3 Easy Ways to Boost Employee Engagement Using Your Company Intranet

The benefits of employee engagement are undeniable and in our time-poor working lives, finding quick-win ways to enhance employee engagement can be a challenge. A company intranet offers some solutions that can quickly and easily be implemented, which will enhance employee engagement and improve your bottom line. In this article, we provide three practical suggestions as to how a company intranet can increase employee engagement in your organisation today!

Employee Engagement Is Good For Business

Employee engagement is an important component of successful and productive workplaces.  Research conducted by Gallup in 2012 found that corporations with highly engaged employees have a 10 percent higher customer satisfaction rating, 21 percent higher productivity, and 22 percent higher profitability than those businesses with low engagement rates.

In addition, engaged employees are more satisfied and are less likely to be sick or to want to leave; therefore, increasing employee engagement also leads to savings in lost productivity, lost knowledge and reduced costs in training and interviewing candidates. In fact, the Corporate Leadership Council reported that engaged employees are 87 percent less likely to leave an organisation than the disengaged. Moreover, the Confederation of British Industry found that engaged employees in the UK take an average of 2.69 sick days per year whereas the disengaged take 6.92.

Despite the obvious benefits of increased engagement, Gallup reports that only 13 percent of employees worldwide are engaged. In fact, actively disengaged workers worldwide outnumber their engaged counterparts by 2-1.

While there is an intuitive agreement about the importance of employee engagement, there is very little consensus amongst the business community about how to go about improving it.

Increasing Employee Communication

Various research projects have sought to identify the drivers and enablers of employee engagement and while it is a complex issue, one common thread is increased communication. From involvement in decision making to effective two-way internal communication, employees simply want to feel valued and involved.

Increasingly, businesses are appreciating the importance of investing in technology that supports internal communication and collaboration. Online office intranets promote employee engagement by offering tools that foster peer-to-peer collaboration and employee participation.

An office intranet is a secure, closed network that is only accessible to employees and cannot be accessed externally. It works as a sort of internal database to which every employee has access, but where information is available on a permission basis that is determined by job position or team function.

Online intranet solutions such as MyHub, provide cost-effective opportunities for increased employee collaboration and communication including:

• Wikis
• Blogs
• Quizzes and Surveys
• Discussion Forums
• Team Pages
• Online Suggestions
• Newsletters and Alerts

In the ongoing drive to improve levels of employee engagement, implementing a company intranet will help your business solve some of the challenges by improving employees’ sense of connectedness, integration, and involvement.

3 Easy Ways To Boost Employee Engagement

Once your company intranet is up and running, there are three simple ways that you can increase your company’s levels of employee engagement, quickly and easily.

1. Introduce A Customized News Feed

There’s a simple reason why social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter are so popular worldwide – people like them and they like the format of customized news feeds. Currently, Facebook has 1.55 billion active users, and Twitter has 305 million active users, and that’s an awful lot of people who are familiar with the notion of targeted and directed news feeds that reflect the user’s interests and information needs.

Engaging with your employees in a similar way with a daily news feed or integrated activity streams that are synchronized with their needs is a great way to engage with employees. It also helps them to feel more valued as an individual.

Customised news feeds could be by team function, geographic location or by similar job positions – whatever makes sense to your business. Often there is a natural active social media user in the office who is happy to assume the responsibility of the news feed intranet administrator. Make sure though that there is the opportunity for employees to generate and contribute to content and try to make it as engaging as possible with lots of photos or graphics as well to create visual appeal.

2. Celebrate Success

The UK’s Institute of Employment Studies found that the biggest driver for employee engagement was ‘a sense of feeling valued and involved.’ Using the company intranet to actively promote the achievements of staff members and teams is a good way to foster that sense of value and involvement.

As well as the more obvious achievements such as salesperson of the month or top performing team, try to find ways to celebrate the successes of the average worker who may not figure in those league table-type scenarios. It could be as simple as recognising a colleague or team who have gone the extra mile in completing an important project or even someone who has achieved something significant outside of their working lives.

Whatever the criteria are that you develop, make sure that you dedicate sufficient space and fanfare on your intranet pages to celebrating the successes of employees. Why not even personalize the content so that intranet users see recognition recipients in their own teams and departments.

3. Demonstrate That Individual Employees Matter

Evidence from the UK government suggests that an important enabler for employee engagement is that ‘the employee has a voice represented through all spheres of the organisation.’ In successful organisations, employees are seen as central to the solution and participate in finding it.

Use your company intranet to invite employees to actively participate in developing corporate vision and strategies, and do so on a number of levels. From quick and easy surveys and quizzes that seek employees’ views on issues and topics of importance to more sophisticated dialogue involving a CEO blog, video messages or wikis; it’s important that employees feel as though they are being engaged in a two-way conversation and that the company and managers are actively listening.

Equally important is the need to feedback regularly to staff members on how they are influencing the corporate direction and having an input into decision making. It’s no good conducting surveys and quizzes if staff receive no feedback as to how that information has been used to make a difference.

A corporate intranet, therefore, can provide various methods for employees to voice their opinions and for managers to visibly engage with and listen to staff. In fact, this two-way dialogue should be another regular feature of the daily news feed.

Making A Difference With A Company Intranet

Enhancing employee engagement in your organisation will be an ongoing, long-term project; however, making some quick wins through utilizing your company intranet will be an important move in the right direction.

Contact MyHub today for more information on how a hosted online intranet solution can improve employee engagement and bring other business benefits to your organisation.