Modern businesses invest heavily in company intranets to boost workplace productivity, collaboration, and operational efficiency. Certainly, it helps gain a competitive edge over industry peers. However, evaluating the existing intranet settings against the standard best practices becomes crucial to maximizing the investment.
'Intranet benchmarking,' the process of assessing the intranet's features, effectiveness, and performance, proves beneficial to understand if your intranet is aligned with the organizational goals and caters to your industry-specific requirements.
Let's explore five proven strategies to get the best out of your intranet ecosystem.
Come up with a user-centric design
An easily navigable mega menu, engaging home page, robust search mechanism, and interactive web parts make it easy for employees to perform their tasks better, eventually contributing to enhanced productivity and overall satisfaction. Conduct thorough research on what your employees need the most and customize the platform accordingly. Help your employees stay updated with the latest organizational happenings, access documents, share information, and easily engage with coworkers to match the requirements and preferences of the users.
Focus on creating a collaborative workplace
To what extent is your intranet fostering workplace collaboration? Enhancing workplace collaboration is undoubtedly one of the primary reasons for organizations opting for a digital solution. However, having a centralized place for employees to organize, co-author, share documents, assign, and track tasks, and access uninterrupted communication channels can contribute to higher employee engagement and a sense of responsibility with shared goals.
Design automated and streamlined workflows
Redundant and repetitive tasks are prone to errors and are time-consuming. At the same time, an intranet automating standard workflows can be a game changer for organizations striving for enhanced workplace productivity. Try automating the approval processes for standard documents and forms, reminders and notifications for hassle-free task tracking, feedback, employee onboarding, and more, reducing manual intervention and improving overall efficiency.
Opt for a solution with seamless integration capabilities
Integration capability is a key benchmark while opting for a robust intranet solution. An intranet that seamlessly integrates with various applications and databases facilitates efficient data flow and helps users leverage powerful features without even leaving the intranet ecosystem. A SharePoint intranet integrated with Microsoft 365 productivity applications allows users to access Teams, Outlook, Delve, Power BI, and more, making it easy for them to perform various tasks with utmost ease.
Ensure proper user training and support
An intranet goes through functional issues and needs proper maintenance, security audits, and a performance optimization plan for continuous improvement. So, opting for a reliable service provider too becomes crucial while benchmarking your intranet solution. For nearly all technologies, including the intranet, adequate user training is imperative to ensure high user adoption rates and proficiency. However, SharePoint-based intranet requires less training due to its intuitive user interface, consistency across applications, unified collaboration platform, and familiar Microsoft 365 environment.
The intranet serves as a backbone for modern organizations. However, achieving intranet excellence is a strategic process that can only be achieved with a balanced approach. From clean and navigable design to timely maintenance and support, every aspect contributes together to create a robust intranet platform that drives collaboration, productivity, and innovation, ensuring overall organizational success.
