the organizational structure of the business with each department having their own specific navigation home page followed by a series of sub-pages. Intranet is a large archive of content and rich media files to navigate through. Many at times it happens that the needed information is not readily available to the employees. A Sitemap is essentially a file where you could provide information about the pages, videos, and other files of your site, and the relationships amongst them. A sitemap also offers important information about the pages like when the page was last rationalized, how frequently the page is upgraded, and any alternate language versions of a page. Not just pages, but site map can be used to store data about videos and images as to their category, type, licence and running time (for video).

Two-way participation

Engagement is a collaborative process, which basically means that there should be input from both the ends.
It means that the employee as well as employer should collaborate in the process of having a lively feed on the intranet dashboard. If the responsibility of updating feed falls on just one entity generally an HR personnel, then it drastically limits the variety in content. If only one entity is supposed to update the intranet post and others only read and react, then it’s not a collaborative and interactive platform. To have an interactive and collaborative platform employee should be able to contribute relevant content on the intranet as well. After all, it’s Company intranet and they ought to have a voice.

Compatible on different devices

Every user may use different devices some may use laptops some may use a tablet or a mobile device. Your Intranet platform should be compatible with all the devices and ensure that the navigation area fits the screen for both landscape and portrait viewing for maximum engagement.

Simplify

Simplicity is the key to success.
Keep your designs simple. Don’t overload your Intranet with Java, multimedia, and other memory hogs. Intranet is essentially a digital workspace for employees, flashy animations and media-rich pages would impact the page load speed and would also make it quite difficult for the employees to navigate the intranet and find the information that they want. Intranet pages should be downloaded quickly and be designed for those users with the slowest access speeds.

Conclusion

The key to having best intranet practice is to manage the above tactics during the planning phase prior to launching a new or redesigned intranet. In planning phases stakeholders and users should document their requirements to help build a digital workspace for their company.