This is how an Intranet brings Value to your Organization + Tips to Measure its Effectiveness.
If we talk of one of the most productive business tools, then the intranet never fails to fall on the list. It is one software that allows the employees throughout the organization, irrespective of their distance, to reach their full potential by bridging the gap between them.
Besides allowing the employees to have smooth communication and collaboration, it helps businesses create a satisfying smooth process.
When it is about the business intranet, the organizations that invest in a secure intranet enjoy advanced inter-linked structures, social connectivity, and impressive return on investments.
Now, when you introduce a new intranet in your organization, there are a few features that you must access to ensure that the chosen intranet is all set to support the objectives and requirements of the business. Besides this, it is also essential to see if the core features will be valuable to you over time or not.
This is how an Intranet brings Value to your Organization
So, here are the features that your business intranet must have to support your organization:
1. Increase Employee Efficiency
One of the essential things for any organization is its people, in the form of employees. It is the ability of an employee to work efficiently that determines the success of an organization.
With an intranet in your organization, the employees will use the same to find out their everyday tasks, carry out the same, and reach out for help whenever required.
Since all the employees of an organization will rely on it, it must help them work more efficiently by eliminating difficulties in communication and information management. It must also make the process of collaboration smooth and enable the employees to carry out different projects/tasks systematically.
An employee intranet must be such that the employees look up to it for resolving their issues and making their jobs easier.
2. Healthy Workplace Culture
Work stations nowadays have employees scattered throughout the organization across different departments, with many of them working remotely. Under such situations, your business intranet must foster a smooth corporate culture by connecting people through meaningful work relationships.
It must stimulate improved communication between the employees while adding meaning to their daily work and promoting the values your organization wishes to reflect.
One of the best ways to deliver a sense of inspiration among the employees is by using the intranet’s news or blog section, allowing them to interact with other employees.
3. Support Remote Employees
With the evolution of mobile technology, more and more people are working from remote locations or their homes. With an increasing number of remote employees, it is essential to make sure that they can access relevant data, information, documents, etc., as and when they need it.
Now, how can this be done?
The best intranet comes with features ensuring the mobile workers have easy and quick access to the information they need. So, make sure your intranet hosting software is loaded with features to make everyday tasks easy for far-flung employees.
4. Content Targeting Feature
Every organization has employees with different goals, needs, skills, etc., and your corporate intranet must be able to recognize their needs and provide them with the relevant content timely.
So, to make sure that your intranet brings value to the entire organization, it must identify the needs of different employees and benefit them all.
To serve the discussed needs, content targeting can be useful as it ensures that the right people receive the right content at the right time.
5. Support Organization’s Objective
An intranet must be able to fulfill the long-term business objectives of an organization. It holds the power to gauge the performance of employees and encourage cooperation throughout the organization by setting milestones for success and meeting new targets.
Thus, your corporate intranet must be able to align well with the organization’s defined targets. It is also an excellent practice to examine every aspect of the set goals and see if the intranet can handle the requirements of your organization or not.
You may also ask your intranet service provider to look into the needful.
6. Centralized Portal
Technological advancements have revolutionized the way we work in today’s age. Such advancements have also made it easy for employees to work from remote locations using any app of their choice.
The growing possibilities of working digitally have made it essential for organizations to safeguard their data via effective integration.
A corporate intranet provides the perfect solution to safeguarding the data by providing a single portal to the employees. This centralized portal supports all the tools & apps the employees need to complete their tasks.
7. Grow with the Organization
Technology is always on the rise, and with so many advancements in technology, one must wonder if they still need an intranet in their organization. Well, the answer is, of course, YES!!
An intranet plays a crucial role in the success of any organization by safeguarding all the information needed to keep the workplace function smoothly and allowing the employees to connect easily.
While it is essential to intertwine the intranet with the company’s objectives, they must also evolve to meet the changing needs of their users. You can do this by examining the goals of your corporate intranet, and by evaluating the purposes, you will be able to mold them to suit your evolving business needs.
Now that you have taken a look at how an intranet helps bring value to your organization, let’s move forward and look at the tips to measure its effectiveness.
Tips to Measure an Intranet’s Effectiveness
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Organizations go the extra mile to implement a new intranet and applying the same under tight budget constraints. They usually invest a lot of time in getting insights from the end-users. And then comes the back and forth with the intranet service provider as both the service provider and company work together to build the perfect intranet for meeting the company’s needs and objectives.
Companies put in a lot of time, effort, and money to build a perfect intranet; they often make very little or no effort to measure its effectiveness.
Monitoring the effectiveness of your intranet is crucial as it helps you keep an eye on the fact that your organization’s intranet is still a valuable resource.
If we talk of a one-size-fits-all approach to measuring the effectiveness of an intranet, then it might be right to say that there is no one approach as there are many factors to be taken into account. It would be best if you decided on the factors based on which you want to measure the effectiveness of your intranet and then measure results over time.
1. The Intranet Usage
Intranet managers usually measure metrics related to intranet usage. The concerned data can generally be found through a third-party platform such as Google Analytics or the intranet’s admin dashboard.
Here are a few sample usage metrics:
- Bounce Rate,
- Unique Visits,
- Unique Users,
- Referral Sites,
- Average time spent on the site, etc.
You must take care of here that instead of using these metrics alone, you must also get a clear idea of these figures’ context. For instance, what percentage of potential users are regular/returning users?
2. The Efficiency of Employees
A useful employee intranet helps employees accomplish their tasks efficiently by finding the information faster, boosting the internal processes’ speed, and fostering collaboration. To understand how an intranet helps improve the employees’ efficiency, consider usability and findability metrics.
Here are a few sample metrics to analyze efficiency:
- Task success rate,
- Articles reviewed,
- Content readability rate,
- Time spent on completing common tasks, etc.
It would be best to consider using time as the critical metric to determine efficiency-related scores since it is a good indication of productivity and efficiency.
3. The Percentage of Active Users
Many of your intranet users might view the content available on it, but do you think that all of them are actively engaged with the intranet? Social intranets are among the best ways to help keep the employees connected with those working remotely and with the organization.
Here are a few sample metrics to analyze user engagement:
- Participation rate,
- Active users percentage,
- Amount of user-generated content,
- Percentage of complete employee profile,
- Like, share, comment, and ratings of an individual, etc.
This can even help you get an insight into significant changes in your company’s culture. For instance, if you see that the employees contribute to the interactions, it means that your organization is growing increasingly connected.
4. The Level of Satisfaction among Users
Measuring the percentage of active users on your intranet does not give you an actual idea of how satisfied users are. To get a clear sense of user satisfaction, you must use the intranet’s form tool or a third-party tool to conduct intranet satisfaction surveys. To encourage honest opinions, you must try and keep feedback anonymous.
Here are a few sample metrics to analyze user satisfaction:
- Awareness of features,
- Satisfaction with essential features,
- Features that users like most/least,
- The likeliness of recommendation,
- Overall satisfaction with the intranet, etc.
When you introduce a new feature, it is not required for you to wait till the time you hit send on another survey. You can easily create a simple intranet poll to have a quick reaction.
When it comes to measuring the effectiveness of intranets, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to help you do the needful. All you can do is take the initiative towards measuring the same. So, stop planning about which metrics to measure and start measuring the results periodically.
5. Impact on the Entire Organization
An intranet plays a crucial role in helping you achieve the objectives of your organization. To demonstrate the contribution of the intranet to your organization’s success, you should focus on recording metrics.
Remember that the metrics you consider while measuring the impact of the intranet on your organization will depend on your organization’s objectives. They may come from sources including interviews, surveys, and many more.
Here are a few sample metrics to help you analyze the intranet’s impact on the organization:
- Overall time saved,
- Overall money saved,
- Level of employee engagement,
- Time is taken to respond to queries, etc.
Relying on a small sample size may result in making assumptions. So, to avoid any assumptions, try to pull your metrics from as broad an audience sample as you can.
I hope that the provided information will serve you in your best interest. For any help, feel free to share your query in the comment box below.
