Every organization wants its employees to maintain strong communication and coordination among them. To achieve this, the companies opt for intranet portals. An intranet portal acts as a route for accessing all the enterprise information and applications. It is very important for a company to have a dedicated intranet portal to ensure that the employees access data, information and applications with ease. When a company invests a big amount in developing intranet portals, it is highly important for it to ensure that the employees use it regularly and drive maximum benefit out of it.
Unfortunately many companies come across situations when its employees start creating distance with the intranet portal. Have you ever wondered why the intranet portals fail to keep the audience adhered to them? Employees usually find intranet portals boring. Most intranet portals act as collection of static web pages on which the employees hardly find anything new or interesting. Employees prefer to spend their time more on social networking websites instead of surfing around the intranet portals. Messages of CEO or MD do not create sufficient attraction which can make them stuck to the portal.
Imagine how life would be if your employees see a good social life on your company’s intranet portal? This thought gives rise to the concept of social intranet. Social intranets are combination of intranet portals and social networking. Social Intranet can be achieved by leveraging SharePoint Out of the box features & integrating third party tools like Yammer, FB, and LinkedIn etc.
Social intranets facilitate speedy communication within the team. Nothing beats talking to a colleague, but you've got to find their contact details first. Though most of the intranets portals make its member enable to see contact details of each other but the ability to interact fast on the portal itself stays missing. When it comes to large companies, the role of social intranet portals becomes extensively beneficial. In big companies, the employees hardly get a chance to interact with the employees of other departments and hence the social intranet portal makes them know each other better. Transforming intranet portal from merely a static website into an informative website and communication platform significantly paces up frequency of visits on the portal.
It is always good for a company to motivate its employees and take up their suggestions. When an employee is heard by the management, it creates a sense of responsibility with the employee. The same goes with intranet portals. If the employees find that the portal is merely a place where the management is spreading few files, documents, notices etc. the former will be least interested in accessing it. On the other hand, when the employees are provided with authorship authority, it makes them feel themselves as a part of the portal and use it often.
Earning rewards and showing them off to world has been a basic desire of human beings since long time. Gamification has evolved as one of the strongest tool which favors success of intranet portals. It is a good idea to put some interactivity on intranet portal and provide rewards and points to the users who participate in those activities. This becomes an important promoter of repeated visits on the portal and makes the employees check the portal regularly.
Intranet portals are supposed to make the life of employees easy. But unfortunately most intranet portals do not furnish this need. In today’s time where everyone is already burdened with information, the load of non-relevant information becomes a trouble for employees. This fact initiates the requirement of providing maximum personalization on the portals. Personalization offers employees to choose the information they want to stay updated with.
So if you are planning to strengthen the internal communication and co-ordination at your organization, do not go just for an intranet portal, go for Social Intranet.