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How can an Intranet Transform your Digital Employee Experience?

LiveTiles, a part of Omnia

DigitalEmployeeExperience LiveTiles
Table of Contents

Believe it or not, how engaged an employee is at their workplace is the most important factor behind their productivity at work.

And yet, most employees (60%) currently feel emotionally disconnected from their workplaces.

In a digital-first world, global, hybrid organizations have a greater need than ever to change how frontline workers and office-based teams experience their work environments.

The better a business can connect with its employees and maintain a unified experience across departments and borders, the more it stands to gain in terms of productivity, retention, employee well-being, and satisfaction.

However, it’s a significant challenge for organizations across the globe, who have to connect frontline and information workers – all with diverse business units, cultural backgrounds and ways of working.

The success of any organization relies on its ability to adapt to the changing digital world, and they can do that by creating a digital-first work environment in which everyone feels connected, valued and empowered to work in a way that fits their ever-evolving needs.

Here, we will explore how Intranet can give hybrid and global organizations the tools they need to unite distributed teams and transform how their employees work, interact and communicate.

What is digital employee experience, and why does it matter?

To put it simply, businesses need to look for ways to create the best digital environment for their team members. An environment that creates a culture of:

  • Improved productivity
  • Higher efficiency
  • Better well-being
  • Increased engagement

Of course, many organizations are accommodating remote and hybrid forms of work, but creating an ideal digital-first environment goes far beyond that.

Effective digital workplaces require organizations to:

  • Reach people with fewer barriers
  • Provide outlets for collaboration, communication and social interaction
  • Offer personalized experiences

As you are also aware, frontline teams have different needs and requirements than office workers when it comes to connecting and engaging with their colleagues, for example.

However, breaking down these organizational siloes is all part of creating a people-first company culture – which is one of the most important factors behind an employee’s decision to stay and grow with your company, or move on.

This simple fact is that organizations that prioritize digital employee experience attract and retain talent more effectively, as well as improving their sense of belonging, innovation and social relationships.

A modern intranet solution can be the tool that can put that digital employee experience (DEX) revolution in motion.

What does your intranet software need to do? 

If you are one of the 1 million companies using Microsoft 365, you already have the foundations to improve employee experience and build a fully personalized, corporate intranet experience in Microsoft SharePoint.

You might also already have expectations for what SharePoint can (and can’t) do.

However, while SharePoint can already interact with your other MS365 apps, ‘intranet packaged solutions’ that are layered on top of it can completely transform its capabilities.

Intranet adds functionality to the basic SharePoint foundations that enable you to build a one-stop platform for everything your organization needs for effective collaboration, information sharing and internal communications.

What’s more, the beauty of building your intranet/employee experience with Microsoft as the foundation is that it’s a familiar and scalable solution that can grow alongside your organization.

Whether it’s creating a branded digital ‘hub’ for your enterprise, streamlining all of your most-used apps into one place, or creating an engaging ‘employee social network’, here are the nine key things your intranet solution needs to do to improve the way your employees experience their day-to-day work.

Minimize app-switching and reduce platform-hopping  

Why?: Context switching between documents, websites and apps results in fatigue and creates a productivity sinkhole

Switching between different apps and sites only takes 1-2 seconds, but in the average Fortune 500 company, this adds up to 5 working weeks every year.

Make no mistake: the effects of app-switching are felt on an enterprise and a personal level.

Increasing productivity across your organization requires you to reduce the barriers between your employees and the necessary information and tools that they need to connect, collaborate and do their work.

  • Intranet essential: All apps and workspaces should be in one hub with a simple user interface. Ideally, an employee can log into it in the morning, and not need to leave it until they log off.
  • Meanwhile, front-line employees need to be motivated by features useful to them in order to regularly engage with it.

Easy to onboard

One of the major motivators for large organizations to upgrade their intranet software is to better connect existing teams (or newly-acquired business units) with the rest of the company.

That being said, in a hybrid workplace, you know that the first impression many of your new joiners will have of you will be through your digital workspace.

It’s already a challenge to engage current employees with new working practices, but it’s even more difficult with ‘acqui-hires’, who are often very unsure of the new business they have just joined.

That’s why it pays for an intranet to be easy to onboard. In effect, it should be a ‘plug-and-play’ platform that’s accessible in a familiar environment, such as Microsoft SharePoint or Teams.

A multi-layered and personalized user experience 

Why?: Intranet is meant to harmonize different ways of working, but it won’t if your users find it frustrating to use.

The new reality of global, distributed and hybrid teams means that there is even less consistency in how people interact with your organization. 

Intranet needs to be integrated seamlessly into their working routines – but that’s not all.

A crucial, but often neglected aspect is the need for personalization based on individual roles in the organization, including designated areas of access for different departments, levels of seniority and job roles.