How to Boost Intranet Engagement: Ideas, Strategies and Tools

How a Modern Intranet is Useful for Employee Engagement?

At its most basic, an intranet is a network that exists inside your business or organization. It connects employees to the information they need to do their jobs. A modern intranet has the capability to support a variety of functions, such as:

• Navigating personalized access to company applications
• Building and participating in internal communities
• Sharing critical updates, policies and news
• Finding training and onboarding materials
• Accessing HR policies and procedures
• Scaling employee recognition and retention initiatives
• Sharing and governing protected company knowledge
• Connecting to authentication, collaboration, engagement and productivity suites
• Communicating via instant messaging and chat
• Much more

Engaging Employees Through an Intranet

A company intranet as LumApps is used to connect employees to what they need while at work. It becomes a portal for knowledge sharing throughout the organization. The following are some examples:

— Leaders can share updates with the entire company. They can create polls and request feedback from employees. Workers can also reach out to leaders directly with questions or concerns.

— The intranet can also be a great source of information for employees. It should have an intelligent user-friendly search function to make it easy for all workers to find the documents or video files they need.

— The intranet can support workplace culture with real-time company updates and peer recognition. It also allows for teams to share news articles about their contributions to the business. These actions allow employees to get to know each other and break down silos. The corporate intranet can help encourage a sense of belonging among workers. No one needs to feel they are abandoned without the information or support needed to do their work well.

How to Engage Employees on an Intranet?

1. Focus on User Experience

A company intranet can be customized with as many different apps as are needed. There are so many ways to configure it that it’s possible to lose track of the notion that if there are too many options, the intranet solution can turn into a bit of a problem of its own.

The people using the intranet need to be able to incorporate this technology into their workday without distraction. If employees find that the intranet is too difficult to use, they will avoid it. A simple intranet design can help the user experience in big ways.

2. Choose a Cloud-Based Intranet Portal

If the goal is to increase employee intranet engagement, it’s important to ensure that all employees have an equal opportunity to use the platform. Many companies now employ remote workers as part of their team.

Introducing a mobile intranet app makes it much easier for them to keep in touch with their co-workers, no matter where they happen to live. They can have the same access to company news, information, and documents that everyone else has, with no time lapse due to distance and modern tools for secure authentication.

3. Include An Employee Directory

An employee directory does not have to be a dry, boring online document. To create one that will help to increase employee engagement, many companies let employees include details such as:

• An inspirational quote
• A brief bio
• Interests or hobbies
• Favorite bands or type of music
• Favorite television shows or movies
• The date the employee joined the company

These details can help humanize everyone at the company and make them more approachable to their team members and those working in other areas of the company.

4. Make It a Social Intranet

A great intranet engagement idea is to encourage employees to post content in communities on the company intranet. They can write their own blog posts, post videos, and share photos. Other employees can “like” and “share” them internally or on social media websites.

As the content is shared more often, it will garner more attention on the intranet and on social media. The more people (employees and others) see the content, the more likely they are to participate in discussions around it.

LumApps, the Social Intranet Platform:

Discover LumApps

5. Make It Easy To Find Relevant Documents

To increase employee intranet engagement, give them a reason to go there. Direct employees to go to the intranet when they need to find onboarding documents for new hires, a technical manual, marketing materials, information about benefits, and more.

Employees will know that they will be able to find the latest version of the document they are looking for on the intranet.

6. Point New Employees To Engage with the Intranet Tool Right Away

If the goal is to boost intranet engagement, having employees start on the company intranet right away can set the tone for the rest of their tenure. New hires can see HR and benefits forms, along with training manuals and related documents. This is the place where a new employee will access information related to their workgroup, current projects, and general expectations for them in their new role.

7. Assign New Hires an Intranet Mentor

New employees will feel more comfortable knowing there is someone they can reach out to if they have questions or concerns via chat. Taking this step makes the new employee feel part of the workgroup they have been assigned to from the beginning and a valued part of the team.

8. Urge Employees To Get Company News From the Intranet

The intranet’s newsfeed is a helpful feature that can push personalized information out to employees quickly throughout the day. This includes announcements from the top-down as well as news about ongoing projects, job openings, training sessions and more. The newsfeed’s comments can also be used to see questions from employees.

LumApps Intranet Newscenter

9. Encourage Sharing Industry Information On the intranet

Every industry is constantly changing and growing. It would be impossible for one person to do the work to stay on top of all the changes. If multiple employees share links to articles and reports they find online and elsewhere with social features to rank posts, it makes the job much easier.

Team members can also add commentary about what they have read or heard. This can lead to lively and productive discussions among employees about current industry events and the future of the industry.

10. Use the intranet As a Rapid-Response Tool

A company’s greatest asset is its people. They were hired for their skills and abilities — their talents. When something happens requiring a quick response, there is likelye a depth of resources available. The intranet makes it easy to put out a call for ideas or specific help from various workgroups quickly or search existing company knowledge on a topic.

11. Encourage Executives To Get Involved On the Company Intranet

Company leaders set the tone for the rest of the organization. The executives and managers need to be seen using this internal communication method. If employees see the executives actively using the intranet to communicate regularly, they are more likely to do the same.

LeaderShip Corner – LumApps Intranet Use Case

12. Identify Internal Brand Ambassadors To Share Content

Find employees who are respected by their peers and make sure they understand the corporate intranet and related goals. Choosing people from several departments who can bring a variety of viewpoints to the table and inviting them to share content for their department with the rest of the company and on social media websites can amplify internal engagement efforts.

13. Include a Virtual Water Cooler

Even though employees are being paid to do a job, it doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be some room for having fun to increase bonding. When setting up an intranet, include an area or a specific thread dedicated to select non-work topics. The virtual water cooler can take the form of a chat room or a forum set aside for socializing.

It may take a little time for employees to develop personal connections with each other. The effort will be worthwhile, since it helps to enhance the employee experience and allows workers to feel personally connected to the digital workplace.

14. Measure How Employees Use the Intranet Platform

To get answers to questions about how (and how often) employees are engaging with the intranet app, leverage analytics tools to track engagement and user experience. Dissecting most-trafficked content posted on the platform can help determine which topics or issues are resonating most with employees, for instance. This data will help to keep a virtual finger on the pulse of what is on the collective minds of team members.

15. Use Polls and Surveys Tto Monitor Employee Intranet Engagement

Often, the best way to determine how engaged employees are in their work is to ask them. Reassuring employees that the surveys are being used as a tool for improving the employee experience can help boost participation.

A Few Tips On Measuring Intranet Engagement

Here are some methods for gauging employee engagement on the company intranet.

— Usage

Keeping track of whether employees are using the intranet doesn’t give a complete answer of whether they are engaged in their work. It is a good place to start, though, and often a decent proxy for certain satisfaction metrics.

Other metrics around social sharing, community participation, time-spent and more can be useful to benchmark internal communications initiatives.

— Feedback

Often missed in analytics tools are the qualitative comments from employees, which are frequently as valuable. Open-ended feedback can be detailed and worth collecting in surveys or within comments on content.