Intranets have evolved tremendously over the last few years. What started initially as a simple online notice board, is today increasingly used to drive multiple KPIs across different teams as well as overall, at an organization level. In addition they have transformed into appealing portals with stunning interfaces that improves the stickiness of the portal up by a notch. Enter 2016, and your company’s corporate intranet will not be much different from the popular social media platforms.
You may ask, “Why go so deep into evolving the intranets of today?”
The simple answer (and also its key value proposition) is – to improve employee engagement.
Employee Engagement Today
Today’s scenario of corporate employee engagement is dotted with a few interesting trends
- More than half the US workforce is disengaged with their workplace
- While almost all business leaders agree that a strategy in place will boost engagement, surprisingly only 1/4th respondents actually have a strategy in place
- The level of employee engagement is found to be directly proportional to workplace productivity and hence organizational revenues.
A survey from Haygroup have corroborated these facts & the findings show that companies with an aligned workforce tend to have a 2.5x revenue boost than other companies having low level of engagement. This shows that a disengaged workforce is a major cause of revenue leakage that needs to be plugged effectively.
The Causes for Low Engagement
Companies that have invested substantially into employee engagement are still finding it difficult to have them stay motivated and productive. Some of the reasons that explain this chasm between the employer and employee can be –
- While company may show generic view, the employee would prefer a view customized to his/ her preferences and need
- While company makes it mandatory to go to the site, what the employee wants is an intrinsic motivation to be prompted to go to the site out of his/ her own free will
- While company connects everybody with everybody, the employee would really be happy connected to his/ her close circle of friends, peers, and colleagues
- Though the company would want to retain control, employees would want to exercise control
Some Engagement Accelerants
Today’s employees need to get the flavor of social media in order to stay better engaged. Integrating features of popular platforms such as Facebook, Whatsapp, Skype, Twitter, and LinkedIn, will definitely up the interest level of the employees considerably. Also providing a responsive social intranet experience to the employees will allow them to access the site from mobile or tablets, thus taking them one step closer to better engagement.
How can this be achieved?
Now that we have seen how incredibly critical is employee engagement, you may be thinking about how to go about achieving this with help of technology. At the core of such a system would be the below 5 essential features –
- SaaS based collaboration platform that grows with the company
- It helps connect the entire workforce of a company irrespective of the geographic or demographic dispersion
- It is scalable in nature
- It provides an employee centric architecture
- It can be easily integrated with the existing systems using a plug and play model
Some of the main features that can be wrapped into the technology solution include –
- Essence of social networking for a deeper level of collaboration within the organizations
- Facility to include various communication channels such as IM, audio, text, and video chat
- Facility to provide reviews, feedbacks, and comments
- Ability to reward and recognize on a global level within the organization
- Provide a centralized repository of all knowledge and information assets, along with easy discovery
- Ability to get a better grasp of the workflow on a project
- Events and personalized activity ingrained into the system
- Custom branding in line with company themes
- Have a secure, credential based on-cloud platform, to ensure scalability and ‘anytime’, ‘anywhere’ working for the employees
- Powerful Solr Search facility
- Integration with commonly used applications such as Gmail, JIRA, and Outlook
- Interactive and responsive design to fit all form factors and screen sizes of mobiles, laptops and tablets
If employee engagement has turned to be a chronic problem in your organization, it will make total sense to check for a solution that drives employee engagement up by several notches and provide you with immense RoI.
At CIGNEX, we strive to provide modern day technology solutions that are relevant today and ready for tomorrow. DEEP™ is one such employee engagement platform that enables higher productivity across teams and hierarchies within your organization. The intuitive, responsive design adds to the value presented by the platform in creating a re-energized workforce that revels in close collaboration and thus ensure greater productivity. Learn more about DEEP here.
