An effective intranet is key to your organization’s communication, collaboration, and process management, but it is an often a neglected and underfunded tool. What features will help take your intranet from mundane to amazing? Read on for five features your intranet needs!
Effective Way to Collect Feedback and Suggestions
How can you engage your employees in continuous improvement? Do you know what challenges front-line employees face in getting their jobs done efficiently? What perks do they value?
Giving your staff a forum to bring suggestions forward helps improve your processes, increases employee engagement, and might even solve problems you didn’t know you had.
I’m not just talking about a suggestion box where ideas fall into a dark box never to be seen again. Employees need a place to discuss and nurture each other’s ideas, using them as a spring board for further innovation. They need somewhere they can view and comment on ideas and track the status of the implementation of their suggestions. These social features and gamification foster a spirit of collaboration, innovation, and engagement. You can reward the most popular and most innovative ideas. This captures employees’ insights effectively and creates a strong, collaborative workplace.
Valo’s Idea Management module does just that: it lets users submit, categorize, share, comment, and like ideas. The idea cards are color coded so you can see the status of each idea at a glance. You can also track how many ideas are submitted and in what categories – a great indicator of employee engagement.
Easy Access to the Most Relevant News
Most intranets share news, but how can you cut through the noise and make sure the right news is seen by the right audience? Especially in larger organizations, there may be information that is more applicable to certain geographies, branches, departments, or roles, and users tend to start ignoring news if it is rarely relevant to them.
You don’t want your employees to breeze past the important news that applies to them – your intranet should be smarter than that. That’s why Valo lets you target news to select groups based on criteria you set.
What about the really important news that you don’t want anyone to miss? Valo has an important news feature that creates a persistent banner on your intranet. These important messages have four categories: alert, warning, success, and information, and they can be scheduled in advance with a start and/or end date. This feature is very helpful for critical alerts such as outages or successes you want to share when the time is just right.
With targeted and important news, your employees will always be informed and up to date on everything you need them to know!
Intuitive Navigation and Improved Search Capabilities
Finding needed information takes up a lot of an employees’ time – nearly 20 percent in fact. You need your users to quickly find info when and where they need it.
Your intranet must have intuitive navigation – without it, user adoption will always be a struggle. That’s why Elantis’ begins each intranet implementation with collaborative workshops to determine an Information Architecture that is uniquely designed for your business. We follow up with workshop with a survey to all your users which will stress test the information architecture we have developed. If adjustments are needed based on user feedback, we make them. The result is an intranet where users intuitively know where to find the information they need.
Some users prefer a logical “click through” navigation and others prefer to cut to the chase – they want to be able to search for what they need by category or keyword. How can you make sure those searches give your users the results they need?
First and foremost, you need the right metadata. Elantis helps you determine that during our workshops. But Valo provides more – the Search Hub let you refine your search by category, author, modified date, and file type. Valo’s People Finder also gives you search refiners, such as job title and department.
Integration with Forms and Workflows
Users don’t just visit your intranet to find information, they visit to get tasks done. Tasks such as submitting expenses, requesting vacation leave, and other routine requests or approvals can – and should be – built right in. Links to electronic forms that automate approvals and notifications are a must in creating a modern digital experience.
Elantis has created automation for such tasks as employee and contractor onboarding, customer onboarding, fleet management, hardware provisioning, marketing requests, contract and quote generation, and more. These processes have saved organizations thousands of hours. Linking these forms and workflows directly into your intranet only increases the adoption and efficiency.
A Beautiful User Interface
Intranets implemented in SharePoint tend to look like… well… SharePoint. And while SharePoint is a powerful collaboration tool, the aesthetics tend to lack a little je ne sais quoi. Your users deserve better.
How can you harness the power and stability of the Microsoft platform, and still give users the look and feel of a beautiful, modern website? Custom development can enhance the look of your intranet. But custom development is costly and introduces risks if you upgrade.
Valo Intranet gives you a beautiful user interface without custom development. Valo offers three beautiful layout options – all intuitive, all modern, and no SharePoint look. What is more, it has a fully responsive design that is available on desktop, iOS and Android devices.
Find Out More
Does your intranet need these features? Join us on October 1st, to find out how you can fall in love with your intranet!
The Author
Amy Grendus, Director of Marketing and Business Development
Amy is a results-focused marketing professional with over eight years’ experience working closely with sales teams to provide effective solutions to customers.
