Intranets that connect employees? Adopt these 10 steps

Corporate intranets are very popular tools that have been developed for over 20 years. Their original purpose was to centralize files and make them available to the entire organization, but in the current digital era, it is possible to develop a corporate intranet that can do much more for organizations.

Initiating an intranet development project is an extremely challenging yet rewarding task. It involves some of the biggest challenges most organizations face today, such as teamwork, rapid decision-making vs. consensus, the ability to innovate, and finally, maintaining productivity and efficiency throughout the whole process. 

The development of a corporate intranet must be integrated into the overall strategy of the organization, but above all within the framework of its digital transformation strategy, and in addition to the aforementioned challenges, it also involves the constitution of a core group composed of the employees who are essential to the project, which can also be a challenge in itself.

Given the potential for internal change, particularly in communication and employee engagement, this core group should include the IT, Communication, and Human Resources departments, among others, and those in management positions.

An intranet and its potential to change the way of communication, bring innovation to the organization, create more interactions, and facilitate the daily life of the employees, is part of the evolution of the digital experience lived by the employees, consequently leading them to connect more with each other. To this end, it is considered that the planning for the development of an intranet should follow these 10 aspects:

1 – Integration of communication and collaboration tools, creating points of contact between collaborators through professional chat and video tools, among others. This is a way of concentrating different work teams and topics in a single tool. 

2 – Make it easy for collaborators to search for content and implement machine learning to make content suggestions based on the interests of each collaborator.

3 – Centralize useful information such as other employees’ contact information, their location, hierarchical structure, groups they belong to, etc. It is also important to centralize functions such as meeting room bookings, lunch reservations, materials, and more, as this contributes to greater coherence in the organization’s digitization process. 

4 – Centralize various institutional information, such as environmental and social responsibility policy, among others, all the procedural documentation belonging to the organization, templates, and forms. This approach increases efficiency and communication consistency and reduces some of the administrative burden placed on certain employees.

5 – Make the organization’s service catalog available through service management tools that centralize all types of services available to the staff in a single place. These services are vacation requests, declaration requests, data changes (tax data, BIN, etc.), IT support, and others.

6 – Develop and improve knowledge management by creating information-sharing areas with interaction features, forums on different topics, etc. If relevant, you can also incorporate some gamification techniques to encourage and reward sharing. At a higher level, the organization also needs to share information to contribute to greater employee enrichment.

7 – Invest in web design and usability (UI & UX) to make the Intranet relevant, visually appealing, practical, and intuitive to navigate. 

8 – Integrate the different levels of external and internal communication of the organization to disseminate organizational news to all employees.

9 – Allow interaction with content, both institutional and related to employees: birthdays, employee recognition, etc.

10 – Access to the hierarchical structure of the organization through the Intranet, which contributes to a clearer organizational culture. 

A Corporate Intranet can be one of the pillars of connection among the employees of an Organization, playing a relevant role in digital transformation, productivity, and collaboration, and in maintaining knowledge management; therefore, it is an important ally of the Human Resources, and Communication and Information Technology departments.