Don’t reinvent the wheel: Be more productive with a tool you already have. Productivity is an inherent goal of work.
There are a million and six ideas out in the universe about how to be more productive. But they often require a complete change to how you approach work every day.
Though change can be scary, it’s usually necessary to grow your business. Starting with small, simple changes makes the most sense.
What if your organization could improve productivity with a tool you already have? It’s time to get going and unleash the power of your intranet.
1. Create engaged onboarding
Companies lose about 25 per cent of all employees within a year, and a remarkable 20 per cent of employee turnover happens within 45 days.
Meanwhile, over 20 per cent of enterprise companies don’t have a formal onboarding program. That’s not a coincidence.
If you don’t bring employees into an organization effectively and with context, they’re not going to stay long term. They might not even stay short term.
THE SOLUTION:
Make sure your intranet is centralized and geared to streamline onboarding and get new hires up to speed faster.
From a logistics perspective, onboarding typically involves online forms that new employees need to fill out, employee handbooks, training videos and manuals, connecting with team members via internal social network, filling out online profiles so that colleagues can find you, benefits information, and more.
All of this can be moved into one intranet portal. Here are seven ways to unlock productivity with your intranet.
2. Quickly receive and apply employee feedback
Easy-to-act-on polling is a great way to foster employee engagement and create a two-way street around feedback.
Highly engaged employees are 87 per cent less likely to leave jobs. Employee engagement is increasingly a CEO-level issue as a result, and it is logically considered one of the major drivers of retention.
THE SOLUTION:
Use quick polls to get a pulse on engagement and receive instant feedback.
You’ll get a real-time, 35,000-foot view of how engagement looks. Acting on quick polls in the moment demonstrates responsiveness to employee issues.
3. Get to what you need faster
Employees want fast access to what they need to do their work. No one wants to waste time at work, and yet over 50 per cent of more than 250 leading organizations are rated poorly by their employees on efficiency of tech usage.
When GM CEO, Mary Barra, spoke to Stanford MBA students at their commencement a few years ago, one of the questions she asked them was, “[Will you] design an environment, a collaborative environment, and the tools necessary to do their best work? Or [will it be] painful to get the simplest task done?”
Organizations have traditionally not been great at this: IT professionals spend an average of 4.5 hours per week looking for documents, for example.
More businesses need to think along these lines and simplify their processes around accessing crucial information.
THE SOLUTION:
Put crucial information in the same place.
This means a central, searchable content management system with metadata to categorize content for easier retrieval. Restrict access to proprietary information with security tiers.
4. Bring important tools in one place
In the same vein as democratizing information: make it easy for people to schedule meetings, request leave, and book travel — don’t make them bounce all over the place looking for the forms they need.
The deliverables themselves at work can become overwhelming; 60 per cent of employees in enterprise organizations report “there’s not enough time” to get everything done in a day.
If the tasks already drown the employees, why not make the processes to get them done easier?
THE SOLUTION:
Bring everything together.
Make it so an employee can schedule a meeting, book travel, cater lunch, schedule a day off, and more, all from the exact same portal. Simplify.
5. Support a positive culture and build an exceptional employer brand
39 per cent of employees believe there isn’t enough communication across silos.
Ultimately, culture is built through community. You boost culture by connecting everyone to a broader purpose and giving them access to the tools they need for work.
THE SOLUTION:
Bring every employee to the same place.
Provide a consistent experience across all employee touch points. This helps you attract and retain the best talent.
Encourage employees to connect and collaborate via a built-in social network. Share stories and build trust. Put company values front and center on your intranet. Build rich profiles of each team member so people can easily connect and find in-house subject-matter experts.
6. Collaborate to get work done
Empower your employees to use the intranet as a collaboration platform. Roughly four in ten employees don’t believe their teams collaborate at all, which is sobering because organizations rated as effective collaborators are 4.5 times more likely to retain top performers.
THE SOLUTION:
Encourage employees to capitalize on the intranet.
Create private groups for brainstorming, sharing files, and having real-time conversations. Schedule tasks and events in a broader calendar.
7. Power up your internal communications
Get your message out and make it stick. Inform, engage, and build a line of communication between management and staff.
In times of uncertainty or change, good communication is crucial. Don’t let rumors or mixed messages derail your progress.
THE SOLUTION:
Use your intranet as a central source of truth.
It should be a place where employees know they can access the latest trustworthy information. Give employees a platform for feedback, because great comms is a two-way street.
GET GOING!
Let’s explore how GreenOrbit can get your organization where it needs to go. Schedule a demo with one of our intranet experts today.
This sponsored editorial was brought to you by Knosys. For more information, visit www.knosys.co/.
