We often use social media, like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, to engage in conversation with our intranet software customers. A few months ago we asked
Why do you love your intranet?
on our Facebook Fan Page. The response was great!
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“Coppermark Bank uses Intranet Connections as our go-to source for all company information. From company news to highlighting new products to sharing employee awards to staying inspired with our thought of the day… Intranet Connections does it all for us. And to have the support team there at the drop of a hat to handle our questions – it is truly the perfect fit.” |
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Here are a few ideas to motivate and keep your employees engaged.
Share Your Corporate Values and Mission:
Your intranet is the perfect place to promote your corporate core values and goals for the organization. Ensure that your corporate mission and purpose are stated clearly on your intranet and use plain language. This keeps your employees aligned with your corporate goals and makes everyone feel like they are in the loop.
Recognize Employees:
What better way to inspire your staff than by letting them know about the achievements of their coworkers? If you learn of an accomplishment or award that an employee in your organization is receiving, write about it on the intranet. The achievements don’t have to be related to your organization at all. Highlighting your employees’ accomplishments not only shows that you recognize their contributions, but it can also help encourage others.
Information Bank:
Create an area on your intranet where employees can share blog posts and articles they find online. This can be a great source of information about trends in the market, best practices and innovation within your sector. You never know where a new idea will come from or what information with inspire others.
Thought of the Day:
Add a widget to your Home Page that cycles through a selection of pre-populated messages. The messages can be inspirational quotes, tips to help employees perform their daily tasks, answers to frequently asked questions and ‘did you know’ topics. The goal is to provide valuable content in bite-sized chunks, from the first page of your intranet.
Employee Message Walls:
Like Facebook walls, this is an excellent collaborative tool for conversation on your intranet. Employees can post questions, seek advice, learn from each other, and share/promote intranet content.
Sometimes, finding ways to inspire employees doesn’t need to involve complex initiatives. Take a look at the tools available on your current intranet and provide avenues for employees to share, inspire and engage.
Check out our Facebook page and be sure to “like” us!
Brian Chum is passionate about finding ways to improve how work is done in his organization. Health Essentials went looking for a company intranet that would offer powerful business and collaboration tools and selected Intranet Connections. In less than 3 months they are gearing up to launch their site. Here is their story.
With over 450 employees, Brian and his team needed to set up a system to connect all 18 business units in the company. Each unit received a company home page with links to external sites they use frequently. This provides all resources in a controlled environment without having to use bookmarks. Each business unit’s home page is customized to serve the needs of the department and will have the same logo, color and design as their corresponding websites. With this format, employees know what resources are available in each satellite location.
The IT team created a tools form where users can post their ideas for the intranet. IT responds to all requests and gets working on the most practical suggestions right away. An employee used this form to suggest that they implement surveys on the intranet. As a healthcare company, Health Essentials employees have mandatory questions that they need to answer annually. With the added functionality planned for Form Builder this summer, Brian and his team plan on taking advantage of tallied results and reporting on survey data.
Rotating widgets help make lunch decisions easier. Employees submit their favorite lunch spots and the widget automatically randomizes content, that’s how they decide where to eat each day. To cater to their satellite locations, the restaurant lists will change depending on the business unit location.
Brian spoke to the power of employee engagement and how they are launching their site with applications to promote and foster recognition.
“We used the ideas forum template to create a new recognition board, identifying employees who go that extra mile. These entries will then get reviewed by management and Human Resources”. They are in the process of designing an incentive system to compliment the recognition board.
Employees have control over people tags within the Social Employee Directory. They can share skills such as software ability and experience level so people can search and reach out to them. If someone needs help with editing a photo they can filter by the tag “Photoshop” to find an expert in that software or system.
Prior to adding users to the intranet, the Health Essentials team is making sure all pages are efficient tools for allowing comfortable communication between departments. Brian lent us some great words of advice on getting started with an intranet:
“Ask not what you can do for your intranet, but what your intranet can do for you. We are hoping our intranet not only pushes the use of management tools but utilizes the advantage of having a standardized system of communication for all employees.”
The intranet is not a static environment; it is dynamic and should be utilized to maximize its potential.
Brian works on special projects at Health Essentials and has a background in working on ways to digitize for paper reduction and increased productivity. Brian’s #1 focus is to build a business intranet that benefits the company.
A special thank you to Brian for taking the time to share their innovative intranet ideas and we wish them the best of luck with their intranet launch.
Many organizations are not ready for internal social media but are aware that social networking may play a future role on the intranet. Starting with no social, some social, or full-use of social tools (aka a social intranet) needs some up-front thought and planning.
In the “pro” column for having a social intranet:
- Participation
- Contribution
- Collaboration
- People Helping People
- Leadership / Mentoring
- Empowers and Engages
- Drives culture
A social intranet can introduce an employee platform that facilitates the collaboration of thoughts and knowledge to benefit the business.
Two quotes to share with you from an excellent article on Social Media Today by Shel Holtz
The Payoff: “Most leaders understand the connection between the number of highly engaged employees and market share growth”
The Problem: “Internal social media strategy needs to be built from within – informed by the company culture, driven by distinct business needs and embraced by early adopters. Executives and leaders should not only align around strategy but embody the change they envision”
We wrote a blog post on how an Executive Intranet can facilitate executive leadership.
Create a business goal around social concepts and tools on the intranet. It will help focus the efforts toward a payoff. It can be just one initiative but it will make a huge difference to employee buy-in, value through education, and supporting the company culture.
Here are a few ideas to leverage your social intranet for business and engagement
- Create a focus group of executives and ask that they regularly (and preferably on a routine schedule) post to their message walls or blogs, sharing company insights, customer wins, and future goals. Run a feed of these wall or blog posts on the intranet home page for maximum visibility. Encourage employees to respond and add to the conversation
- Use the social tools on your intranet to support current business initiatives and programs. Create a survey with Form Builder to get feedback from employees on initiatives or new products. Place opinion polls on the intranet home page, team sites, or various landing pages to gauge the effect of customer service satisfaction scores
- Use an ideas application or discussion forum to tap employees for new ways to generate revenue, how to improve customer programs, ideas on recycle initiatives, how to move towards a paper-less office. Allow employees to freely contribute ideas and comments, adding to the conversation and value. Moderate through alerts, subscriptions, content feeds or an approval process prior to publication. Create secured areas for confidential or sensitive topics of discussion
- Offer professional growth and career advancement seminars, internal software training, new product training. Encourage feedback through course comments from students who registered and attended
- Enable comments and thumbs-up “like” ratings on news articles and employee feature stories, showing how engaged employees make a difference to the company and the customers
- Ask managers and supervisors to nominate their staff and give a very public pat on the back for a job well done
- Create surveys or e-forms for mandatory questions or tests that employees need to answer quarterly or annually. Move job performance indicators online by building e-forms and routing annual goals and deliverables through workflow and automated notifications
- Build a “Job Shadow” e-form where employees can register to shadow someone from another department
- Assign an executive each month to be a “mentor” for employees through the intranet, engaging them with wall conversations and posting advice and thought-leadership
Social tools really should be called engagement tools. It boils down to wide spread participation and contributions versus a static intranet where a handful of publishers do all of the work. The marriage of business tools with social engagement and collaboration creates a high level of user adoption, stakeholder satisfaction, return on investment and a more informed and engaged workforce. Not to mention a successful intranet.
Don’t miss out on The HR Intranet and The IT Intranet in this blog series.
