Those companies that either have no or a very limited intranet might wonder what one could actually do for them and when they might use one. Below are a few examples of when an intranet is not only useful but is the best option.
Ensuring employees get up to speed on the latest news, be it industry, company, legal or personnel, is a key factor in maintaining staff morale and loyalty. It is also important for making sure that staff have the relevant information needed to maintain standards and relationships.
This kind of information used to be disseminated during staff meetings, but with greater time constraints and employees being out of the office, or in a completely different one, management now often resorts to email. While email has several advantages over a staff meeting – information is written down and can be looked at whenever and wherever – they can get lost amongst the hundreds some people receive each day, ignored or forgotten about, as well as being largely static.
Intranet software revolutionizes how news is produced, published and consumed within an organisation. Producers can create news with text, photos, diagrams, audio and video and publish it through sophisticated yet easy-to-use content management systems. This can then be shared with all, or targeted, colleagues in any number of ways: via a social or instant messenger link, a section on the intranet home page, a Skype meeting or even via an email.
In this way, businesses can ensure the right message gets to the right person at the right time.
Organising and having face-to-face meetings can be time-consuming, costly and stressful. Booking a meeting room, knowing who to invite, getting attendees to turn up, making sure everyone has all the material they need all impact upon resources and the ultimate effectiveness of having the meeting in the first place.
Intranets that integrate online meeting tools and the latest communications apps make liaising with colleagues, clients and stakeholders much simpler and cost efficient. Finding the right people to invite is now also straightforward thanks to employee directories. Unily's people directory enables staff to search for colleagues based on several factors and thanks to integration with Microsoft Teams, easily get in touch at the click of a button.
For shorter and more immediate conversations, enterprise social networking provides real-time interaction to encourage communication and collaboration on a more ad hoc basis, including reaction to news through to flashes of inspiration.
Document management has been a key attribute of intranets since they were first introduced. Today, quality intranets can help staff achieve the following with their documents:
A quality intranet can be used in an almost endless list of scenarios that will improve how a business operates. At the end of the day, finding a reason to use the intranet is not difficult; finding one for not using it is much, much harder.
