Wasn’t it a while ago that networking was actually a skill? Connecting as you know it, has transformed rapidly over the years. Today’s offices use sophisticated collaboration tools, which claim to promote better communication between employees and boost their productivity. But, there’s still something missing.
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According to a recent government report commissioned by the United Kingdom government, organizations that have the highest employee engagement scores have twice more profit than their counterparts. This goes on to show how organizational productivity is directly proportional to satisfied, happy employees. The custom office intranet plays a major factor in employee engagement.
Social Intranets: Embodying Organizational Principles for Employees
In the same report, the researchers identified 4 main engagement enablers that can be embedded within your organization through custom intranet development. Basically, custom intranet software provides a means which boosts these enablers as essential tools inside your organization, with the sole effort of enhancing the engagement of your workers and increasing their productivity. Let’s shed some light on what these four major enablers are and how building custom intranet helps you keep your employees happy!
Office Intranets for enabling Leadership
High-performance organizations project a visible and empowering leadership that carries a robust strategic narrative of how and where it is taking the organization. Throughout intranet history, management has used intranets as indispensable tools to convey the vision and mission of what employees should imbibe while working. In times when retaining good employees is key to a company’s future, using custom intranets only increases your chance to share management’s vision better and more responsibly with your employees. This means doing away with one-line mission statements and monotonous telegram style message and engaging in direct correspondence with your workers regularly and often. Successful companies leverage their custom intranet site to convey both the objective and context to deepen employee’s understanding of an organization’s vision and mission.
How do I enable leadership with intranet?
Your intranet need not be too fancy. It can be a simple layout with features such as CEO blogs and discussion threads where senior management actively participates. This way, they can effectively humanize the mission of the organization and make it more tangible for employees to achieve.
Custom intranets for enabling managers
Line managers are the quintessential success elements for any team. Managers who focus on motivating their team, treating everyone individually and mentor their teammates in the right direction are rewarded with high performance and even higher engagement.
Consider this; out of two employees one who received recognition for his work as opposed to one who didn’t, which one is more likely to stay loyal towards the company and stay engaged for another quarter? The answer is obvious. And custom intranet site is THE place to do so. Your company intranet is a great mechanism to identify performing individuals and teams. When you reach out to applaud your workers for the hard work they put in, your employees are gratified. Moreover, since they receive recognition publicly, the overall uplifting is amplified.
Social intranets enable top-down as well as peer-to-peer recognition and there is nothing more your tech team has to do than adding a “Like” button or allowing colleagues to be “Tagged” in status updates.
How do I enable managers with intranet?
No matter how forthcoming your senior management is, chances are, they only get notified about individual accomplishment through managers. This is where intranets create a difference. When you make your intranet system more interactive, your employees get a face and a voice through their social profile. Thanks to Facebook, everyone is capable of handling their online presence and feel powerless where they can’t do so – which is often the case in traditional intranets.
Your intranet can be improvised to invite employees for managing their profiles, talk about themselves, share their interests and hobbies making it easier for like-minded individuals to connect and share – whether you’re a 50 member company or 500! All of this enforces positive behavior within your organization.
Intranets help empower employees with a voice of their own
A distinct feature of highly engaged organizations is an employee voice which reinforces as well as challenges the views throughout the workforce. This makes these organizations more employee-centric rather than management-centric.
When you create custom intranet, you are actually giving your employees a platform with a mic where they know they are being listened to – not only during feedback sessions but round the clock! Since social intranets welcome everyone to contribute, they carry the powerful message that every single opinion matters and is important to the overall well-being of the company.
How do I make my intranet more employee-centric?
Enterprise intranet solutions give employers several tools for fostering and soliciting meaningful discussions and contributions from employees. Some of these are blogs, polls, article comments, forum discussions and wikis. Creating intranet systems which are convenient to use on the go add to employee engagement. If you have a large sales team and people work more on-field than inside cubicles, it only makes sense to have your intranet that can be easily accessible over smartphones.
At BluEnt, we recommend knowing the different work teams do in an organization before we build custom intranets. We don’t believe intranets should be accessed only on office wi-fi. They should be happily accessed anywhere and anytime. We did the same when we worked on creating custom intranet application for Elan Construction Ltd., Canada’s leading general contractors.
Using intranets to boost organizational integrity
The most common reason why intranets still lag significantly is that they do not reflect what consumer-focused technology offers. There is a visible expectation gap in the technology your employees use in their personal lives and the older, clunky and tacky platforms you “force” them to use in office. Organizations have understood the engagement benefits of providing good physical working environment but they are yet oblivious to the equally gratifying experiences which can be offered with a well-functioning digital workspace.
The truth is, most employees want to do a good job but they are left wanting because of the dearth of resources to accomplish so. Good intranets ensure that the framed values on the walls are reflected in day-to-day organizational behavior, uploading your organizational integrity. A great intranet does two things: It builds a great brand value; And, it becomes a vital toolbox at the disposal of your employees to leverage their potential.
How do I do bolster organizational integrity with my intranet?
If you want your organization to appear as a modern, collaborative and efficient externally, you must ensure that it functions similarly internally too. Give your employees the tools that they expect. We’re not asking you to build the next Facebook for office, just give your workers resources to help do their job satisfactorily. Become an employer of choice, one that your employees are willing to go the extra mile for. We worked on a custom SharePoint intranet for Alsbridge International and we were truly impressed with what their requirements were. Their vision and mission are reflected clearly in their intranet portal. With several tools that facilitate their employees to giving them a healthy competitive platform for boosting productivity, it was appreciable how sensitive the management is towards empowering its employees as human capital assets.
Several organizations cite budget cuts as reasons why they cannot facilitate better intranets for their employees. However, in the era of growing competition every day, employee engagement is “not nice-to-have”, it’s a must-have for driving strong financial performance. With effective intranets in place, your organization will not only give your employees a voice, it will reflect your brand and boost your employee happiness, all of which have a propensity for building employee engagement.
And if you want someone to build a custom intranet for you, you can rope in the experts at BluEnt. We have worked with several leading clients such as Alsbridge, Citrix and Capgemini to name a few. Get in touch today to see how we can help you out. Custom intranets are not optional anymore, they are a strategic advantage, one that you can leverage straightaway!
Maximum Value. Achieved.