Using your intranet to improve the company culture and retain your best people

A record amount of people quit their jobs in September and the great resignation shows no sign of stopping:

• 4 million Americans resigned in September.
• A survey of Dutch workers found that 46% of those surveyed planned to quit in the next six months to a year.
• Microsoft recently found that 41% of the global workforce is likely to consider leaving their current employer within the next year.

This year has seen a tidal wave of resignations around the world. Millions of people quit their jobs. The employee turnover rates are already reaching record highs.

According to many experts, the “great resignation” shows no sign of stopping. Especially now that many employees unhesitatingly leave their current jobs even though they don’t have another lined up.

How can you prevent your best people from leaving? And what role can your intranet play in improving employee satisfaction?

In this blog post, I’ll share some insights in improving happiness at work and how your intranet can support that goal.

Is it the salary? Surely everyone wants a job that pays well, but a good salary is not going to be enough to keep people at your company in the long run.

According to Glassdoor’s research, company culture and values is much more important than compensation when it comes to job satisfaction. The same findings came from surveys among employees in the US, Canada and Europe.

Employees particularly want to work in a culture of empathy, understanding and support as we are going through these difficult times. This is not new information. We all know how it is more important than ever to put your people first, making them feel valued, belonged and cared for.

Leadership plays a main role in demonstrating and encouraging these values within the organization. This should be based on honest and transparent communication and strong connections among employees.

Company culture is not something you create. It’s something that happens. It’s about living your company values. Your intranet can further those efforts in many ways.

A survey of workers in the US found that 52% are feeling burned out, up +9% from a pre-COVID survey. A UK survey showed that 46% feel more prone to extreme levels of stress compared to a year ago. The McKinsey’s report indicated almost half of all employees felt at least somewhat burned out.

It’s no surprise that employee well-being took a hit in recent years. Taking care of your employees becomes the TOP priority in many organizations.

Here are several ways an intranet helps support employee well-being at your workplace:

• Allowing flexibility and autonomy, receiving and accessing key information from anywhere, from any device.
• Reducing information overload, as it gives employees a central place to keep up with all the information they need and only the information that is relevant to them.
• Promoting workplace wellness by providing a place for the HR team to launch wellbeing initiatives and motivate employees to join.
• Facilitating employee recognition, as it gives managers a platform to publicly praise employees for a job well done, or colleagues to show appreciation to each other.
• Facilitating social interaction, with social features that somewhat fill the gap of missed live interactions.

The intranet provides a centralized communication platform for the entire organization. It allows leadership to communicate the organizational goals and strategy to all employees. This helps to ensure that your employees are aligned with your company’s vision and purposes.

To foster an honest and open communication culture, management can use the employee communication platform to share key information such as company updates, business results and successes, updates on policies and procedures, departmental insights, HR documents, etc.

Especially with the increasingly asynchronous communication that we see today, a virtual communication hub is an ideal tool for those working remotely or across different time zones. It allows everyone in the organization to stay informed and access any resources they need, when they need to.

Your team can also use the intranet to produce the best collaborative work. For example, Involv which is built on Microsoft 365 and SharePoint enables multiple members of the team to work on the same documents simultaneously.

77% of employees list connections with co-workers as the top driver of employee engagement. It helps to foster a sense of purpose and well-being in the workplace. In addition to that, the quality of employee connections can have a major impact on loyalty, collaboration, productivity.

Your intranet brings everyone together in one place, allows people to connect, communicate and collaborate more quickly and efficiently. It’s the perfect place for every interaction and conversation to happen. Some key features include:

• Employee directory: quickly find and connect with everyone within the organization, wherever they are
• Organizational chart: helping people to understand everyone’s role.
• Rich employee profiles: providing not only basic contact info but also in-depth details such as expertise, skills, interests, …
• Upcoming birthdays, New hires.
• Ideation tool: everyone can share their ideas and discuss or vote on submitted ideas.
• Create groups or team hubs to brainstorm, discuss topics, share documents, etc.
• Social features: liking, commenting, @mentioning team members.

It’s no secret that company culture is a key foundational factor that drives employee behavior and actions needed to get the desired results. Every organization, therefore, needs to prioritize people and culture.

We truly believe your intranet is an essential tool to transform your organizational culture. If you want to learn more about Involv intranet and how other companies are using their intranet to create a happier workplace, feel free to get in touch!