Why a Corporate Intranet is Essential for Internal Communications

Modern corporate intranet solutions provide a multitude of effective internal communications tools, making it easy to share accurate and relevant information to your staff. And for fast moving organisations that need to push important updates quickly and across dispersed teams – including remote workers – these capabilities will prove essential.

Why is a corporate intranet essential for internal communications?

There are several reasons why your company intranet is indispensable to your internal communications strategy:

• It improves corporate culture: Today’s modern intranets include a variety of communication tools, such as internal social media, collaboration spaces, and company news feeds. Regularly communicating to your teams via these channels will promote transparency and openness, which are important for creating a positive corporate culture.
• It enhances the employee experience: Company intranets are not just for top-down communications – quite the opposite in fact. Teams can create their own communication and collaboration spaces on any topic imaginable, where they can connect with their coworkers to share ideas, work productively, and collaborate on tasks. This level of staff autonomy will go a long way to enhancing the user experience.
• It boosts employee experience: Good internal communications should help your employees feel informed and trusted to know what’s happening throughout the company. And when teams feel trusted, they feel valued, which is an important element of employee engagement.

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The best internal communications tools to use on your corporate intranet

Corporate intranets are packed full of internal comms features, especially when they form part of the wider digital workplace. Below is our top pick of the best internal communication and collaboration tools to use in your organisation:

Intranet news channels

Inform and engage employees by posting regular company news articles on your corporate intranet. Keep content relevant by creating news channels for each team, department, or location, so that staff don’t get bogged down with unrelated articles.

Corporate social media

Effective internal communications rely on enabling staff to engage with the intranet content you’re posting. This ensures that communication is a two-way street – and not top-down – which will encourage cross-team collaboration.

Use corporate social media features such as likes, comments, and @mention tagging to make it easy for team members to engage with the content they find interesting.

Learn more about On Premise Intranet Software

Content targeting

As mentioned above, all content on your corporate intranet should be targeted to particular teams. Doing so means that staff will only see content that’s relevant to their department or role, making the intranet a valuable source of curated information.

Use content targeting tools when creating news articles, intranet pages, corporate social media feeds, and more to keep employees engaged with your intranet.

Policy management

Certain sets of information flows such as company policy changes, health & safety procedures, and compliances are compulsory to communicate to your staff. So it’s important that you inform staff of these details clearly and in a timely manner.

Policy management systems simplify this process by centralising all the data in one place and allowing you to distribute policies to the relevant teams for review and acceptance.

Notifications

There is such a thing as communication overload, especially when you’re getting notification pings left, right, and centre.

Being a great internal communicator means knowing what to share, when to share it, and what the best medium for delivering the message is. Your corporate intranet includes all sorts of internal comms tools that allow you to share content in the best way. But it also includes customisable notifications that put the user in control.

For example, employees can choose what type of notification to receive: email, push notification, or internal intranet message. They can also select how often they receive notifications: immediately or in digest form once a day or once a week. Allowing staff to choose what suits them will increase engagement with the content they want to read, rather than get distracted by endless notification alerts.

Knowledge base

Today’s corporate intranets and internal communication platforms allow you to create content-rich knowledge base articles that are full of engaging and interactive content, which will boost knowledge sharing across your organisation. For example, you can embed videos, images, and external sites into articles, as well as enable social features that encourage employee interaction.