A central part of the digital workplace, corporate intranets have seen widespread popularity in recent years — and for a reason. Working like a well-oiled machine, these web-based enterprise platforms have been able to make a far-reaching impact on startups and SMEs alike.
For instance, fashion brand Coach Inc. used an intranet to effectively coordinate their stores around the world. Domino’s Pizza capitalized on a similar web solution to facilitate document search and secure confidential information flow.
And that’s only a small part of functionality intranets offer. Read on to find out other reasons why you might need to hire a custom web development company for building a corporate portal.
Smooth internal communication
Teamwork is increasingly becoming the central tenet for any firm. Of course, many tasks are completed in isolation, but they always come under the umbrella of a company’s larger goal.
To reach that goal and avoid project failure, you should set great store by well-run communication. That becomes even more important if part of work is done remotely, or if you have numerous branches. With a feature-rich corporate portal, ensuring effective communication is no daunting task.
Paired up with a WebRTC platform, the intranet allows employees to start a text chat, an audio or video call and tackle critical issues without face-to-face meetings. And with features like file exchange and screen sharing in place, you can rest assured everyone is on the same page.
Enhanced document and knowledge management
Another mission-critical feature intranets offer is an effective document and knowledge management, which means storing all relevant documents and multimedia material in one place so that employees could easily retrieve and work on them anytime and anywhere.
Being a decentralized information source, such a corporate portal also significantly facilitates search by keywords and topics thanks to appropriate content indexing and tagging.
In addition, you’re guaranteed functionality like scheduled reviews, content archiving and clean-up, commenting and rating, document versioning, automatic read/agree on confirmation and access control.
Better employee engagement
According to Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, employees are (self)interrupted every three minutes, with social media being a major culprit. A corporate intranet won’t be able to put an end to distractions, but it can help translate them into meaningful ones.
Make your corporate portal a one-stop place for exchanging thoughts by equipping it with social enterprise features like in-depth personal profiles, forums, directories, wikis, blogging, and Q&A sections. Besides, keep your employees in the loop about the company’s policy updates, upcoming workshops, and brainstorms, latest surveys, future corporate events, etc.
If you want to go the whole hog, introduce AI-enabled “intranet suggests”. That will let you analyze user interactions with the portal to personalize their news feed and promote relevant content.
Effective task management
First and foremost, people come to the office to get things done. Being a key collaboration tool, the intranet is set to make the working process straightforward and efficient.
You can create tasks, assign responsibilities, set deadlines, prioritize issues, and get progress reports — all in a couple of clicks and without any hassle. And to minimize the risk of missing the deadline, you can connect your tasks to the calendar or activate email reminders.
One more useful intranet feature is advanced discussion dashboards that spare the need to sift through tons of emails to find peers’ comments on a particular issue or some important attachment.
To sum it up, by adopting a corporate portal with task management functionality, you’ll be able to improve business workflows, better track progress, boost employee productivity, and speed up your projects.
Reduced employee turnover
TINYpulse’s research says the major reason for staff turnover is the lack of recognition and career development opportunities. Conversely, simple acknowledgment like naming the employee of the month can significantly increase engagement and productivity. What role does tech play here?
You can use your intranet to publicly recognize your workers’ achievements — through dedicated pages, news feeds, and blogs. A corporate portal is also a good place to display current positions. This way, you give your employees the privilege to be the first ones to apply for a job, working their way up through the company. Moreover, think streaming internal career advancement webinars — that will make your platform a favorite bookmark for many colleagues.
Another important function intranets fulfill is feedback collection. Show your staff that their opinion counts by conducting surveys; also, let them voice discontent. Then, put that valuable data into action to strengthen the staff’s emotional connection with their work, improve job satisfaction, and decrease employee turnover.
There’s more to the story
A corporate portal might be pivotal to creating a productive workplace. Packed with advanced document and knowledge management tools, chat functionality, and social features, it can boost employee productivity and streamline decision-making.
However, reaping these benefits requires intranet adoption on a company-wide basis. So when building such a portal, keep the specific needs of your staff in mind. With a high adoption rate, you’ll be able to take your business processes to new heights of efficiency.
About the author:
Yana Selina is a tech journalist who loves beautiful content. At Oxagile, she creates research-based articles in which match is interwoven with other verticals and software solutions including but not limited to media and entertainment, online video, big data, business analysis, eLearning, fintech, and adtech. Yana spends much time exploring the untapped potential of technology and the benefits it can bring to businesses of every stripe. She contributes not only to Oxagile’s blog, but also to a number of popular websites, such as ITProPortal, Business2Community, UX Matters, News Medical, The Innovation Enterprise, and Dataflow, to name a few. Yana studied public relations at Minsk State Linguistics University, Belarus and worked for a number of software development companies.
You can reach Yana at yana.yelina@oxagile.com or connect via LinkedIn or Twitter.
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