What Employees forever desire from Their Intranet

Date: 14-Nov-2019

Every intranet software should be designed with unique features to suit the organization it is serving. But several themes persist so often that they feel so basic for an intranet to address.

Creative Social Intranet frequently does discovery work and surveys for intranet design and digital workplace strategies. Listed are the factors that stood out time and again and showed what desire patterns emerged:-

1. Employees are Overloaded with Information

Employees are overloaded with communications that come across multiple platforms. They often have to employ time to filter out what is relevant to them and what’s irrelevant. Thus they desire an intranet that feels applicable to them and also helps to prioritize information coming in from various sources. An employee should be able to access the most vital information for him directly on one page.

For example, mass emails as a communication channel can be quite frustrating, as expected. Employees would like more control even though user-driven personalization on intranets rarely works well. There are numerous ways to personalize your social intranet. It’s all about the information received to be relevant and useful.

2. Easily Find the Information Needed

Usually, when an employee can’t find the required information, the initial response is to blame the search engine. But look deeper and you’ll find the correct reasons to be blamed for it:

  • Unaware of where to look for information.
  • Unsure whether the information exists or not.
  • Don’t know if information can be trusted.

It will interest you to know that in many scenarios filtering is a cause of such search goof-ups.

When you search for data, you’ll find everything that’s ever been written on that keyword….thus finding a recent one will be really difficult.

Hence when there are too many results, there should be more filter options and much information should be available on the filtered results. Intranet search results need to do much more to help users refine queries since the one or two-word Google search strategies is quite less successful on the basis of enterprise data:

3. What’s Happening Locally is more important

Balanced news delivery is tough in any medium or large organization. Organizations often want to promote what’s happening at a corporate level to all their executives. In contrast, employees are usually only interested in news that is relevant to the location or department, or case they are working in, thus creating tension. For instance, if you are working in Mumbai, you don’t want to see news related to Delhi— what you find interesting may not be the same as people at your head office.

4. What tool is Supposed to be Used and When?

Many times, employees receive minimum or very little training and support for using intranet tools, including cultural aspects. Employees need proper training and guidance on what tool is right for their job when a wide range of tools with overlapping functions exist.

The past failures are not due to technology but the change in the management process of guiding what tool should be used for daily work. It’s good if it is included in the onboarding process itself to educate people on what tool should be used from day one. Though freedom of choice sounds akin to a good thing, it often just increases the burden. So it’s important for the organization to make a precise decision on what tools they are going to use and then get all of them using these and not using 20 different options.

5. Finding the person at the right time?

The people finder has been a killer app on Intranets for a prolonged time. However, the focus has moved from finding a person’s contact details to finding the right person when you don’t know his/her name. It’s like trying to find the right person at the right time when you need something urgently, you’ll have to go around the house for it.

Another consideration here is that there are many talented people within the organization and many may not even know about them. Thus the company ends up wasting money on outside agencies when there might be the required skills in-house only.

6. Everything may not be Pretty!

Usually, people feel more strongly about the autistics of an Intranet than you might expect it to be. The price is hard to return in a cost-benefit analysis, but the dynamic influence is real. It looks kind of outdated and doesn’t really reflect how people who work in the organization think of their workplace. It doesn’t feel very vibrant or interesting to some as they may expect a consumer-grade experience now. To a few, it may not be a dynamic layout like a good website would set out to be.

7. And finally what your Intranets Should Do?

Definitely, many Intranet managers considering a revamp will identify with all of the above factors. Although those mentioned above are the most common symptoms, it isn’t necessarily, you can attain a formulaic solution for an ideal Intranet solution.

  • That’s why working keenly with your employees on the Intranet design is so vitally important.
  • Not leaders only but leaders and employees together can design their desired INTRANET SOLUTIONS.

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