Intranet Myths: Debunked
How do you envision an intranet? Chances are, the first association that comes to mind is an ancient, corporate-looking webpage, filled with plain text and lacking visual elements. Perhaps this is how it all started, but technology has shifted towards more social, collaborative, and interactive solutions. Let’s debunk some intranet myths together.
1. Intranet platforms aren’t interactive
If that was the case before, this is now far from the truth. Before companies needed one device to connect to the internet and another to make phone calls. But, the advancement of technology now allows us to combine these functionalities into one digital workplace.
The modern intranet now provides a single access point for both a corporate portal and a social workplace. With the right cloud intranet platform, you can share and collaborate with all employees across your organization. It’s much easier to manage global document storage, projects, and teams all in one place. You can collaborate in real-time: discussing and sharing information with colleagues all over the world.
Your intranet can be a “single source of truth” in the organization, which enables employees to find and exchange the right information, whenever they need it.
2. Intranet platforms won’t improve communication
Quite the opposite. Intranets are great tools for enhancing internal communications. These platforms are built to deliver information vertically and horizontally, but also transversally.
Communications managers can target relevant messages to reach the right people. Imagine a machine malfunctions at a single site, affecting one line of production in a particular factory. Using modern intranet features, you can save a lot of time and energy to segment communications to inform only the production department in the given factory and city, that there will be a delay in production, rather than pushing a global message that will be irrelevant to other sites.
By highlighting the message for certain individuals or departments, you are guaranteed that the right people are reading and interacting with the most relevant information. This way, employees receive clear and efficient information without added noise.
3. Management needs to control intranet content
The top-down approach caused older intranet platforms to become static and insufficient. Today, an intranet content strategy is more than just posting important news. It’s about collaboration and exchange (see Myth #1). Hence, everyone should have the freedom to express themselves and contribute to organizational goals. For the sustainable future of the company, all employees need to be connected and should be able to contribute. Therefore, the intranet needs input from all team members, across all departments, to exist as a strong digital representation of the company.
4. Only IT Departments can develop and manage intranet technology
In the 90s, organizations were investing lots of time, assets, and even office space to build from scratch and host their platform. Therefore, they needed a specialist with a certain amount of technical knowledge, which back then was not an easy task. Today things have changed! This intranet myth is uncovered by the technological progression and cloud computing, which have transformed the world of the digital workplace. Discover the Social Intranet : LumApps.
Cloud intranets are:
- Faster and easier to develop
- Easy to organize and manage
- Less costly to develop and host
- Pre-designed and templated
- Integrated with business modules and tools
Having the above in mind, imagine how easy it is now to develop a feature-forward, cloud-based intranet. Advanced technologies allow users to simply drag and drop different features to customize their platforms. You can establish a structure that will best serve your company and add branded elements to the design with ease, no need for additional coding expertise. Nowadays, you simply need a strong content plan to continue encouraging adoption and interactivity.
Debunking the above five intranet myths allowed us to understand the new functionalities of a social and collaborative intranet. Which in turn is built to better engage employees and improve internal communications within a single tool?
