How to Build a Next-Generation Intranet that Fuels the Employee Experience

When it comes to fuelling employee experience, there are a number of considerations from health and wellbeing to general job satisfaction, but having a tool that allows you to develop these aspects should be front and center. 

Company intranets have often been a source of frustration for employees and businesses, with their lackluster design and outdated processes for communications. In recent years, this underperforming piece of software has been transformed to serve the needs of the modern workforce, allowing it to now sit at the heart of a business, an invaluable solution to many of the challenges we face in a post-Covid era.

With features that embrace the best of social media, real-time communication and sharing features, housed in a safe and secure platform, an intranet can now offer an oasis for culture and employee engagement. With thoughtful UX and ease of use, the days of the cumbersome intranet can be a thing of the past.

Now that we have an exceptional platform, building an intranet that has employee experience at its heart is the next step. 

In this guide, we’ll highlight some key considerations to shaping a next-generation intranet that fuels employee experience. 

Start by understanding employees 

In order to build a next-generation intranet, the process should start with a detailed look at employees - how they operate and what they need to succeed. Get feedback from employees on the current intranet or equivalent services and find out what’s working and what isn’t. This might be different for those who are office-based, hybrid and remote working, so it’s important to consider all scenarios and build from the ground up. 

It’s useful to begin with ‘must haves’ and ‘a wishlist’ to avoid a neverending list of requirements that aren’t relevant across the majority of the team. It can be very helpful to start with platforms and applications you already use, for example integrating Microsoft or Google to your intranet to embrace the ’easy-wins.’

Ensuring employees have the right platform to share their insights and experiences and feel listened to is paramount to successful design and implementation. If you establish a solution that checks a lot of boxes, you’ll be making the lives of your teams easier, freeing up valuable time and likely increasing productivity. If you listen to employees at this stage in the process, it’s also more likely the intranet you build will be fit for purpose and engaged with. 

Build with employees in mind

An intranet offers a huge range of tools to improve employee experience, from targeted communications, making sure the right information reaches the right people, to social features for employees to post, like, comment, and share posts in communities, generating conversation and encouraging participation. 

Polls and surveys offer an open forum for employee feedback and an employee directory gives teams all the contacts they need in one place. Developing your solution with your employees in mind will help shape the platform to have a positive impact. 

By putting employee experience at the heart of the platform, you’ll be creating a positive company culture. You’ll also be encouraging creativity and innovation as employees have a forum to present ideas and a culture of support to be open and honest.

Supported employees will impact the bottom line

Employees that are engaged produce better results, have higher job satisfaction and are far more likely to advocate for your business. Great employee experience will also help improve customer experiences, resulting in better performance, higher levels of productivity and inevitably, the bottom line. Engaged employees are 24% less likely to leave and almost five times more likely to perform their best work. In establishing an impactful intranet, you have the opportunity to redefine every area of a business and support growth, backed by an engaged team. 

Employees are more productive when everything is in one place and accessible from any device. Keeping them connected to each other as well as company news and updates, bridges the gap between remote and office-based work and establishes a culture where employees can thrive. As part of a well-developed intranet, integration with existing apps offers an upgrade in service quality, but also a chance to build a comprehensive platform with existing solutions that works for your team. 

Consider how you’ll measure impact

A next-generation intranet can offer an incredible upgrade to the employee experience, but you can only see the impact of a solution if you have a way to track engagement and results. Therefore, you’ll need an analytics function to allow you to measure employee engagement, and track how employees interact with the platform and content. This is an invaluable tool for learning and shaping the platform, and for ensuring it’s having the impact you want.

Employees will appreciate sharing their insights and feedback if they can see progress and changes as a result. This will build a culture of trust and encourage employees to keep engaging as they can see the clear outcomes. Measuring impact demonstrates that as a business you’re committed to this process and the benefits a next-generation intranet can have.

Be prepared to change and develop

An intranet has the potential to be the most effective and agile tool in your organization, growing and developing in line with your business. Taking the feedback from your analytics and shaping your platform in response is a way to make sure your intranet is not only meeting requirements but also transforming the way your employees engage with their colleagues and workload. Employee engagement is a process. Only when there is a clear, aligned vision and mutual understanding can a business feel the full benefit, so being prepared to adjust and learn is key to success.

Remaining agile can be a challenge when you’re investing in different solutions, however, modern intranet solutions are created to be versatile, with a wide range of applications and functions to elevate the employee experience.

A next-generation intranet can transform a business

With a tailored intranet that directly serves your employees at the core of a business, the benefits for individual employees, teams and the company can be unlimited. Whereas a traditional intranet can serve a purpose, a next-generation platform embraces an entrepreneurial spirit, with specific features to drive growth and level-up engagement. The ability to capture and share knowledge, with analytics to track impact, can directly impact employee experience. 

Employees are able to align their work and efforts to a wider company vision and strategy, creating momentum towards goals and increasing their engagement. Employee experience is an incredibly powerful element of workplaces, fuelling innovation and progress in businesses. If we equip teams with the tools to connect and thrive, the impact on businesses can be hugely positive.