When businesses first had access to email, it seemed like an amazing piece of technology, which would revolutionise the way we worked. Indeed, it was nothing short of a technological revolution at the time, offering near-instantaneous personal communication.
Now however, technology has advanced rapidly and most organisations will agree that online intranet software – which includes an in-built intranet email system – is the way forward in the digital workspace. Over the past decade, there have been so many advancements in business communication tools that even email is rapidly becoming outdated.
Email still has its uses, but it has its limitations too. The main problem is that if you’re working in a busy office and receiving hundreds of emails each day, opening and reading them can actually hinder your ability to do your job. You’re wasting time if email is your main communications strategy and your inbox isn’t segmented, so everything appears in one huge, cluttered list.
Arriving at your workplace in the morning, only to find dozens of new emails since you last checked your inbox, presents the day’s first challenge as you try to prioritise which are the most important, and which can probably be deemed junk. Then, you must decide which need a reply most urgently. Then, you spend time drafting suitable replies. By the end of this process, you could have wasted precious time dealing with emails that weren’t important, leaving you feeling jaded before you start the rest of your tasks.
Another problem is that once you have a stack of email threads, you’ll need to search through them for any saved information that you need, which can also be time consuming. For instance, you may be looking for a quote that a colleague emailed you months ago. Since then, the same person will have emailed you countless other times, leaving you with a massive task in searching through a black hole of archived messages.
In some cases, you might not even be able to find the original email, meaning you have to contact your colleague and ask if it can be re-sent. All of this is wasting time by having to do the same thing twice.
Another problem is that email isn’t particularly secure. This is why you can’t take any risks, such as emailing clients’ sensitive information, like bank account details or passwords. Even if you’ve never suffered a problem in the past, there’s always a chance something will go wrong.
An increasing number of businesses are looking for a better communication tool – and the answer is an intranet email application. This will allow your team to communicate more effectively and easily, by creating new pathways for interaction. And rather than being a hindrance, internal communications will become an asset to your company’s culture and the entire employee experience.
Internal communication with your team via email can be difficult, but you can make it easier by using your intranet to simplify collaboration. Instead of sending out a group email to many individual colleagues and then having to await a multitude of replies as everyone picks it up at different times, you’ll have a platform which enables you to collaborate with many workmates at the same time.
The modern intranet provides a number of collaboration tools, including file managers, photo and video sharing, blogs, company news articles, and internal social media, which encourage everyone to be involved and boost productivity.
A social intranet becomes a community in which all employees can connect with each other, which will drive an increase in employee engagement levels.
Returning to the limitation of emails – where all messages arrive in your inbox in a random order regardless of the topic to which they relate – an intranet application enables users to segment incoming messages. For example, marketing-related tasks can be stored in one segment, while accounts-related tasks can be stored in another. You can create as many segments as you need.
With the ongoing advances in technology, an intranet application can be used for project management, communication, scheduling and a host of other purposes. This means there’s far less confusion, as the information you require to do your job effectively is at your fingertips and correctly stored with other relevant files. There will be no going back to a colleague, six months later, to ask if they’re able to send something again – you’ll know exactly where to find it.
After spending years using email, many employees find that using one-line messages via the intranet are saving them time. It’s far easier to send a quick message than to spend time starting a new email file, finding the recipient in your contacts list, composing the email, and sending it. Why click several buttons when you just need one click of your mouse?
For those who’ve been using email for many years, switching to online intranet software can seem daunting. But by embracing change, your business can remain competitive and take advantage of the new technology that’s out there.