Intranet Going Social: Crucial For Employee Engagement

Many people have complained about the lack of adoption of the intranet among employees. Employee engagement is very important for this adoption and the way to achieve this is through social aspects. We, as humans, are social by nature, there for we can get engaged through these aspects. The objective of this is to get employees to visit the site daily. Once this is done, you can focus more on tasks and less on the social part. The following are five ways to engage your employees and to use the intranet to the fullest.

To achieve a successful intranet launch, building awareness is needed. Set up a contest to name your intranet by using the intranet as a platform for the contest. This way employees can submit ideas of their own for the name and the winner can receive a prize. The winner can be featured on the intranet homepage too.

For the launch day put employees on the intranet homepage, since people like to see and hear about other people. Feature employees through opportunities like: who is getting married, who is having a birthday coming up or who is new? Don’t forget to upload a photo of the employee while you’re showcasing this. Also, have your CEO to post a welcome video or a blog. This is a great tactic to show employees that management encourages and expects them to use this tool even if it’s new.

Launching an online scavenger hunt can be a very clever way to engage. This is fun for the employees and at the same time they’re using the site and finding content. Hide items on the intranet and ask employees to find this content, it can be words, images, etc. The first people to find the content can get prizes for their department as an award. The great benefit of this tactic is that a large number of employees will be browsing the site.

Allow social media tools on your intranet. This can be done by asking employees to read, rate and comment on topics that affect them directly or are related to them. These kinds of topics can be both internal and external which impact your employees. Topics such as H1N1 could have been an adequate topic to place preventive measures, symptoms, etc. Look for what is current in your company: are you working to launch a new product or service, opening new locations or coming up with a new marketing strategy? Motivate conversation about these topics in your organization by uploading contents, slideshows and videos. Then ask employees to participate in the generated conversations.

On the intranet there are top used applications like the employee directory and the buy-and-sell feature. The characteristics of these two applications are social which help drawing your employees to the intranet. It is important for you to ensure that there isn’t paper copies of phone listings at your company, that way the intranet will be the only place for employees to find contact info. You can also ask them to post their photos on their employee directory profile and it would be great if they filled out their skills and personal interests. For the buy-and-sell application, you can ask them to anything they have up on craigslist to be listed also on the intranet’s buy-and-sell.

Intranet is very important in a business organization since it helps save time and money in the long run. To really boost the intranet use it is very important to go social with it. The benefits of intranet make it more of a necessity than a luxury.