Build an Engaging Intranet to Enhance Employee Engagement

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.

What Is the Purpose of an Intranet?

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.

What Are the 3 Uses of an Intranet?

• Manage and Store Documents: Think of the intranet as a digital library. Here, employees can store, search, and access essential files and documents. Whether it's company policies, project files, or training materials, an intranet ensures that these resources are organized and easily retrievable.
• Connect Employees: As the workplace becomes increasingly remote-focused, it’s common to have employees spread across various locations. The intranet bridges this geographical gap, enabling seamless communication and a beautiful sense of community. Whether it's through forums, chat systems, or news updates, an intranet helps keep everyone in the loop.
• Integrate with Apps: Modern intranets are not static. They can integrate various apps and tools that employees use daily, from calendar systems to task management tools, creating a unified platform that streamlines daily operations and reduces app fatigue.

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.

ROI of an Intranet for Employee Engagement

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:

• Active Listening: The advantage of intranets is that they serve as a digital space where feedback isn't just given—it's sought. Intranets are useful for engaging and listening to employees online. Through tools like polls, surveys, and forums, companies can hear directly from their workforce, address concerns and implement suggestions.
• Unified Communication: Disconnected information can lead to disconnected employees. An intranet centralizes vital announcements, updates, and company happenings. This ensures everyone, whether they're in the office or remote, is informed of any development. Thus creating a stronger bond with the company's mission and vision.

Learn more about how to share information effectively, here.

• Recognition and Rewards: Everyone appreciates acknowledgement. In fact, 63% of “usually” recognized employees are unlikely to look for a new job in the next 3-6 months. Companies can use the intranet to spotlight outstanding work, celebrate milestones, and even run reward programs.
• Training and Development: A key component of intranet engagement is providing avenues for growth. With integrated e-learning modules, skill workshops, or knowledge-sharing sessions, employees feel valued and equipped to tackle new challenges, leading to higher job satisfaction and retention rates.
• Collaboration Boost: The modern intranet isn't just about reading—it's about interacting. Features that promote teamwork, like project management tools or brainstorming boards, make tasks more efficient and foster a culture of collaboration and innovation.
• Employee Well-being and Health: The value of investing in employee well-being has become crystal clear in recent times. Incorporating wellness programs, mental health resources, and virtual health consultations into the intranet, businesses directly contribute to enhanced engagement and productivity.

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.

How Do You Engage Employees to Use an Intranet?

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:

1. Personalized Dashboards

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.

2. Regular Content Updates

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.

3. Intuitive User Interface

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.

4. Engagement Activities

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.

5. Training and Onboarding

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. 

6. Promote Collaboration

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.

7. Feedback Channels

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.

8. Integration with Daily Tools

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.

9. Celebrate and Recognize

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.

10. Mobile Access

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.

How to Engage Executives in Intranet Adoption

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:

1. Personalized Dashboards

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.

2. Secure Communication Channels

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:

• Data Encryption: Assembly uses SSL/TLS encryption, which means that the information you share on the platform is scrambled, making it unreadable to any unauthorized person trying to access it.
• ISO 27001 Data Centers: We store all user data in facilities that meet the ISO 27001 standard. This means they adhere to one of the strictest data security benchmarks available, ensuring your information is stored safely.
• Code Reviews: Every software update or change we make goes through a detailed review process. This ensures that vulnerabilities are caught early and fixed before they can be exploited.
• Proactive Monitoring: We continuously watch over the system for any signs of security threats. If something seems off, we're on it, ensuring that any issues are resolved quickly.

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.

3. Strategic Insight Generation

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.

4. Streamlined Decision-making Tools

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.

5. Content Curation

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.

6. Peer Networking Opportunities

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.

How to Measure Intranet Engagement?

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?

• Understanding Utilization: Keeping track of how often employees access the intranet, which pages they visit most, and which resources they utilize helps identify the most valuable parts. If certain sections are less visited, it might indicate they need updating or are no longer relevant.
• Identifying Active and Passive Users: By looking at who actively engages with the platform and who doesn't, you can determine which users might need additional resources or training to help with intranet engagement. On the flip side, those who engage regularly can be ambassadors, promoting the platform's benefits.
• Guiding Content Strategy: If your intranet hosts articles, news, or other content, monitoring user engagement helps refine your content strategy, aligning it more closely with what employees find useful and interesting.
• Enhancing Productivity: An engaging intranet simplifies tasks for employees, from finding necessary documents to collaborating with colleagues. Aiming to increase intranet engagement can lead to a more efficient work environment.
• Continuous Improvement: With engagement data, you can introduce new intranet engagement activities, modify existing features, or implement fresh ones to better the user experience.

Metrics to Gauge Intranet Engagement Include:

• Login Rates: This is a straightforward metric. By dividing the number of unique logins by the total number of employees, you get a percentage that shows you how many are using the intranet regularly. Formula: (Number of unique logins / Total number of employees) x 100 = Login Rate (%)‍
• Activity Metrics: While not a single metric, this encompasses actions such as comments, shares, or document downloads. Monitoring these actions can offer insights into the interactive aspects of your intranet. Formula:To measure document engagement: (Number of document downloads / Total number of documents available) x 100 = Document Engagement Rate (%)‍
• Surveys: While not a strict "metric," regular surveys provide qualitative data on user experience, pain points, and potential areas of improvement. This feedback helps in refining the intranet's features and content.‍
• Page View Duration: This metric shows how long, on average, users spend on a particular page or section of the intranet. It can help determine which content is genuinely engaging and holding the users' attention. Formula: Total time spent on a page / Total number of visits to that page = Average Page View Duration‍
• Page views per visit: This metric indicates how many different pages or sections a user visits during one session on the intranet. It's a good measure of both interest and the discoverability of content. Formula: Total page views / Total visits = Page Views Per Visit
  

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.

Common Intranet Challenges and Their Solutions

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.

1. Low Adoption Rates: After the initial introduction, employees' usage of the intranet may decrease. This decline in participation can be attributed to various reasons, including unclear benefits of the platform or lack of proper onboarding.
   Solution: Promote the platform's advantages regularly and incorporate the intranet into daily tasks. Additionally, training sessions should be offered to guide employees on maximizing the intranet's features.
2. Outdated Content: An intranet with irrelevant or outdated information can lose value, leading to decreased engagement in intranet content.
   Solution: Designate content managers or teams to keep the intranet's content current and relevant. Regular reviews and updates will ensure employees always find the latest and most useful information.
3. Difficult Navigation: Employees expect an intuitive and easy-to-use platform. A complex interface can deter users from fully engaging with the intranet.
   Solution: Choose a user-friendly intranet provider. Do not forget to update it regularly. You should also consider gathering and acting upon user feedback during this process.
4. Lack of Personalization: With diverse roles in a company, not every update or piece of content will appeal to every employee. A generic intranet can result in decreased intranet and employee engagement.
   Solution: Enable personalization features. Tailoring content based on roles or preferences ensures every user finds relevant and engaging information.
5. Inefficient Search Mechanisms: Employees often rely on the intranet to retrieve vital information quickly. An inefficient search system can lead to wasted time and mounting frustration.
   Solution: Invest in improving the search functionality. Regularly update the system's algorithms and incorporate filters to help users find what they need swiftly.

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!