40 Intranet Benefits for Companies and Employees

What is an Intranet?

An intranet can best be described as a private, secure network within an organization’s internal team and trusted clientele. This network acts as a centralized portal to access both internal and external resources. The role of intranet in business is to:

• Empower company-wide communication,
• Increase employee productivity,
• Facilitate team collaboration,
• Securely store and manage documents,
• Help co-workers stay connected,

…all while integrating with industry-leading business apps.

When intranets were first introduced, they were primarily utilized for top-down communication and file storage. It was realized over time that this approach was inefficient as it left bottom-top communication lacking. Modern intranets are made to facilitate communication up and down the chain and within and between teams. Further empowering your employees, social features such as creating profiles, submitting and interacting with posts, live messaging, and more have been implemented over time.

Adapting your internal workflows in an intranet has never been easier. With native integrations to Google & Microsoft suites and cloud-based solutions, transitioning your existing infrastructure can be seamless. LumApps Open Platform offers you native connectors to widely used business applications, a user-friendly interface, enhanced security, and open APIs and SDK for the tech-savvy developers out there. The importance of a good intranet can never be understated. The benefits, features, and many implementations significantly improve business workflows and productivity company-wide.

20 Advantages of Intranet in Business for Companies

1. Create Engaging Content

Enrich your communication and employee experience by engaging them with appealing content. LumApps has a built-in custom content designer where you can publish blogs and articles, create weekly newsletters, embed videos, documents, images, and so much more. By making your communication more engaging, not only will you see an increase in productivity, but employee satisfaction as well.

2. Increase Employee Productivity

Connecting through a centralized digital workplace, employees have access to an entire suite of utilities and tools. From single sign-on, intranet-wide searching, Google Cloud Search integration, and more, employees will no longer need to login and run ten different applications to find the right answer to their questions.

Google Cloud Search with LumApps

3. User Management

Managing communication and documents within a multi-department business is no easy task. With a social intranet solution like LumApps, you can create groups for each department to share content and collaborate easily. To go a step further, you can assign users with specific rights and permissions (i.e., view, edit, comment) based on the roles assigned. With grouping and flexible governance, internal communication and collaboration are set for success.

4. Analytics

To poise your business for success, you need to accrue data to make those hard decisions or pivot your approach to a problem quickly. With LumApps, Google Analytics, and Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace native integrations, you can monitor sessions, bounce rates, page views, and so much more through data-enriched dashboards. Never again will you need to make decisions without first having the analytics to back you up.

5. 24/7 Cloud-Based Solution

One of the advantages of intranet in business is they are designed for adaptability within the workplace. Employees need flexibility and a secure connection to your company intranet wherever they are. A cloud-based intranet is accessible from any location and provides employees all the tools and information from the intranet on-the-go.

6. Native Integration with Google Workspace

Modern intranet solutions, like LumApps, have a native integration with Google Workspace. Formerly known as G Suite, Google Workspace houses a robust set of tools that can be cumbersome to train each employee on. With easy access to training resources and peers’ expertise, Google Workspace’s adoption is significantly increased. By providing company context within the G-Suite, employees are guided towards the application for their specific needs.

7. Out-of-the-Box Microsoft 365 Integration

A native Microsoft 365 integration improves the efficiency of internal business workflows and management. Providing a seamless connection to the entire Microsoft 365 suite (formerly Office 365) helps businesses get the most value out of their Microsoft investment and the advantages of intranet in business. Employees can access files from SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams from a central digital workspace to improve efficiency and quality of work as documents are no longer lost or multiple copies are used and edited.

8. Knowledge Management

Regardless of industry, every company has a lot of information and knowledge to store. Many times, documentation is stored across numerous platforms like Outlook, Excel spreadsheets, OneDrive, Google Drive, etc., making it tedious to find the information you’re looking for. The benefits of using intranet as a central repository for all documentation streamlines the accessing of said information. Your intranet must have a robust search functionality so teams can efficiently locate relevant information.

→ Read More: Learning Center Use Case

9. Advanced Security and Permission Settings

Data breaches, malware, and ransomware can cripple any business. That is why the security and protection level essential to any company further reinforces the importance of intranet in business. Companies store confidential and sensitive information on internal communication platforms that don’t always live up to the gold standard in security. Businesses need secure networks where they can keep all their knowledge and promote company collaboration. Here at LumApps, we offer a cloud-based intranet solution that protects you against any cyberattacks.

10. Build a Transparent Culture

Creating a comfortable space where your employees can share thoughts and opinions brings out the best in everyone. One of the most vital assets of company culture is built on transparency and open work principles. When co-workers feel empowered to build stronger relationships with peers, this creates a more profound connection with one another, leading to higher trust levels. Ultimately, each employee can fully contribute their value to the company.

Example of Store Community – LumApps Intranet

11. Simplifies Employee Onboarding

The tribal knowledge developed and shared within a single source is one of the most significant benefits of intranet offers. This can substantially reduce the time to onboard new employees by making accessible the knowledge and expertise from past and current employees. Having all the needed information for each role in the company helps employees work faster and feel more confident in what they produce.

12. Enhanced Project Management

After you have successfully launched a project, supporting and maintaining a positive client experience is essential to every business. Building a modern intranet provides you the tools to track your current and past projects, making monitoring progress and issue resolutions much more efficient. By observing conversations between the internal and external teams, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of the challenges that emerge during the project’s lifecycle.

13. Efficient Process Consolidation

Consolidate common business workflows and reduce the need to utilize multiple applications with a modern social intranet platform. All of your marketing, HR, accounting, business management, and so much more can be aggregated into a central digital workspace. These efficiencies and benefits translate directly into increased profits.

14. Documentation that Grows with Your Company

Every business’s backbone and the key to its success are knowledgeable and passionate staff backed with efficient internal communication. As your company expands and scales, your intranet follows suit. Each month brings new policies, information, documentation, and lessons to be learned. Your intranet acts as your company’s digital library that updates in real-time with each of these changes.

15. Intuitive Calendar Features

Everyone has experienced the difficulties of trying to schedule meetings with numerous attendants. Trying to track down when everyone is available can be cumbersome and time-consuming. With an intranet, employees will have access to their peers’ shared calendars and calendars for team communities and groups. This intuitive approach to accessing company, group, and shared calendars eliminates the need to toggle between applications to schedule a single meeting.

Most modern intranet solutions have out-of-the-box integrations with third-party platforms like Outlook in Office 365 or Google Calendar in Google Workspace. This native integration aggregates all of your calendars into one place, empowering employees with the intranet tools to succeed.

G Suite Dashboard – LumApps Intranet Platform

16. Improving Relationships with External Teams

Improving the interactions and relations with outside partners has never been more comfortable with the help of an intranet. Inviting trusted external teams to join specific areas within your platform opens dialog and communication between groups. This increased visibility and collaboration further facilitates the growth of the business relationship. Ultimately, your partners will have access to tools and resources to understand better internal processes and how they can best improve their workflows.

17. Strengthened HR Management

A human resource intranet redefines how you hire new employees and improves the onboarding process with automation and self-training resources. Businesses that want to use existing talent by hiring from within the company can utilize the intranet as a job posting board. The management team can use employee profiles that showcase expertise throughout the company. With this information, companies can hire from within instead of going through an additional onboarding and hiring process.

→ Read More: Onboarding Center Use Case

Onboarding Center – LumApps

18. Saved Time and Money for Your IT Department

Your IT department can organize and make accessible your company tools, knowledge, applications, and information from a single workspace. With robust intranet search features, employees can find needed resources from anywhere on your intranet. Regardless of where employees are working, your IT department can support all workers through a secure cloud platform built to scale and grow with your business.

19. Easily Share Information

Sending out information and company-wide announcements has never been more streamlined than with your company’s intranet. By sharing content through internal news posts , your team has additional means to respond and interact. This sharing of information in an open platform facilitates discussion within the company to share their points of view and expertise. Creating space for open dialogue with your company instills the value of communication and trust between employees.

20. Meeting Documentation

Meetings minutes can become cluttered and disorganized quickly when you have multiple sources of these notes. This can become so exacerbated that most of them become unusable. This is why managing documentation and files within a social intranet can play a crucial role in organizational efficiency. By empowering intranet users to create specific pages where they can share and collaborate with peers, document actions, reports, and presentations can be aggregated into one centralized place.

20 Advantages of Intranet in Business for Employees

1. Increase Productivity

Employees that regularly use their company intranet can improve productivity by accessing all the tools and information they need in one location. We all know the struggle of having to tab between numerous applications and tools throughout the day. Whether you are accessing Outlook, Google Calendar, SharePoint, or other business applications, you can access them all within a single dashboard. This essential boost to productivity is one of the importance of intranet in an organization.

2. Boosts Recognition and Reward

Your company employee benefits intranet is the ideal place to acknowledge the work and efforts of your employees. Showing appreciation by congratulating employees can do wonders to motivation, satisfaction, and so much more. Utilize your intranet platform for sharing success stories, goal achievements, or just saying, “Thank you for a job well done.” Regardless of someone achieving the highest sales or completed the most challenging task, recognition goes a long way to boost morale.

LumApps Intranet Recognition Center

3. Team-Shared Calendars

Transparency is essential for quality teamwork. Integrating a shared calendar helps co-workers track each other’s availability and tasks. Your intranet shared calendar can be used to schedule meetings, display dates of importance, log paid-time-off, feature upcoming company events, etc. A shared calendar empowers teams to collaborate and maximize their time. Teams can share their roadmap with the company and showcase important dates, promoting visibility within the organization.

4. Improve Collaboration and Feedback

The most effective way to motivate employees to utilize your intranet is to provide them with tools and resources that improve their day-to-day work. Co-workers will naturally use the tools when drawn in by their peers or their work. Modern employee benefits intranet platforms have social features such as liking, commenting, mentioning, document sharing, and so much more. Using this form of communication helps bring in the right people to help contribute to work that they have expertise in.

→ Read More: How to Boost Intranet Engagement: Ideas, Strategies and Tools

5. Accessibility on Mobile Devices

An often overlooked benefit of a cloud-based intranet is the ability to create a mobile workplace where employees can connect to the intranet no matter their location. This enables access to company information and tools immediately. This saves employees time and reduces work delays when working remotely in different time zones and locations. Essential mobile-friendly intranet features are built around your company’s needs, such as live broadcasts and events, live chat support, and so much more.

6. Brings Your Workplace Culture to Life

An engaging and welcoming corporate culture brings a sense of belonging and fellowship between co-works. The employee benefits intranet is the perfect tool for fostering meaningful company culture as employees are encouraged to connect and collaborate. The importance of an employee intranet solution promotes teamwork to drive lasting results.

Inclusion & Diversity – LumApps Intranet

7. Build a Meaningful Community

Beyond the communication platform, your intranet portal is a collaborative and social digital workplace. Build meaningful employee networks by facilitating the growth of communities and groups. Professional groups can be created around any expertise, company branch, localization, etc. Additionally, you can build social communities around similar interests. For example, an employee could put together an art appreciation group, a book club, a bicycling group… The possibilities are limitless, and all drive positive team relationships.

8. Personalized Experience

The new digital experience is centralized around personalization, even in the workplace. Creating unique or personalized information is the providing of relevant content to an individual. Employees should have instant access to pertinent work information that facilitates the improvement of their performance. Not only should this help improve their performance, but a personalized user dashboard curated to their needs and interests enhances employee satisfaction.

9. Helps Employees Find Information

The importance of a good intranet features a global search where employees can quickly find information and resources across your digital workspace. LumApps features a Native Search connected to the advanced enterprise search, Google Cloud Search, and Office 365 Search. Without needing to open multiple tabs or log into various apps, you can search across all Google Workspace and Office 365 applications from your intranet platform. Consolidating all your company knowledge into one location is one of the many benefits of using intranet solutions.

10. Improve Internal Communication – Stronger Communication

Communication is essential for businesses in efficiently completing work, but also in innovation. One of the advantages of intranet in business is facilitating collaboration with accessibility to relevant workspaces and tools. Collaboration can come in the form of project workspaces, internal groups, and even cooperation with clients. A modern intranet has native integration with social media platforms and functions to help peers connect. Overall, the importance of an employee intranet that supports communication and communities creates connections between employees beyond their immediate team is essential to building a more connected company.

→ Read More: The 12 Most Important Internal Communication Methods for Companies

11. Heightened Employee Activity and Sentiment Tracking

It is imperative to measure or gauge the engagement of employees for any business. With data collected through an intranet, peers can see others’ successes, their achievements, and where their progress is on their tasks. A business social intranet can collect analytics in organized, comprehensive reports that you can then use to evaluate what is working and what isn’t. Having this information helps reinforce employee behaviors where they see the most success.

12. Reduce Meetings and Time Spent in Outlook/Gmail

Trying to sift through an overly cluttered email inbox or a calendar that is stuffed with double-booked meetings is both time-consuming and daunting. An employee benefits intranet with a quality integrated chat feature helps empower peers to collaborate and communicate efficiently without needing to email or schedule meetings all the time. It is much easier to keep the team informed and to receive prompt feedback.

13. Strengthened Human Resource Management

Communication with your human resources department can feel like a one-way street, but this view overlooks how inefficient it is for employees and managers. It is essential to foster a relationship between employees and management where they treat each other with a high level of respect. Empowered HR departments can play a significant role in improving this mutual respect by facilitating a chance for feedback, and a modern social intranet makes this possible.

14. Improved Employee Satisfaction

It’s no mystery employee engagement is critical to building a more productive workplace with high employee satisfaction. Of the many benefits of intranet platforms, significantly improving engagement in multiple ways is but one. As business values and culture flourish on your intranet, it is easier for co-workers to visualize the larger picture and feel a part of something. An intranet is a digital workspace for active communication. Employees can use this to remain connected to their team and to receive feedback from managers.

15. Provides Organizational Clarity

Companies are ever-changing, and having a clear definition of the organization’s structure is difficult to understand. One of the advantages of intranet in business is creating dynamic organization charts  that provide visibility on your company’s architecture and hierarchy. Adding rich layers to this, additional features like individual profiles help employees understand peer roles and responsibilities throughout your business.

16. Better Internal Communications

Social intranets encourage the flourishing of internal communication across the entire company. This is made possible by facilitating open discussions between teams and sharing knowledge between peers, leadership can easily engage with all business members, and departments can share updates. The most empowering piece is that this communication is available to anyone in the company. Everyone can share information, articles, make comments and provide feedback. In this way, intranets empower individuals with a voice and streamline communication by bringing it into one place.

LumApps Intranet Overview

Discover LumApps

17. Travel and PTO Request Tools

It is always difficult for employees and companies to coordinate on paid time off and unexpected absences. When someone is unable to make their shift, having a system where it is easy to reallocate someone else’s work is critical to each project’s success. Companies can set up virtual spaces in their intranet where co-workers can collaborate and request time off as needed. Having an intranet solution with documentation and a process for these scenarios makes things easier for the employee and the employer.

18. Building Brand and Value

Of the many advantages of intranet in business, reinforcing your brand and value among your peers is key to a sense of “oneness.” An intranet provides several ways for placing your company values in the front and center. A few examples are; Recognizing employees for being an example of the company’s values. Collaboration and sharing news stories, web articles, and blogs that align with the business. As well as having an open forum where peers can converse about the many ways they see brand and values in their daily work life.

19. Motivating Peers

The benefits of using intranet solutions are vast and go beyond just its functionality. Through gamification features and creating a friendly environment for employees, inspiration and encouragement flourish. Able to motivate in multiple ways, its customization tools empower businesses to build dynamic and exciting pages that make the intranet experience enjoyable.

LumApps Design Experience

20. Managing Passwords

Businesses transitioning to cloud-based software architecture and solutions will notice that the amount of passwords needed to be remembered vastly increases. Consequently, sensitive applications and information are protected by insecure passwords. With a robust intranet, each employee can create private spaces to store all of their corporate passwords. This solution offers a simplistic and secure method of storing and managing sensitive information.