5 Reasons Intranets Are More Important Than Ever

Is your company considering an intranet portal, but wondering if it’s worth it? Are you thinking that perhaps the entire idea of an intranet may be a bit outdated? That’s a valid concern, as long as intranets in one form or another are around for many years, and lots of them are showing their age, with their bad interfaces, old content, and declining employee usage in the company.

But counting intranets out would be an enormous mistake. While it’s true for a lot of legacy intranets – and therefore the platforms they’re supported are outdated and can’t compete with new intranet portals, an entire new intranet has come up in recent years. This next-gen platform, referred to as the interactive intranet, bears little resemblance to the old intranets. It brings communication, collaboration, and social networking technology together in one integrated virtual work environment.

That’s an honest thing because far away from becoming obsolete, modern intranets are becoming popular in companies. As companies get more fragmented and distributed, with more people working in additional places with more sorts of information and tools, there’s a desperate need for one central place to attach, stay informed, share and collaborate. That’s an interactive intranet.
Why do Organizations Need an Intranet? Here are the five reasons your organization needs a modern intranet:

The attention span of the typical human is eight seconds, consistent with a well-publicized study by Microsoft. Intranet by Sciqus rises above the noise and really grabs employees’ attention with gorgeous, eye-catching company news and announcements displayed prominently on the home page. Since the interactive intranet is already the place employees visit for their work, the news is impossible to miss. Each user’s news page is personalized, ensuring that the content has relevance. It’s delivered to both desktop and mobile devices (thanks to a mobile intranet app), enabling internal communication with teams really easy even for remote and “deskless” workers who might not have computers (or even company email addresses).
And unlike traditional one-way corporate communications like mass emails, newsletters, and static intranet posts, interactive intranets support complete two-way engagement. Employees don’t just passively consume; they will ask questions, discuss, give feedback and share the news, igniting the type of active participation that builds understanding and a way of ownership.

As we’ve acknowledged in other blog posts, employee disengagement is one of the most important challenges HR departments and corporations are facing lately. Much of the matter stems from a way of disconnection that a lot of employees feel. They’re restricted from getting the organization’s vision and mission. Finding their place within the company, forming relationships, getting assistance and answers, getting useful feedback, learning new skills, and developing their careers are all a struggle. That may appear to be many problems, but an interactive intranet offers one solution for all of them. It provides as an entire employee experience hub – one holistic environment for onboarding, mentoring and on-the-job learning, feedback and recognition, networking and collaboration, corporate communications and dialogue, HR information and support, knowledge sharing, expertise location, social connection, and more. It’s the guts of company culture, where people from across the corporate form one unified team.

Interactive intranets work as a truly digital workplace by powering fast and frictionless collaboration with employees. There are spaces for teams, groups, departmental and cross-functional collaboration, also as for work with external agencies and contractors. Each space brings together all the people, information, content, and resources needed to work. An interactive intranet also pulls information from external collaboration and communication tools, bringing siloed content and conversations into one centralized, searchable, and arranged environment. Sciqus specifically offers integrations with Google calendar, Office 365, Google Drive, and more.
Instead of further fragmenting processes and creating more silos by providing yet one more limited-purpose tool, interactive intranets centralize and simplify work, providing an integrated, cohesive collaboration experience across systems and devices.

Companies have an enormous investment in “intellectual capital,” including ideas, inventions, practices, and therefore the collective know-how of employees. Those assets are wasted if they aren’t saved, shared, and re-used. Unfortunately, most companies suffer from acute “corporate amnesia.” Most of their collective knowledge is trapped in silos or the heads of employees, quickly forgotten, and permanently lost when people leave the corporate.
An interactive intranet acts as a living library and institutional memory, capturing and preserving ideas, discoveries, insights, and innovations that might rather be lost. It turns transient interactions into lasting collective knowledge that’s visible, searchable, and re-usable – so rather than constantly forgetting, companies learn and get smarter over time.

HR and IT teams spend tons of your time supporting users and answering their questions via email or phone. Users may need to wait each day or more for a solution, then more hours or days if they need follow-up questions. The entire process is expensive, time-consuming, and frustrating. consider all those help desk people answering an equivalent question from different users, over and once again.
An interactive intranet eliminates much of the inefficiency and headaches, providing ready access to self-service resources (how-to-docs and videos, FAQs, etc.), peer support (where users answer each other’s questions), and one-to-many expert assistance (where support agents can post a solution once for everybody to see). Our intranet portal even comes with pre-built HR and IT support spaces for this purpose. The result: employees can get answers and resolve issues quickly without using the phone or an email. Help desk tickets are deflected (down 17% on an average, consistent with an independent analysis of Sciqus customers), saving significant costs. HR and IT staff are free of endlessly responding to an equivalent question and may specialize in higher-priority problems.