8 ways to improve employee experience with an intranet

Have you ever asked yourself how the general employee experience in your company is? Well, don't worry, lots of people have never asked themselves this question.

However, it is super important to guarantee a high level of employee experience as this is the base for dedication, motivation and engagement.

In the following we'll give you an overview of what employee experience actually is and entails and show you, how intranet platforms can help to improve employee experience at your company. Our employee experience ideas will give you a direction for long-lasting improvements at your company that will increase the motivation and dedication of your colleagues and co-workers sustainably.

What is employee experience?

The employee experience definition combines every activity that is related to an employee's experience at work such as the onboarding processes, the office setup, the internal communication, corporate events, recognition, the company culture and many more aspects – and this is what makes the term super complex, as it refers to anything related to work. As an employer securing a good work experience for the employees is one of the biggest challenges that need to be succeeded as a low level of employee experience mostly relates to low employee engagement and a general lack of motivation. Deloitte’s annual Global Human Capital Trends survey, shows that 80% of executives rate employee experience as important or very important. However, 59% of them feel they are not ready to address the associated challenges.

How to improve the employee experience?

Employers who wish to improve the employee experience need to start from the scratch and question themselves whether the employees are happy at work or whether there is anything that needs to be adjusted and improved. As employee experience is a broad term that refers to anything related to work, it is important to consider it holistic. Hence, in order to improve the employee experience, you need to question the onboarding process, the the internal communication and even the quality of the files you are sharing internally. There are lots of employee experience ideas, and we'll give you eight of them below.

8 ideas to improve employee experience with an intranet

1. Intranets help in the onboarding process
   

   
   Starting at a new company is always exciting, but it can be nerve-wracking too, especially when onboarding remotely. Often, onboarding processes consist of various calls, various meetings and a whole bunch of documents and files that need to be reviewed, signed and uploaded to different servers. An intranet can help you fasten the process and, above all, to centralise it. Through an intranet you can have your onboarding process structured, have all the files ready and get the new employee on board as quickly as you can. As a result, you as a company do not only make a good impression from the start, but also help the new employee to quickly identify himself or herself with a new company culture that is surrounding him/her now.

2. Intranets help with recognition
   

   
   Employee recognition is the key to the general happiness at work, and it is super important. However, studies show that 63% of employees in the U.S. don't feel recognized for their achievements.  How often have you worked over hours for a special project that went live – but nobody actually recognised your work? We know the feeling: annoyed, disappointed and maybe even a bit sad.
   
   

Employees need to be recognised, their work needs to be seen, and they need to be thanked for their strong dedication and power. One of your employee experience strategies could be to use an intranet to recognise the hard work of your fellow co-workers by using one of the open channels that are integrated in your communication tool, by giving a huge 'thank you' at a virtual event or by posting a thank-you-note in your newsfeed and tagging the meant persons. Trust us, employee recognition will increase the general employee experience of your team to a maximum.

3. Intranets help to communicate
   

   
   In times, in which people can basically work from anywhere in the world, internal communication is becoming more and more difficult and sometimes even frustrating. It's important to give your employees the opportunity to quickly connect to each other, to find the right person to talk to in no time and to have a clear way of communicating within various departments and teams. An intranet can give you various tools like static intranet pages and collaborative channel to implement a working communication strategy to prevent frustration of lacking communication within the company.

   Also, when we talk about better communication at work, we also mean tools that help colleagues to give feedback on work that has been done. According to the "2020 Global Employee Experience Trends", a study that has been realised by Qualtrics, companies who act well on feedback have twice the engagement score than those that don't. Meaning, that 80% of the employees are more engaged, and thus have a better employee experience, if the feedback looks at their working place work well.
   
   

4. Intranets help to create a good company culture
   

   
   A working corporate culture is only successful once everyone in your company knows about it – and actually feels it. In companies where remote work is huge and, thus, employees are working from all around the globe, distributing the internal values can be a challenge. By using an intranet, you can easily spread your company culture among the people who are actually the most valuable parts of it. Through your newsfeed you can share inspiring stories of your company and your employees, through virtual events you can share new objectives and goals and through channels you can recognise the team members who are the true embodiment of your company culture.
   
   Knowing the culture of the company one is working for helps to identify with the values and, thus, gives one the feeling of being part of something big – and that's the key in having a working employee experience.
   
   

5. Intranets connect everyone – no matter where they are
   

   
   We already talked about the fact that being happy at work also means to be able to talk to people, to have working communication channels and, above all, to feel connected to the rest of the company. Indeed, it is nice to be able to work from anywhere in the world. But the overall remote employee experience is only working, once you really feel connected to the rest of the company – no matter where in the world you are working from.

A modern intranet software is not only the centre of communication, but it is also a centralised information tool with many social features, such as a working employee directory, individual channels and communication tools that give you the opportunity to react to any postings that are being published. Sometimes receiving a smile-emoji from a colleague who is working from South Africa while you are sitting in Berlin can really make you feel connected, seen and valued, which is the base of having a good experience at work.

6. Intranets can be a training hub
   

   
   To improve employee experience you can also think about offering workshops and training. But how to offer these perks if your team is working from all around the world? Well, the answer is simple: by using an intranet.

   You can easily integrate entire trainings in your intranet by uploading the needed files, sheets and presentations and even by including videos. A training for dedicated employees is always a nice way to show that you as a company are supporting the individual growth of each member of the company. Plus, learning something new is always something that boosts motivation and employee engagement.

   However, apart from offering work-related training, some of our remote experience and remote employee engagement ideas also consider lifestyle classes such as yoga or meditation workshops, art nights, virtual wine-tastings or anything else that improved the understanding of belonging to a team of like-minded people instead of being the lonely soldier who works from home. And, honestly, a good yoga class during a virtual lunch-break feels like heaven, doesn't it?

7. Intranets can save time
   

   
   Losing time when looking for the right documents, files and even people can lower the employee experience at work to a maximum as it is really depressing to be spending lots of time browsing through documents and emails. An intranet works as a knowledge hub and your organized best friend. Once you implement it correctly, you can easily organize your files in a Drive and overcome silos. Happeo's Universal Search makes work easier by letting you quickly find the information you're looking for.
   
   

8. Intranets boost collaboration
   

   
   Anyone who has ever worked on a large project in which various departments were involved knows that collaboration can be a mess. Often, you have to communicate with various people from different teams using various communication channels – from e-mail, telephone, Slack and many more. Streamlining project management in one tool can thus be a relief for everyone as it saves time and boosts the overall employee experience. A working intranet gives you the  opportunity to boost collaboration, to connect various teams with each other, to streamline communication in one shared tool and to quickly share any files and documents that are needed to successfully work on the project.

So, where to start to improve employee experience at your company?

Of course, it always sounds easy to give you these pieces of advice and to show you how easily the employee experience can be improved by using an intranet, but where do you actually start?

A good starting point to improve employee experience would be to evaluate how happy your colleagues are at their working place. Is there anything they dislike? Is there something that they would like to be improved? It is important to listen to those that are most affected by lack of internal communication, recognition or maybe even the organisation of files and documents. The more you know about how your colleagues feel at work, the better you can actually act and, thus, implement some of our employee experience ideas.

With an intranet solution, you'll have a solid base for streamlined communication, a known corporate culture and even fun events that improve teamwork and create a common sense of "belonging together" – even when being super far away from each other.

Would you like to learn more about intranet software? Watch a demo video or schedule a call with one of our intranet experts.