Intranet is a basic need for all industry types and functional roles as it is a great help when it comes to digital asset organization. It has emerged as a very powerful tool for modern-day businesses to empower employees, boost communication, improve collaboration within teams and streamline all the day-to-day processes. In short, it has become the central repository for all the key information that staff needs to get the job done.
There are a number of factors that can influence your decision to select intranet software that fits best for your business. Analyze the immediate needs and requirements of your team to set up goals to be achieved from the software. Get the budget in place. Review multiple vendors who have the possibility to give you quick deployment, flexible quotes and amazing add-ons to add value to your intranet. Do not rush in for such decisions. A careful think through beforehand will surely help you overcome several problems.
There needs to be a Launch Plan (from Orientation to Training to content generation to go LIVE). Launching a new company intranet is as sophisticated as a new product launch happening in your company. Give high value to it. Plan it effectively and think through various aspects of it. It’s just not letting your employees know about the new piece of software which they would be using daily. It’s building up emotional connection with it where they become super excited about using it to ease out their difficult tasks. Try to gather as much information or requirements of your organization as well as employees, to assess what would help the employee ‘Reach’ the intranet, ‘Use’ the information available, ‘Revisit’ the Intranet often.
Remember, it’s difficult for your employees to adjust to any new intranet. Keep the home page simple but highly intuitive. Employees tend to use the intranet if they get a quick navigation to daily tasks like meeting calendars, important news and happenings of the company at one place, project management tools, and other social sites access. The selection of ingredients that built up your home page is equally important here. Mantra for effective usage of the intranet is use a clean user interface with minimal design and with all important applications on the home page.
At a basic level, your company intranet must have a strong brand, a sense of identity that distinguishes it from the other public website or general information sources within the organization. There should be a single look-and-feel that encompasses the entire intranet. This includes a standard page layout, colors, and navigation. It’s important that you carry the company logo and theme colors into the intranet pages but not necessarily copy them. Some companies play with the color themes with changes in seasons or moods, sometimes with festive times as well. This tends to give a freshness to the daily moods of the users also.
The next important thing which you need to take care of is the selection of readily available Add-ins or Apps or Web-parts which build up an effective and productive intranet for your company. These help in getting a head-start by immediately deploying the Add-ins (instead of recreating each feature/functionality everything yourself). Make sure each of your departments has something in the Intranet that brings them closer to collaboration and communication. Over the past decade, Beyond Key has successfully developed a lot of add-ins and workflows which can become serious ingredients for your company’s internet and across each functional area as well.
Things just don’t end up after setting up the intranet. They begin with it. Revisit the acceptance rate of the new social tool with your employees after using it. Check the difficult edges reported by your team and work on improvisation. If things are going smoothly, you can think of how to keep the progress moving. If you’re not meeting your goals, however, this is the time to consider how you can improve upon your intranet utilization.
Our observation- SharePoint intranets that have not been updated lesser than a week tend to lose connection with users. So, continuously update, improve and refresh the content as well as the look and feel of the intranet. Add Information that remains relevant and usable for a long time. Keep adding pages on Company’s updated approach, achievements, and happenings. Appointing a SharePoint manager can surely help you better organize and update SharePoint content to keep it evergreen.
Hopefully, we have been successful in explaining to you how to set up your own customized intranet without being a technical minefield. Contact us at Beyond Key for a free consultation on your intranet requirements.
