Employee turnover is at all-time highs nationwide. While there are many reasons for companies experiencing low retention, one of the most common factors is low employee engagement. This lack of engagement usually looks like employees losing sight of why they joined the team and becoming disillusioned with their role. To help combat this trend towards high employee turnover, many business owners are learning that a great way to retain team members is with a high-quality intranet.
Encourage engagement through your intranet
One of the best ways to keep a team engaged is by providing them with all of the tools that they need to accomplish their jobs while part of the process. This is most effectively accomplished through an employee intranet. While most employers offer an intranet for their teams, many are unaware of how pivotal this tool’s design can be for their teams ability to collaborate, enjoy a good work/life balance, and to stay engaged.
5 steps to making your intranet engaging
We’ve researched common complaints that employees have about their company’s intranet. These are 5 of the most effective ways to transform your intranet into a rewarding tool that provides value for your team.
5 steps to making your intranet engaging
We’ve researched common complaints that employees have about their company’s intranet. These are 5 of the most effective ways to transform your intranet into a rewarding tool that provides value for your team.
- Prioritize access
One of the first mistakes employers make that damages employee engagement is not prioritizing access to the intranet. From day one, employees need to be able to log in and interact with every aspect of their job. When intranet access is several log-ins away or is delayed and only presented later in the on-boarding process, team members can be understandably stressed and prevented from accomplishing what they were hired to do.
Access means whatever your team needs it to mean. No two companies are the same and no two teams work the same way. Your team’s ideal access could be access from home, access from on-site devices only, or a hybrid of the two. However your team operates, employees need the autonomy to access your intranet whenever they need it.
- Maintain calendars
Calendars are a great way to ensure that your team is on the same page. Deadlines, events, project goals, all of these elements of their workflow and are all things that can easily get lost in the busyness of the work week. By keeping track of events through interactive calendars, teams and groups within the company can keep work and office events all in the same space.
- Simplify
One of the most common complaints about intranet design is complexity. When it comes to an intranet, less is definitely more. With a simplified design, employees will be able to access necessary information with just a few clicks. Team members don’t sign up for a job to spend hours learning a new system, they sign up to do what they do best.
By simplifying your intranet, you’re directly making your employees’ jobs that much easier. It’s easy for your team to be engaged when their work is easily accessible and their questions are easily answered. In the long run, streamlining your intranet makes your training processes easier and saves time and money in the on-boarding process.
- Provide resources
When your employees have direct access to documents, forms, and HR tools, they are able to take ownership of their jobs. A stress factor commonly reported by staff is having to go through an HR department for many of their needs and not being able to take care of issues like payroll, benefits, perks, or work-related forms on their own.
Designing your company’s intranet to be a one-stop shop for resources and tools shows your team that you understand their needs.
- Gain interactive feedback
Intranets are a great way to gain feedback from your team. Whether it’s their satisfaction with a certain course of action, their desire to change something in and around the office, or major decisions like benefits, pay, or workplace flexibility. As industries continue to be shaken up, office work and what it means to be an employee is in a near constant state of change. Keeping track of your team’s needs has never been more important than it is now.
Feedback can be gained through polls, questionnaires, idea boxes, or any number of methods that employees can provide you with data on how they’re feeling about decisions, systems, and processes. By incorporating feedback into your intranet, you’re giving your employees another way to use their voice as active members of a team. By elevating their position in this way, a sense of ownership is instilled and each member sees their role as significant and meaningful.
How do you know your team’s ideal intranet?
Most people can easily name the issues that they have with their company’s intranet. The high-yield course of action for any business owner is to simply ask their team what an ideal interaction with their intranet looks like. After collecting answers on this subject, coordinating to solve the issues for your team is a huge step in the direction of showing them that they matter as stakeholders in the well-being of the company.
A great intranet is a combination of design features, interactive content, and communication tools. It helps to partner with team experts who can deliver an engaging internal source of communication for your business.
Anchorpoint creates engagement
If you’re concerned about keeping your employees engaged, you’re not alone. Our team at Anchorpoint helps companies gain optimal stakeholder buy-in. We’d love the opportunity to partner with you and to turn your company into a satisfying workplace with drastically lower costs than your competitors due to reduced employee turnover and higher rates of talent retention. At Anchorpoint, we offer a one-stop shop for internal communications. From aesthetic and layout design to graphics support and site mapping, our team is more than capable of delivering your team’s ideal intranet. Contact our team to see how we can help you develop a strong relationship with your employees through a well designed, engaging employee intranet.