As a highly regulated industry, financial services organisations face several challenges when it comes to open and effective internal communication.
Dealing with sensitive and confidential information, such as customer data, financial statements, and regulatory compliance details, maintaining secure communication channels and ensuring data privacy within the organisation can be a constant challenge.
This comes alongside compliance and regulatory requirements. Communicating changes in regulations, compliance procedures, and policy updates to employees across various departments can be complex and time-consuming, especially when dealing with a large workforce.
This can be all the more complex when that workforce is highly dispersed, across departments and divisions, regions, or even globally. Not to mention the increase in hybrid working since the pandemic.
So, how can internal comms professionals engage, inform and connect such a workforce?
We’ve spoken to some of our finance sector customers to find out how they’re using their intranets to mitigate these challenges.
Here’s what we discovered:
1. Digital hub
As a centralised digital communication hub, internal comms can use their intranets to provide employees with company-wide announcements, news updates, and important notifications.
With a highly distributed workforce, being able to communicate key information in one place, on a highly secure platform, such as a Microsoft 365-based intranet, is vital for financial services organisations.
Designating your content as a ‘mandatory read’ will ensure it reaches more people.
Intranets are highly effective for reaching employees with formal messaging but a modern intranet will also allow employees to communicate with each other in a more informal way via social features such as Viva Engage (formerly Yammer) integration.
Giving employees the opportunities to chat informally, share best practice, ideas and advice, within a secure platform, not only helps co-workers feel more connected to the organisation, it also reduces the risk of shadow IT, where employees might be tempted to use less secure external platforms such as WhatsApp.
3. Document Management
Finance sector businesses deal with huge amounts of sensitive information, including financial statements, client records, and legal documents. In addition, there are often rules and regulations around the length of time documents must be stored.
Intranets offer robust document management capabilities, allowing employees to securely upload, store, organize, and search for files, as well as version control.
This ensures that the right people can access the right documents, quickly and easily.
4. Self-service intranet
From booking annual leave or submitting a support ticket, to claiming expenses, no one in the financial services sector has time to waste searching for forms.
A modern intranet offers self-service features allowing employees to complete these documents directly via the platform, triggering an approval workflow that can be tracked in real-time.
If your organisation has a staff canteen, you can even allow staff to book lunch via the intranet. There’s nothing like seeing what’s on the menu to encourage repeat views!
5. Third-party integration
By offering third-party integrations, internal comms can elevate the status of their intranet to a one-stop-shop digital workplace solution. With the intranet as the organisation’s homepage, finance sector staff can quickly and easily access all the tools they need to do their jobs, saving the time spent app-switching and increasing productivity.
Of course, many organisations are using Microsoft 365, so an intranet built on the platform already allows easy integration with all M365 apps.
6. Mobile
It has long been understood that there is a direct correlation between employee experience (EX) and customer experience (CX).
Providing staff with a mobile version of your intranet not only promotes a feeling of connection with the organisation, it also means they have all the information they need at their fingertips wherever they are, allowing them to serve customers more effectively.
A modern intranet will have a fully branded app, giving employees access to news, documents, staff directory, calendar and emails.
If you’re a financial services business and you want to know how to use your intranet to improve your internal comms?
Book a demo with one of our friendly experts today for tips and advice.