• Share this:
Why your employee experience needs an outstanding intranet

4 min read

Why your employee experience needs an outstanding intranet

Find out why an intranet acts as the backbone for a great employee experience.

How’s the employee experience in your company? If you don’t know, it’s time to start paying it some attention. Delivering an outstanding employee experience is the new competitive battleground for businesses.

This article explores the role of technology in improving employee experience. More specifically, it focuses on how your employee intranet is the starting point and anchor for a comprehensive and connected employee experience.

What is employee experience?

In a nutshell, employee experience refers to everything an employee experiences at work—their interactions with their boss, their software, their teams, and more. It’s a holistic term that considers the full spectrum of an employee’s experiences at a company.

The key word here is holistic. A great employee experience is holistic, and herein lies one of the biggest challenges for improvement. Employee experience components are dispersed across many tools, files, and forms. The first step to changing this is to glue these pieces together and make them easy for employees to navigate and discover.

That’s where the modern intranet comes into its own.

Modern intranets: the backbone of employee experience

If you want to get serious about improving your employee experience, a modern intranet is a tool you can’t do without. 

Traditional intranets are the embodiment of bad employee experiences. They were dysfunctional and frustratinghomepages with hundreds of links to cluttered pages that were seldom current or relevant.

Modern intranets are so unlike this, they almost deserve a different name. They make navigation and discovery easy, and they’re designed to keep information current and relevant. They have a holistic approachbringing all relevant information and interactions into one place.

If that doesn’t sound like your employee intranet, it’s time to replace it. That’s the first step to an engaging employee experience.

“An explosion of digital and mobile tools has emerged to help HR design and deliver a great employee experience. […] New tools are moving well beyond traditional email to improve productivity and engagement.” Deloitte University Press


How modern intranets anchor your employee experience

By using intranet software as a unifying platform, you can create an experience that allows employees and new hires to interact efficiently with the company, and the company with them.

When this is done properly, it will involve deploying the company’s brand and values to deliver a seamless experience to your employees.

In turn, your employees now have a way to explore, absorb, and participate, thereby contributing to the overall fabric and culture of the business.

Here are some examples of this in practice: 

1. Onboarding

A good intranet makes onboarding simpler than ever. It's easy for new hires to find their feet with easy-to-access documents, up-to-date organization charts, rich bios on their peers, and a vibrant news hub that provides information and insights into the culture of the company. 

2. Recognition

Recognition is an essential part of the employee experience, and it serves to improve employees' satisfaction and engagement levels. Research shows that the recognition or reward doesn't need to be monetary or excessive (it can be a simple 'thank you'), but it does need to be timely. It's easy to do this with your intranet if it has a live-feed and/or an integration with a peer-to-peer recognition tool like Bonusly

3. Information

Need to get updated HR documents into the hands of your employees? Have a training video that everyone should watch? Want to make sure everyone reads the new policy? All of this can be done with a modern intranet. A good one will make sure this information is front and centre so it can't be missed.

4. Communication 

A modern intranet allows communication to happen across your organization. It enables teams to have open discussions, individuals to share knowledge, and leadership to stay in touch with the entire organization.

All communication can flow both ways—anyone can share information and articles, and everyone can comment and provide feedback. In this way, an intranet streamlines communication by bringing it into one place and empowers individuals with a voice and company knowledge.

5. Culture

A company is not a company without its people, and modern intranets are about those people. Bringing them together, bringing out the best in them, and enriching your company culture in the process.

Through the actions mentioned above—peer to peer recognition, leadership articles, brand messaging, and more—a good intranet becomes a hive of activity that takes on the characteristics of the company itself. It's a hotbed of company culture. 

Conclusion

Creating an effective employee experience requires a dedicated and holistic approach. With the right employee intranet in place, it becomes much easier to unify and build out the many components of your employee experience.

A modern intranet glues your workplace culture, your key information, and the software tools you use, into a connected experience for your employees. It’s your starting point to a more efficient and innovative company.

Want to improve your employee experience?

See how an intranet can help you

placeholder
placeholder

Read more by
Hannah Price

  • Share this:

Add your comments