Employee Communications
The purpose of employee communications is to improve productivity. Messages, conversations and shared information should provide all staff with a clear understanding of their role in supporting your strategies, the capability to do it well and the will to contribute beyond the measurable minimum.
Intranets
Providing your employees with news, information and business tools through a web browser has many attractive benefits.
Like any business initiative, achieving those benefits requires planning, funding, ongoing management and employee commitment.
If you’d like some experienced help with getting your intranet sorted, we’re here to help. Our services range from mentoring an employee during a time of change, to providing the extra resource needed to get the job done.
Development
If an intranet is to help an organisation achieve its goals, then the planning and development of the intranet needs to be closely aligned to those objectives. This involves seeing your intranet as an enabler of your business strategies and asking how your intranet could help you to achieve success.
Governance
Most organisations are quite vertical in their structures and processes. Budgets and accountability generally flow down and up through siloed departments. Intranets however, operate more horizontally. They provide all employees with access to the same content.
Today, successful intranet governance tends to involve a cross-organisational group. The team often includes senior representation from departments such as human resources, information technology, employee communications and sales. It needs to be chaired by someone who is able to make difficult decisions when consensus can’t be reached.
Management
Once your governing development plans, policies and processes are in place, it’s possible for an intranet manager to operate successfully across the organisation within the agreed guidelines. Without them, the intranet’s potential to support your business strategies will tend to be hampered by lack of budget, internal politics and conflicting priorities.
Organising content
Employees come to your intranet in order to do things. Content should be organised around business processes, rather than under the name of the department that provided the content.
As employees follow the process, the content they need next (information, form, calculator, customer scripting) should be right there so they trip over it.
Writing content
People don’t read online content, they scan it. This means your intranet content can’t be the same as your old paper-based newsletters, manuals and brochures.
Intranet content needs to be:
- Succinct – half the number of words used on paper.
- Scannable – bulleted lists, sub-headings and tables.
- Objective – avoid exaggeration, put the main point first.
The tone and manner of your content should be aligned to your organisation’s culture and brand.
Providing training or workshops in online writing for your intranet contributors is a positive step towards offering all your employees more useable content.
