As a company, your intranet can be a powerful corporate tool or a stagnant place that employees visit when they must. If properly structured, your intranet can become a place to encourage the growth of your corporate culture as well as increase your employee’s engagement in both the company and their day to day jobs. When using a platform like SharePoint, your intranet can become the place to get information as well as a solution that solves everyday business problems.
There are a number of ways to encourage employee engagement in the intranet:
1. Keeping your content fresh. Publishing regular news stories regarding the current
accomplishments and on goings of the company will help to keep your employees informed as well as provide them with a sense of pride and ownership in those accomplishments. This requires commitment to continually seek out and write stories.
2. Contests, Polls, and Trivia. Contests can range from a photography contest to allowing employees to submit news articles or ideas, to company trivia based on past articles or events. Contests don’t need to have extrinsic reward, but can encourage participation through recognition on the intranet. Contests that work great at one company may not garner the interest at another. Insight into the interests of your employees as well as your company’s culture will help form a vision for keeping the intranet exciting.
3. Tools. Tools can range from simple tools like displaying the weather and company related stock information, to more sophisticated tools like a floor plan module that allows employees to quickly find and visually see where others are located in the office, or a visual organizational chart. Tools will reinforce a vision of the intranet as where to go for information, but will typically require a small investment.
4. Solutions. When using a platform like SharePoint, a number of solutions can be introduced to your intranet to solve everyday business problems. Some of the solutions we have created in the past for clients include a vacation request system that allows employees to request and track their vacation in a year, an on-board and off-board solution that helps facilitate the right information to the right people at the right time, and a document management solution that has helped encourage one of the highest adoption rates for document management that I have seen in my career. Solutions require the most investment, but transform your intranet from a place to get information to the place for collaboration and work.
However, these do not come without a balance of vision, commitment, and an investment. A large investment that lacks vision and commitment will not guarantee a successful intranet. Likewise, a great vision, without the proper investment or commitment will soon run out of momentum.
