Why You Should Card About an Intranet
At Engynn – we believe that winter is possibly coming for your business, and if you don’t improve how you communicate with your employees – you’re going to be left in the cold! To understand why this is the case- we have to take a look at the history of technology and it’s affects on worker behaviour. Moore’s law, in so many words, explains how technology doubles every two (2) years and changes consumer and business expectations. But to understand why now is the critical moment – imagine you have a penny, and you double it every 2 years. Initially you are going from 1 cents to 2 cents, and then 4 and 8 – not a significant change. But after doing that just 20 times, you are going from 16 million to 33 million – HUGE noticeable changes.
Any exponential curve similar to technology advancement hits a peak where every jump is so significant, it brings with it such radical changes to consumer and worker expectations that whole industries are changed in months, not years. In fact, in the last 10 years we have seen the movie rental industry, cab industry, and many other industries practically fall apart because they failed to adapt fast enough. Is your industry next? You can help protect yourself by creating a culture of connected people in your organization! This is why we’re so passionate about helping businesses become better connected through our intranet product.
Moores Law – James Halladay https://medium.com/mybit-dapp/moores-law-and-the-future-of-iot-d9ed7d725f0a
Benefit 1: Improved Communication and Employee Satisfaction
Communication is critical part of a productive workplace and strong culture in all organizations. Polls show that most workers feel disengaged in their workplace due to lack of communication. And this makes perfect sense – how can an employee feel engaged in their work if they don’t feel included in communication? It’s just simple: failing to convey clear news, updates, and strategies to employees leads to poor morale- but the worst part is your customers are likely to feel this the most. Let’s be clear: an intranet is just one cog in your communication plan – but it’s a great tool for communicating with employees. Features like company news feeds, commenting, and file sharing are incredibly useful for allowing employees to read updates and news on their time, and feel that you are putting an effort into keeping them in the loop.
Benefit 2: Consistency and Organization
Have you ever heard an employee ask “What’s the most recent policy on Customer Complaints?” or “Where do I get the most recent vacation request form?”, or other similar questions? This is a common symptom of the OLD way of doing things: printing out documents in management binders or in other inaccessible places. To survive in today’s ever-changing landscape, you must be able to adapt fast and consistently across your business network – and yes, that includes your policies and procedures. Ask yourself: “if I wanted to implement a new policy on customer returns to stay competitive, how fast could I roll it out, how accessible would it be?” If you’re unsure of this, an intranet could be the answer. Features like our document drive allow you to keep a secure central repository of all policies, procedures, logos, marketing files, and more. This drive is accessibly by anyone at any time, and always current. You can even set permissions and restrictions on a file by file basis.
Benefit 3: Increased Efficiency
Improved communication and consistency in your business means you’ll be a leaner, more efficient organization. As we discussed earlier, the rapidly-changing business world can only be survived by the most efficient organizations. If you need to implement a new policy – how fast can you implement it? If you have important news – how can you guarantee all employees will have access to it as fast as possible? If employees need to collaborate remotely – how can they do so? An intranet can help you speed up these processes, while ensuring employees feel included and in the loop. Similar to a snowball gaining size as it rolls down a hill, you’ll find that increased communication and consistency leads to better employee satisfaction, higher performance, better customer service, and an all-around better company. THIS is why some organizations win, while other’s don’t.
Benefit 4: Improved Onboarding & Lower Turnover
Employee onboarding is defined as the steps used to bring an employee into their job most efficiently. Research shows that effective onboarding leads to:
- Better job performance
- Greater commitment to the organization
- Reduced stress
- Higher job satisfaction
- Better retention (and associated cost savings)
An intranet can play a key role in ensuring that a new employee has the tools and access to everything they need as soon as possible, including any training, forms and procedures, contacts, and more. Imagine showing up to your first day at work and not having access to a staff directory, latest news, the pertinent policies related to your position, and more? It’s not likely you’ll feel engaged. An intranet can completely turn this around and ensure that new employees have everything they need.
Benefit 5: Remote Work Capabilities
Does your organization have multiple locations across regions, or even field staff? One of the biggest challenges in the past was keeping organizations connected to a common system across multiple cities – especially when it comes to things like document drives and communication tools. An intranet can virtually eliminate these challenges by being accessible in the cloud to anyone with an internet connection. You simply create a new login, grant access levels, and that’s it! If an employee leaves the organization, you can remove their logins just as simply.
In Conclusion
Moores law has very well guaranteed that businesses and consumer expectations are changing at an increased rate every year, and only the strongest organizations survive. A great way to improve the strength of your organization is with an intranet. An intranet can help you improve communication and employee satisfaction, increase efficiency and organization, and keep your business lean and ready to react to whatever the market throws at it. If you’re interested in getting started for free, visit our signup page today.
