An intranet is an effective way to alleviate email and voicemail overload for employees while streamlining instant communications, and sharing updates and opportunities easily with employees while making sure they’re read.
Publicly recognize someone for being an invaluable team player with a public recognition post or celebrate an employee milestone or promotion by sharing it with all your contacts.
Communication
In 2010, HDIntranet software emerged, offering people an effective collaborative tool. These private networks can be accessed on desktop computers, cell phones and tablets; similar to internet access but limited solely to company content; it can serve many functions including employee and customer communication, knowledge management, training sessions and project collaboration.
An intranet can reduce your need for multiple apps and programs to manage daily tasks. With one place for all company information and resources such as files, calendars, project management tools, chat systems and more.
Saving you both time and stress, it also makes finding and sharing information more efficient – helping your team finish jobs quicker while improving communication.
The right intranet solutions can enhance and streamline your work experience while offering you an effortless means of communicating with colleagues. They should offer fast and simple search experiences while supporting a range of features like future publish, labels and read tracking – plus social features like microblogs or discussions which serve as virtual water coolers for employees. When selecting an intranet solution for your company, do your research by consulting reviews from employees as well as review websites before investing your resources in one.
Collaboration
Modern intranets foster collaboration through an array of tools designed to boost productivity. They offer desktop web-based platforms where project timelines, private chat and task lists can all be accessed at once – as well as being compatible with third-party software tools like Office 365, Slack or GSuite to connect coworkers and streamline workflows. Furthermore, well-designed intranets serve as the ideal place for collecting structured (surveys, social walls) and unstructured feedback (comments or likes) from employees – helping leaders build trust, foster positive culture environments, increase productivity.
At its core, an intranet serves as the single source of truth for everyone in your organization, so it’s vital that its content remains current and easy to find. To accomplish this task, establish a governance structure with clearly-outlined roles and responsibilities, develop content standards guidelines, and encourage employee participation as part of adoption strategies.
Promoting an intranet’s benefits to employees within your company is also vital, encouraging adoption through ongoing training sessions and rewarding those who contribute. Consider adopting an intranet solution that offers support and training to both end-users and administrators so you can maximize its effectiveness as you expand and scale. Communifire by Axero provides an easily customizable scalable platform designed to facilitate communication and collaboration among teams of any size – ideal for helping you grow and scale organizations quickly and sustainably.
Accessibility
An intranet should serve as the central source of truth for employees. Making this an integral component of its design not only creates great design, but it can make life much simpler for your teams: no more passing files back and forth between teams, no more double-checking – simply one reliable place where employees can access what they need when needed.
However, for many this is not the case – 18.5% of Australians are estimated to have some form of disability and require access to digital platforms in their organization. Failing to meet digital accessibility guidelines could significantly decrease usability for users with these needs – leaving them frustrated and potentially turning them away altogether from using it altogether.
Modern intranet software has greatly evolved in terms of meeting WCAG 2.0 standards and digital accessibility, but teams still must ensure they do not introduce accessibility issues through customisation changes made by non-technical staff, content publishers or customisation changes themselves.
Example: Ensuring hyperlinks clearly identify their target page instead of being mere text links can significantly improve intranet navigation for certain employees. Also, making content keyboard accessible can be extremely beneficial to those with mobility or dexterity impairments – Unily’s latest release provides enhanced keyboard support so it’s much simpler for users to navigate without using a mouse.
Security
Security of intranets is of primary concern when handling confidential information, especially if they deal with sensitive data. A company’s network acts as the gateway for hackers and other unwelcome visitors to gain entry to its internal files and may become vulnerable. An intranet solution may use firewall protection, encryption and authentication systems or both as safeguards against unapproved access that prevent hackers from masquerading as employees and accessing or stealing confidential files from the network.
Encryption converts files to an encoded code format that can only be deciphered by authorized users using specific ‘keys’ or passwords, similar to HTTPS at the start of Web addresses and most modern intranet solutions. Authentication systems go further by verifying whether there exists something uniquely yours like certificates or encrypted digital signatures which prove that the message comes from an actual person rather than computer hackers.
Some intranets may include a proxy server that serves to protect their internal network from Internet, blocking certain objectionable or inappropriate websites like those with violent or sexual content. This feature can be particularly beneficial when employing temporary workers or contractors who don’t exist within your Active Directory environment – in these instances look for software offering Single Sign On (SSO), so they can use their Windows credentials instead of creating separate logins on the intranet.