Getting employees engaged in the strategic direction of your organisation can have massive benefits. As a tool spanning across the business, I want to show how your intranet software can be at the heat of your employee engagement initiatives. For information on this and more, download our free guide on how to manage your intranet.
The term ‘employee engagement’ may seem quite hard for some people to grasp. It tries to describe a feeling that employees have towards their employer, and the work they are involved in, and as such may not be so easy to measure. Despite this, most organisations do want their employees to be engaged – actively interested in the success of their work and the impact this has on the business.
Many organisations (particularly larger ones) regularly use employee engagement initiatives to try and get their workforce more actively engaged. With a background in intranets I see these as under-used tools to bring these initiatives to staff and to embed some of them in regular employee engagement.
An online resource for HR and the employee engagement community lists some great employee engagement ideas - check it out here. I wanted to show how some of these can be delivered within your intranet.
The first on their list is about recognising employees that represent the values of the business and acknowledge them publically. Clearly the intranet can be used as a place to share this recognition but it can also be used as a tool to collect nominations from other members of staff. I’ve seen this process work well in many different types of businesses, promoting the nomination process offline which also drives staff back on to your intranet.
Another suggestion is to assign new starters with a mentor. Clearly this would work best if the relationship were face to face, but don’t overlook mentoring on the intranet. Intranets are often used to promote expertise from around the business, this information could easily be used as part of the onboarding process for new starters.
Recognising and encouraging innovation could be another employee engagement initiative the intranet can add value to. As business-wide tools, intranets are best placed to act as a central location to manage new ideas and develop best practices.
While ‘getting social’ on their list may be more about going out with your colleagues, the intranet makes a great job of reinforcing this online. It’s easy to think of the intranet as something that should exclusively be used for work, but there is great value in using applications like team spaces to promote clubs as well networking between colleagues. People get to know each other, connections get made – skills and work get shared, all leading to efficiency within the business and engaged employees.
Finally, collecting feedback is another simple way the intranet can add value to engagement initiatives. On the intranet, feedback can happen in multiple ways, from polls to dedicated forms – you can even consider the comments people write on the stories that are published. The key of course is the way you use it, feedback left ignored is a wasted opportunity and a potentially disengaged employee.
Ultimately employee engagement and the intranet go hand in hand, they both need each other. There are so many other ways the intranet will help engagement, I could have gone on forever. If you are interested we can show you how our intranet software facilitates your engagement initiatives or talk to you how other businesses have use their intranet in this way. Simply get in touch and book a demo with our experienced team.
