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Learn how an effective intranet can transform your employee engagement, enhance communication & improve employee satisfaction.
Do you think an intranet is just for file sharing? Well, think again. Beyond just storing documents, an intranet facilitates team interactions and strengthens company culture.
In this article, we'll explore the many facets of an intranet. You’ll learn how to transform it into a driving force for communication, collaboration, and improved employee engagement.
At its core, an intranet is like the digital nervous system of an organization. It's a private network, accessible only to the members of a particular organization, offering a centralized location to manage and disseminate information. But it's much more than a simple storage system. An intranet shapes the way employees interact, access tools, and stay connected with each other.
With these core functionalities in place, the question still remains: How do I make my intranet engaging? The answer lies in its design, content, and usability. An engaging intranet is user-friendly, regularly updated with relevant content, and tailored to the unique needs and culture of the organization. In the sections to come, we'll delve deeper into strategies, intranet engagement ideas, and features that can make an intranet not just functional but truly engaging for its users.
The numbers don't lie: employee engagement has taken a hit. According to Gallup, employee engagement in the U.S. saw a noticeable drop from 36% engaged employees in 2020 to just 32% in 2022. While this dip may seem minor on the surface, it signals potential challenges in productivity, sales, and overall morale.
Here's a silver lining: the value of engaged employees is quantifiable and impressive. Engaged employees make 18% more sales, are 14% more productive, and improve customer satisfaction by 10%.
The figures reveal an undeniable truth: investing in engagement isn't just about happier employees; it directly impacts the bottom line.
So, where does the intranet fit into this picture? An intranet for employee engagement is more than a tool—it's a strategic asset. With the right intranet engagement strategy, organizations can transform their digital spaces into hubs of communication, collaboration, and recognition.
Here are some compelling reasons why:
Learn more about how to share information effectively, here.
The intricate bond between the intranet and employee engagement cannot be overstated. From a Return on Investment perspective, the tangible benefits are clear—improved sales, productivity, and customer satisfaction.
The intangible benefits, like enhanced company culture, improved employee morale, and reduced turnover, are equally crucial. Together, they create a compelling case for organizations to prioritize a robust intranet engagement strategy.
Engaging employees to use the company intranet consistently can sometimes be daunting. Yet, with the right strategies, tools, and content, you can create a thriving digital community within your organization. Here's how:
Just as we customize our phone's home screens, the intranet should offer a personalized experience for each user. Allow employees to choose widgets or tools they frequently use. This way, they'll find immediate value each time they log in. A one-size-fits-all approach might miss the mark when it comes to engaging diverse employee groups.
Through platforms like Assembly, you can ensure each employee has a dashboard tailored to their needs. This means widgets, tools, and content they find most relevant right at their fingertips. Over time, a personalized intranet learns and adapts, offering content that aligns with an employee's usage patterns, roles, or preferences, making each login feel bespoke.
An intranet that stays static is bound to lose engagement. While official company announcements have their place, the intranet should be a vibrant space reflecting the company's pulse.
Highlight individual or team achievements, share behind-the-scenes glimpses of company events, or even have a monthly spotlight on a department or a role. Hosting webinars, AMAs (Ask Me Anything) with senior management, or spotlight interviews can draw employees in.
Having content that spans from professional updates to light-hearted, fun pieces, creates a dynamic environment that caters to diverse interests, ensuring employees keep coming back.
A complicated, hard-to-navigate intranet can deter even the most tech-savvy employees. The design should be intuitive, clean, and straightforward. This ensures employees spend less time searching and more time engaging.
Using familiar design principles and minimizing the learning curve can lead to better adoption rates. Additionally, having a responsive design that works flawlessly across all kinds of devices is essential. This is why you should always go for a tool that’s clutter-free and accessible, so employees can utilize the platform to its full potential.
Engagement isn't a passive activity. Launch polls, quizzes, or surveys that prompt employees to interact. It could be as simple as "Choose the next decor for the break room" or "Share feedback on the recent town hall."
You can even host monthly awards where colleagues nominate and vote for each other based on various criteria like teamwork, innovation, or customer service.
Assembly has robust recognition and reward features, including peer-to-peer recognition, where employees can send accolades, badges, and goodwill messages. Such activities make employees feel seen, valued, and more connected to the organizational culture.
Every new tool requires some level of familiarization. Your intranet onboarding should be comprehensive.
Initial training sessions should be accompanied by readily available user manuals or video guides. However, this shouldn’t be a one-time activity. Organizing regular webinars highlighting advanced features or best practices is important to keep your team up-to-date.
Having a dedicated intranet team or champions within each department can provide first-hand support and guidance, ensuring that issues or doubts are addressed promptly.
The intranet should serve as the heartbeat of the company's collaborative efforts. Using the intranet for project discussions, whiteboarding sessions, or even maintaining a shared calendar for inter-departmental meetings can bring teams closer.
Encourage teams to host virtual brainstorming sessions directly on the intranet, instead of a whole new app. Assembly's platform emphasizes a seamless collaborative experience, enabling teams to work in synergy, share ideas, and drive projects to completion with the collective intelligence of the workforce.
An engaging intranet evolves with its users. Regular feedback sessions are crucial, but the intranet should also feature non-intrusive channels for users to voice their suggestions. These could be in the form of interactive polls, pulse surveys, suggestion boxes, or monthly virtual town hall meetings.
Acting on this feedback and showing visible improvements can reinforce trust among employees. A transparent approach to improvements ensures the intranet stays attuned to user needs and remains a valuable tool for everyone.
The modern employee is often overwhelmed with many software tools — emails, calendar appointments, task management, etc. If these tools are directly accessible from the intranet, you can ensure consistent usage and prevent app fatigue.
Assembly's approach minimizes disruption in daily workflows by offering extensive integration options. This unified workspace approach means employees can concentrate on their work without constantly toggling between different applications.
Recognition is a powerful motivator. The intranet should serve as the central platform to celebrate professional and personal achievements. Highlighting top performers, showcasing standout projects, or even recognizing personal milestones like anniversaries can foster a positive work culture.
Assembly strongly emphasizes employee recognition, offering features like spotlighting exceptional performances or enabling peers to send their own appreciation.
With the rise of remote work and flexible schedules, access to the intranet shouldn't be restricted to desktops. Offering a seamless experience on mobile devices ensures employees can stay connected, even on the move. Important updates, team discussions, or accessing documents should be as easy on a phone or tablet as on a computer.
Assembly's mobile-optimized design and features, such as offline access and push notifications, ensure that the intranet is always within arm's reach, keeping employees connected and informed.
In essence, an intranet is not just a tool; it's a workspace, a community, and a reflection of the company's culture. The more it aligns with employees' needs and expectations, the more engaged they'll be.
Engaging top-tier leadership in intranet adoption involves leveraging your platform's strategic advantages. When executives see value, they not only use it but drive intranet engagement throughout the organization. Here's how to get them onboard:
Just like other employees, executives appreciate experiences tailored to their needs. Offering personalized dashboards aligns perfectly with this preference.
Within these dashboards, they can view key metrics, monitor project developments, or receive departmental summaries. This ensures they're constantly updated without trawling through loads of data. With Assembly, the vast customization options allow executives to adjust their dashboards to reflect their specific focus areas.
With remote work brings challenges, especially in data security. A significant 96% of executives identify data security as a major threat. Moreover, two in five are concerned about employees' relaxed data security practices during remote work, putting this risk on par with external data breaches.
Assembly understands these concerns and has tailored its platform to address them through:
This peace of mind for executives means they can confidently share strategic insights, discuss sensitive topics, and make decisions on the intranet knowing their data is secure.
A primary task for executives is strategy formulation. Here, the intranet can be a powerhouse, accumulating data from various teams and transforming it into actionable insights. From analyzing market dynamics and reviewing competitor activities to understanding internal performance metrics, having this data at their fingertips is invaluable.
Assembly excels in this domain, streamlining data representation into more comprehensive and intelligible formats.
Executives are often pressed for time. Incorporating tools that expedite decision-making can significantly elevate their intranet experience. For instance, automated reporting collects and presents data clearly, saving time and effort.
Predictive analyses using AI can offer insights into what might happen next, helping executives plan effectively. Virtual decision rooms bring all essential discussions and information together in one place online, making it easier and faster to reach decisions without the chaos of scattered emails or files.
Executives are bombarded with information daily. The intranet can offer a curated content feed to avoid overwhelming them. This means presenting only the essential and relevant details to them. It could include important industry news, updates about the company's successes, or articles that resonate with their interests. This approach ensures executives always stay informed (and keep their teams informed) without sifting through unnecessary information.
For executives, networking is not just beneficial; it's essential. The intranet can be a medium for this, carving out spaces for interactions both within the organization and across industries. With Assembly, there are dedicated spaces for such interactions, enabling executives to share insights, collaborate on projects, or simply engage in productive discussions.
Ensuring executives see the tangible benefits of the intranet is key to its adoption. Their involvement helps encourage teams to engage with the platform and boosts intranet engagement over time.
Measuring intranet engagement goes beyond a mere numbers game; it’s understanding how effectively your company's platform is serving its purpose.
If you've invested time and resources into an intranet, you'd naturally want to ensure it's making a positive difference. When you evaluate employee intranet engagement, you can gain insights into the platform's strengths, and areas that might need improvement.
So, why should you measure intranet engagement?
When trying to get the full picture of how employees use the intranet, it helps to mix and match different metrics.
One way to do this is by creating an intranet engagement rate. You might take an average of the login rates, activity metrics, and page views per visit. For instance, if you add the three percentages from the metrics above and then divide by three, you'll get a blended rate that shows overall intranet use. This rate can be a more accurate look at how often and how deeply employees are diving into your intranet.
While intranets offer a central hub for collaboration and communication, they're not without challenges. Here, we look at some of these hurdles and provide actionable solutions to ensure your intranet remains an engaging and valuable tool for your team.
An effective intranet boosts collaboration, simplifies tasks, and strengthens employee connections. Companies can keep their intranet platform relevant and useful by addressing challenges before they come and measuring their engagement data.
The rewards? Better communication, increased productivity, and happier teams.
With Assembly, the journey towards an engaging intranet is streamlined, making it easier for companies to achieve positive outcomes like improved communication and higher employee satisfaction. For a clearer picture of how Assembly can transform your intranet experience, book a demo with us!
Get the foundational knowledge on creating an employee recognition program that boosts employee engagement and helps them feel valued.
Explore GuideYes, at Assembly, security is a top priority. Each quarter, we have ongoing security work that is everyone’s responsibility. While we maintain a strong security posture, it was important for us to prove to our customers that we do everything we claim to do. This led us to pursue a SOC 2 Type II report that would provide evidence of our compliance with industry gold-standard security practice.
There is study after study showing that employee recognition leads to increased engagement. This in return creates an environment where employees are happier and more motivated which increase productivity and reduces voluntary turnover significantly. In order to filled critical roles, companies tend to spend nearly twice the value of an annual salary. Assembly is an investment in your employees that supports your bottom line.
Yes, we will offer contracts for companies with longer-term agreements to help larger customers have more certainty around future costs.
The minimum agreement term is a 12-month subscription.
We do and for FREE! Any new customer needing further support to get started with Assembly to ensure you're set up for success can request custom onboarding support. Improving your employee experience is about much more than just using our amazing software; it’s about transforming your business to create a workplace that people love. That’s much easier to do with the personal support and advice from our passionate people experts.
Yes. We offer a completely free plan for up to 50 team members. This plan is intended for teams or organizations that are looking to get started with an employee engagement tool. Keep in mind, this plan is limited in features.
All customers can open an Assembly account for free and get started without a credit card. Then you can change plans as necessary.
At the time of redemption (when your employees exchange their points for a paid reward) you'll pay face value. If a reward is a $10 Amazon gift card, your cost will be $10. All paid rewards are billed for on a monthly basis.
The good news is that you don't have to pay for rewards upfront because we only charge you when points are redeemed, not when they're earned.
We offer discounts or educational or charitable organizations. In order to secure a discount, you'll first need to book a demo with a customer support specialist.
For all other organizations, we are willing to consider longer-term agreements in exchange for discounts. To set up annual plans or longer, you will need to book a demo with a customer support specialist.
If you're on a month to month plan, you can go here and cancel anytime. If you're having concerns or need help setting up your account for success, you can always book a demo with a customer support specialist.
If you're on a longer-term custom plan, you'll need to reach out to your customer support specialist to cancel your account or email us at support@joinassembly.com.
Great question! You can customize your core values to match your organization's to boost and track alignment. You can change your currency from the 🏆 emoji (our default) to any emoji of your choice. You can swap our logo for your own. You can also set up company culture rewards such as, "Lunch with the CEO," "Buy a book on us," and so much more!
While we recommend a peer to peer set up where anyone in your organization can give or receive recognition, you can set up Assembly however you want. If you need to limit the people who can give or receive recognition, that's perfectly fine and can be done from your Admin, here.
Assembly connects to the tools your employees use every day to offer an easy, seamless experience with minimal change management.
Assembly has integrations with HCM/HRIS systems like ADP, Google, Office 365, and Slack. We also integrate with communication tools like Slack and Teams so you and your employees can access Assembly wherever they work now.
That depends on the company's permissions set up. That said, over 90% of the employees on Assembly's platform are recognized on a monthly basis. That means nearly every employee across all of our customers are receiving regular recognition from their peers, managers, or leadership. We're extremely proud of this.
They are not required. You can use Assembly without having rewards set up. However, we don't recommend it if you intend to have a high adoption and usage rate. You can always keep the costs down by offering internal culture rewards that are fulfilled by you internally.
No, you can remove allowances from anyone or everyone. It's up to you but we do recommend using points whether they're worth a real dollar value or not. Companies that use points have a much higher engagement rate even if those points don't exchange for real dollars.
Please schedule time with an expert and we will help you to get all your questions answered