You’ve been working Fridays, grinding out content for your intranet. You have the responsibility of “disseminating your company’s work culture” (such a heroic and intangible objective). With a thumping heart, you open the engagement report page - 4 clicks for the entire week. Love work? Sounds familiar?
Possibly, the main problem of internal communications departments is not technical, nor budget or skills gap: it’s simply the fact employees just don’t like to keep their eyes on the primary channel of communication - the intranet.
The best way to combat this is to make your intranet more than a set of static webpages, or a medium of unidirectional top-down communication. Make it the hub of everything your employees need to get work done. Make your intranet essential to their very work existence. Here are some tools every modern intranet must have:
Web calendars
Web calendars might not be the most surprising and exciting tool around, but, well, every employee surely must review them on a daily basis. The result - employees see your intranet firs thing in the morning. A win for your intranet.
Push notifications
Push notifications are instant alerts that show up on your browser or mobile phone. They’re great to instantly notify users to check recent activity such as content updates, new projects assigned to them, calendars events, and conversations of relevance to them.
While simple, push notifications are a great way to make users keep going back to your Intranet.
Project management
When you integrate tools like project management in your intranet, it becomes essential to teams managing complex projects to get an idea of their tasks, deadlines and the overall status of the project.
Contact management
Your intranet should be the go to place when employees are looking for any important external or internal contact - vendors, champions, team mates, people with specific skills in another department etc. In other words, intranet should have contact management capabilities.
Forms
Every business is unique, and a lot of what you do depends on your specific situation. Forms and databases help automate processes and workflows that are specific to a situation. Forms are a way to serve as the way to manually collect data from people that you can use to trigger automations. Some common uses of web forms for intranets are:
- Absence requests
- Event participation confirmation
- App signups
- Calculators
- Process tracking
- CRM contacts upload
- Sales and leads tracking
- Task management and scheduling
- Internal applications
- Surveys
- Supply management
Videos
Multimedia content is incredible in its capacity to engage an audience. People spend inordinate amounts of time on Youtube these days. Studies say that soon90% of traffic will come from video. Intranets should have the ability to easily embed and broadcast videos which can be used for a variety of objectives - training, motivation, informative
Document management
The benefits of document management are proven; almost every company regardless of size these days has a document management system. Intranets should incorporate document management capabilities and be the knowledge management hub of the company - a go to place for all important documents related to the company.
Instant messaging
Instant messaging services have become red hot. While intranets have traditionally lagged when it comes to real time communication, there is no reason it should continue to be the case. Apart from email, this is the one tool employees will use the most. HyperOffice understands this and incorporates real time messaging in its platform.
What’s next.
Learn from our other intranet resources:
- Real examples of Intranets
- Intranets best practices for 2018
- Microsoft Access apps examples
- Internal communications tools
- Is the corporate intranet dead?
- Slack vs Teams vs Ushare.to
- How to build your own intranet
