Do you need to boost internal communications? These are the components your digital workplace needs

One of the main concerns of internal communication managers is getting employees to feel connected to the organization. All too often, they are not. They feel underinformed and little appreciated, which undermines the success of the organization. That’s why optimizing internal communications is one of the main reasons organizations look for a digital workplace.

3 Areas that can be improved on are making information transparent and findable, facilitating 2-way communications and facilitating or automating time consuming tasks. Are you responsable for internal communications? In this blog post I will share 20 components of a digital workplace that boost your internal communications.

Make information transparent and findable

Personal page

A personal page can be arranged with the content that matters to your employees. They can, for instance, see updates of teams and projects they are working on, an overview of their tasks or links to applications they use frequently.

Search functionality

The amount of information within your digital workplace increases day by day. That’s why a good search functionality is crucial. It helps users find documents and information, but also contact details and useful information about other employees.

Who is who

A who is who pages helps people to connect. It allows users to search for coworkers by name, department or skills. The who is who shows contact details and different ways to get in touch with each other, as well as documents users have been working on together.

Frequently asked questions

A lot of questions employees face today have been answered before. Collect them all in the frequently asked questions section and prevent unnecessary waste of time. Faqs contain text, but may also be enriched with documents, images and video.

Recent recruitments

A recent recruitments component makes sure new colleagues can be welcomed appropriately. It shows the latest recruitments, who they are, what they do and how they can be contacted.

Events

An events module keeps employees informed about upcoming events. Events can be divided into different categories. Specific events may show for the entire organiation, while others show for specific departments.

News

A news module keeps employees informed about the latest news within the organization. News can be devided into different categories. Specific news items show for the entire organization, while others are only shown to specific departments.

Multilingual

If you want to offer content in multiple languages it’s important to see if your digital workplace supports this. In a digital workplace that supports multilingual content it’s easy to create content in different languages ánd for end users to see the content in their preferred language.

Internal jobs

An internal jobs component makes sure each employee is aware of open vacancies. This increases the chance for vacancies to be filled faster and creates transparancy for internal growth opportuinities.

Notifications

Personal notifications are emails, push or text messages that inform users about changes that are relevant to them. Notifications are for instance updates from the management, file changes or chat notifications.

Enable 2-way communications

Chat

Chat applications offer an added value in both personal as business environments. They provide a quick and efficient way to communicate and get feedback from 1 or more coworkers. It adds value to the intranet as it may contain information that’s useful to other users too.

Recognition

Employee recognition increases involvement, which is essential to improve employee retention. Recognition could be given by the management, but employees too can give their coworkers a digital pat on the back for a job well done.

Social

Social networks allow us to maintain our social contacts. Social media funcionalities such as likes, tags and comments are intertwined in the modern digital workplace to foster interaction between employees.

Birthdays

Strengthen ties by congratulating colleagues on their birthday. This component shows upcoming birthdays and offers contact options such as telephone, chat and email.

Feedback

This component allows users to share feedback with the intranet manager. If there’s an error, or something is unclear, than this feedback can be submitted directly from the relevant page.

Polls and surveys

Polls and surveys are another great way to gather feedback from users. Once enough answers have been submitted, this component can easily be switched off again.

Facilitate or automate time consuming tasks

E-mail and calendar

If you want to make your intranet the starting point of the work day, it might be a good idea to integrate e-mail and calendar. This way it’s no longer needed to switch between applications. Apart form mails and calendar items this component can also show the availability of conference rooms.

Personal links

A personal links component is another way to ensure your intranet becomes the starting point of the workday. This component has links that are shared by the management with all users, but users can also include links to their personal applications.

Onboarding

The first impression users get from your intranet will determine the user adoption to a large extent. A tour / onboarding will guide them through the core functionalities and possibilities of your digital workplace at the first sign-in.

Forms and workflows

Forms and workflows can take care of various manual, time-consuming tasks. For example, think of submitting leave requests and expence claims with the subsequent approval process.

Create a community

The purpose of a modern digital workplace goes beyond sharing information, facilitating communication and simplifying tasks. The ultimate goal is to create a community where people can connect and feel involved with each other and the organization. Based on a clear management strategy, but with the proper flexibility for the user to personalize the environment.

We chose to build Involv on the Office 365 framework. Office 365 offers an impressive range of business tools that are perfectly integrated.

Configuring all the components is child’s play, because the content they display is fed from the Office 365 profiles. The necessary connections between the content are automatically created thanks to built-in artificial intelligence. This ensures, for example, that our “who is who” component also provides access to documents on which you have worked with a specific colleague. Together with our extensive configuration options and best-practice components, I am convinced that Involv offers a great digital workplace to improve communication within your organization. Schedule your demo today with one of our experts.

Tip: Measure your efforts

Tip: After choosing your new digital workplace and the components that go with it, it’s important to also consider how you will measure the success of your efforts. In this article we share 6 KPIs to measure the success of your digital workplace.

Tim

Tim Bogemans

Tim is Collaboration Expert at Involv/Cognit. He builds leading solutions to help people collaborate easier, faster and happier. Connect on LinkedIn.

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