Keeping Your Office Connected with Your Intranet

As the typical norms of where and how people work shifts from a standard 9-5 in-office day to more remote, flexible hours, it is critical that companies maintain their workforce cohesion and culture. Creating and maintaining a central hub in the form of an intranet is the best way to keep even the most far flung employees 'in the know' and able to access the latest documents or materials.

Remote Problems

As employers increasingly have employees working and creating value from home, client sites, or other locations, it is key that those employees are equipped with the proper tools to be the most productive and  engaged. This holds true whether your organization is just letting people work from home on Fridays or is primarily made up of consultants or sales people operating mostly out of client offices.

This move to remote work improves employee satisfaction, productivity, and value creation when done correctly.   Unfortunately, the loss of constant face to face interaction also leads to less knowledge sharing and more miscommunication. As a result of not having a physical presence in the office , they might miss a conversation in regards to where key documents were moved or the office chatter of new initiatives. Perhaps they just missed an email that discusses  a company event coming up and because they were not in the office, they lost the chance to hear about it from a co-worker. 

One might say, "well we have Slack," or "we have Skype, so communication is not an issue for our organization, wherever our employees might be." But that wouldn't be exactly correct. Because email or chat systems are not perfect knowledge sharing systems as stand-alone products. And they don't allow for easy storing and maintaining of files, posting of events with relevant information, creation and distribution of company news articles, etc. It might be possible to have some of that functionality, but they certainly cannot efficiently and effectively provide all that in a way that matches being in the office face-to-face.

Intranet Solutions

But there is an easy solution to maintaining that company cohesion and getting all of those above benefits, even while having remote employees. That solution is creating and maintaining an intuitive, effective intranet that all employees can access. An intranet allows employees to find all the information they need in one, organized place. For example, in IntranetPro, employees can be kept up to date with company-wide announcements. If they don't see them the first time they log in, it'll still be front and center the next time. Maybe you have events planned,  let them know that either the entire organization, their community, or department is invited and keep that event posted on the company calendar. Employees can subscribe to any number of groups so they can be kept up to date from any location they are working from.

These different communities and departments (or whatever your organization might decide to call them) that can be created, can host all manner of content from new articles relaying the latest client signing to an event posted on the calendar inviting people to celebrate a major organizational win. 

The intranet can help be a hub for employee interaction for both work and life. And not only that, but a place, via the SharePoint system running under the hood, to securely store  content so that those remote employees can quickly and easily find the latest version of a standard client contract, for example.

The intranet allows employees to stay engaged and active in the company affairs when they are working remotely. It does this in a way that other software product offerings cannot wholly match. Whether employees are reading about the latest employee promotions in their departmental news feed or downloading the latest marketing materials, the intranet keeps your employees engaged, informed, and supplied with the tools they need to best do their job. It all goes back to what we have published in prior posts, engaged employees are key to reaching your organization's goals.

Is your organization ready for the move to remote work?

Reach out and see if your organization could benefit from building its own hub, its own modern intranet to better allow you to compete.