Boost Employee Engagement with Your Intranet
It's generally accepted that employee engagement is something to strive for in an organization. Staff who are engaged feel a connection to the company, believe their work is important, and want to do their best. Your intranet can help you to accomplish this!
Engagement can be encouraged in a variety of creative ways:
- post news about employees to help connection between coworkers; staff love to hear about the impact their coworkers are having
- run a 'photo of the day' contest, feature the submissions, and have staff vote on a winner
- set permissions to allow staff to contribute news stories, subject to moderation by Communications staff
---
Use Intranet Tools for Engagement
Our intranet software includes lots of ready-to-go Apps which can be used to improve employee engagement.
Specific tool techniques include:
- Employee Directory - allow staff to update their profile photos to help coworkers recognize each other and show some personality
- Birthdays or Work Anniversaries - show upcoming staff events from the entire organization or specific departments in a Birthday or Anniversary widget to help connect staff
- Employee recognition or kudos - help employees to highlight the great things their coworkers are doing, using an Employee Kudos App
- Featured employees - use the Employee Profiles widget to feature employees; choose whether to include their photo or personal information
- Staff area - create a space where staff can post information directly to coworkers; keep it simple with just a widget to allow direct messages such as fundraisers, or create a site which may also include areas like Buy and Sell, etc.
Some of our customers have gone a step further and put in place custom tools for their organization which increases engagement in a whole new way. Learn directly from our customers about their experiences.
---
Tips to Simplify Your Intranet and Improve Engagement
Intranet Tip #1: Make Items Easy To Find
Navigation is both the structure of your intranet and the way users understand what’s available on the site. Simple, well-designed navigation increase the chance that employees can locate information the first time – without resorting to search – which helps build trust and improve engagement.
To simplify your intranet navigation:
- Use regular words for your navigation labels which clearly indicate function, and eliminate user guesswork and confusion.
- Limit the number of choices in the main navigation to 5-9 items so they’re more easily understood.
Intranet Tip #2: Delegate Responsibility
Intranet administrators can’t possibly keep all areas of the intranet up-to-date. Creating department or team sites is easy with Intranet Connections, and once you’ve created sites, you can hand off responsibility for edits to that group or department through security permissions, where they can add or delete content.
Intranet Tip #3: Write for the Intranet
Writing online differs from the written word, especially when it’s an employee-only intranet. Use a more conversational, casual tone to keep the content more approachable (e.g. “let’s” rather than “let us”).
Get to the point, and keep sentences and paragraphs short. And use bullets because they:
- Are easier
- To understand
- At a glance
Intranet Tips #4: Use Groups for Security
Using the built-in security functions of Intranet Connections is a great way to control who is viewing and editing content. But the reality is that employees are continually leaving and being hired, and managing permissions individually can be time-consuming.
Managing security by using groups is a much simpler way to ensure that the right users have the right security. For example, create an Editors – HR group and give it edit access to all HR forms and pages. When a new employee is hired, rather than add their access individually to each of the forms and pages, just add them to this group to provide the access they need.