Whether you’re starting out on your digital workplace transformation journey or looking to reignite a digital transformation project that went stale, one thing that’s absolutely vital to its success is your company intranet.
Before we explain why, let’s take a look at what digital transformation is all about!
What is digital workplace transformation?
In a nutshell, a digital workplace transformation is the integration of digital technologies throughout your business. These workplace technologies should reach all areas of your organisation, including:
Business processes and operations
New digital tools should improve how your business operates. For example, digital technologies such as e-forms and workflows will streamline your business processes by automating repetitive tasks and busywork.
Employee experience
Your digital workplace strategies must make your teams’ work environment better. This could cover aspects such as using the tech to increase employee engagement, enable flexible and remote work, or improve the end user experience for business systems.
For instance, by utilising online collaboration tools as your primary communication method, rather than relying on outdated tech like emails, this will improve your remote work setup and provide a better employee experience.
Data driven decisions
A major part of digital transformation is using the data and analytics this provides to make informed decisions about your overall business strategy. Using this data, you can better understand how to improve areas such as the customer experience, employee engagement levels, operations, and even staff wellbeing.
3 reasons why intranet software is essential for digital transformation
Now that you know a little more about digital workplace transformation and what it means for your digital workplace strategy, you’re probably wondering how your organisation’s intranet platform fits into all this.
Like we mentioned above, modern intranets are essential to digital transformation. Here are 3 reasons why:
Intranet solutions are already part of the digital workplace
Without intranets, there would be no digital workplace. In essence, a digital workplace is a composite of interconnected and integrated tools that work together seamlessly to enable team collaboration and increase productivity, and online intranet software is a major part of this.
Intranet software sits at the heart of your digital workplace.
Having preceded the digital workplace several decades before, intranets started out as an internal information and file sharing portal. Over the years, the software has evolved to become a primarily cloud based solution that integrates with tools like e-learning, project and task management, e-forms, and workflow automations to form a complete digital workspace.
So if you take out the intranet from the digital workplace, there’d be little left to fuel your digital transformation.
Intranets enable remote work
As we know, digital workplace transformation must improve the employee experience to be successful. Part of this is enabling flexibility and autonomy in how teams work, and intranet software is packed full of features out of the box that make this possible.
For instance, remote and dispersed teams can easily find the information they need using your intranet’s document and knowledge management system, saving them from having to travel into the office to locate physical documents. In today’s hybrid-working world, making a trip to the office to retrieve paperwork would make for a poor employee experience indeed, and would do nothing for employee retention.
Intranet software makes it easy for remote workers to access documents online.
Similarly, internal communications and social tools – ever present on intranet software – enable remote teams to communicate and collaborate online.
Intranets contain meaningful analytics
You can’t have digital transformation without meaningful data. Thankfully, your employee intranet hosts tonnes of valuable data that you can use to push your digital workplace strategy forward.
For example, if one of your overarching goals is to improve employee engagement across your organisation, you can look to your intranet to uncover data on current engagement levels. Look at stats such as content management readership rates or interaction with company news to see if your staff are resonating with your company’s communications and goals.
