A Modern Intranet Platform to Enhance Your Internal Communications

An intranet can revolutionize your business's internal communications—from boosting employee productivity to reinforcing company values.

Continue reading to learn how today's leading organizations leverage knowledge-sharing platforms to significantly enhance collaboration and information sharing among employees throughout the entire organization, along with the research-supported advantages this offers.

What Is an Intranet in Internal Communication?

An intranet is a private network that can only be accessed by a company’s employees.

It’s also one of the most powerful internal communication tools at your disposal in the employee experience. It allows you to house all your organization’s important information, guidelines, and document-sharing processes in one place – and for your employees to edit and comment on those resources in real-time.

Modern intranets come equipped with features like a workplace news feed, CEO and Executive updates, and weekly updates to help you improve internal communication, and workplace culture, streamline processes, and increase employee productivity by keeping your employees in the loop with what’s happening across your organization.

How to Use an Intranet for Internal Communications

There are three main ways today’s most effective organizations are using the intranet for internal communications: 

1. Knowledge Management and Company Knowledge

The best internal communication tools make knowledge management a cinch – especially in large organizations where things can get complicated fast.

Eliminating as much unnecessary back-and-forth between your teammates as possible makes for a very effective internal communication strategy. Capturing all the information your people need to access to do their jobs in a knowledge base, internal wiki or intranet software can transform productivity across your business (more on that later). 

Having multiple versions of a document circulating around your business goes against all internal communications best practices, and can become confusing for new employees. An intranet eliminates that problem by ensuring all your teammates are working from the definitive, up-to-date version of a document rather than an outdated copy they saved on their hard drive months ago.

2. Communication and Collaboration

The more internal communication channels your employees use to talk to each other, the more likely important information is to slip through the cracks. 

By centralizing your internal communications through a company intranet, you’ll make it much easier for your people to communicate and collaborate with their colleagues in different departments – especially if you’re a remote or hybrid business.

3. Employee Engagement

Improving employee engagement across your company can boost productivity, reduce turnover, and ultimately improve profits. The right internal communication software can be the key to cracking the engagement code in your business.

That’s where an employee intranet comes in. It connects your employees, no matter where in the world they work from, helping them feel like much more of a team. Plus, it arms you with all the tools you need to improve engagement, from a recognition program to an icebreaker template for integrating new hires into your team – and an employee engagement survey for regularly taking the pulse of how engaged your people are.

Benefits of an Intranet as an Internal Communication Tool

Can using an intranet for internal communication really have that big of an impact on your organization?

Here’s a whistle-stop tour of the biggest benefits a company intranet can bring to your internal communications strategy:

Empower Your People to Work More Productively

Skeptical about how much of an impact internal communications tools can really have on your business?

Did you know most employees spend an eye-watering 20% of their working week searching for the information they need to complete their daily tasks?

Which means a well-organized and regularly updated intranet can literally help free up an entire working day each week for every one of your employees.

There aren’t many changes you can make to your business that will come close to providing that kind of a productivity boost.

Give Your Staff a Good Reason to Stick Around for Longer

Employees of organizations with higher employee turnover rates are 65% more likely to say that it’s "very difficult" or "nearly impossible" to "get the information needed to do [their] job well."

It probably doesn’t come as a surprise that 81% of employees say they feel frustrated when they can't get hold of the information they need to complete a task.

Which is why building an intranet that makes it easy for your people to find the information they’re looking for the foundation of your internal communication plan has such a big impact on your retention rates.

Make it Easy for Employees to Collaborate Across Departments 

Your business is bound to run into trouble if collaboration isn’t a cornerstone of your internal culture stack.

In fact, 86% of workers say ineffective collaboration and communication is the main cause of workplace failures.

Despite this, 36% of workers find it difficult to exchange information across different teams within their organization, believing this causes silos.

Empowering your people with effective internal communication platforms is often the first step to a more collaborative culture.

But the fact is: transparency has to come from the top down. A simple way to kickstart a company culture that encourages collaboration is for your leaders to improve internal communications with executive announcements. If your directors lead with honesty, your people are a lot more likely to open up and share their own expertise.

Capture Invaluable Insights and Knowhow 

A massive 42% of most organization’s institutional knowledge is unique to individual employees. That means if your staff all up and left tomorrow, you’d lose almost half of your business’s accumulated knowledge for good.

Creating a culture where your people are quick to capture their hard-earned knowledge in your internal communication platforms will help ensure it’s a much softer blow whenever a teammate choses to move on.

Free Your People Up From Endless Meetings

71% of workers think meetings are unproductive and inefficient. Yet they’re an inescapable part of most office jobs. 

But it doesn't have to be that way…

Leverage your company intranet to boost internal communication in an organization and you’ll be able to follow in the footsteps of Kaz Nejatian, Shopify’s Chief Operating Officer. 

He canceled all meetings with more than two employees – as well as all meetings scheduled for Wednesdays – across his company. This freed up over 322,000 staff hours – or a mind-boggling 8,050 full-time work weeks.

These kinds of time savings can only be unlocked by making information much more easily available for your people through a company wiki.

Boost the Bottom Line

All these benefits that modern internal communications software bring to business quickly add up. 

Research even suggests that companies with around 1,000 employees could save $2.7 million each year by leveraging an employee intranet to improve knowledge sharing between their employees. 

Which easily makes creating a company intranet one of the highest ROI projects you’ll work on this year – even if it's not one of the sexiest.

Wrapping Up

Setting your company up with a modern intranet comes with a whole host of research-backed benefits. 

It’s likely to make the biggest difference to internal and external communication across your organization.

Provide your people with the right platform and they’ll find it much easier to quickly find the information they need and collaborate with their colleagues across different departments.