What your Intranet becomes, in the end, is entirely up to your creativity. You may have it as a one-page welcome board that flashes on everyone’s screen. Or you can upgrade to a more thorough and sophisticated credential-based access, sharing, collaboration, and engagement tool designed to help your organization achieve its growth goals. The advantage of an Intranet is that its functionality may be scaled up or down depending on the company’s needs and employee preferences. However, a few qualities must be included for it to be considered a legitimate employee intranet portal. Let’s look at the seven mission-critical characteristics that any employee intranet system should have.
1) Content Management – Your Intranet’s content is the gasoline that keeps it going. Previously, a separate third-party interface with a Content Management System was required for the portal (CMS). However, today’s intranets cannot function without a built-in CMS or the ability to integrate and work with other CMS. In addition, the requirement for new, up-to-date, and relevant material is critical in today’s workplace, which is changing by the minute. Therefore, isn’t downloading and uploading content the most basic function of an Intranet?
2) Fine-grained Permissions – Giving users regulated access to the portal’s many sections boosts its efficiency. For example, while all employees will see broad leadership statements and HR rules, secret financial predictions, profits, and revenue sheets should only be seen by finance, sales, and operations executives. Such fine-grained permissions allow for not just credential-based sign-in but also role-based and department-specific information access. This functionality greatly enhances the portal’s practical value.
3) Forms, Policies, and Documents – This is one that HR will appreciate! A common repository for all sorts of paperwork and policies may be found at the employee portal site. For simplicity of use, the section might include direct download and online form filling. In addition, tech papers, cheat sheets, templates, manuals, and library files – all materials that aid in the execution of routine or recurring tasks – can be posted by operations personnel.
4) Mobile-friendly – When used wisely, mobility may go a long way toward assisting workers in developing a positive relationship with the corporate Intranet portal. Instead of cramming everything into the mobile version, you may restrict access to the critical and routine functions that can be readily handled on a smartphone’s small screen. These might include:
Manuals and policies for read-only access are examples of texts.
Newsfeed – Providing read-only access to blogs and news feed helps employees stay abreast of the latest happenings within the company.
Address book – Having an address book with names and numbers can help users exploit the native functionalities of smartphones, such as calling or messaging.
Databases – This one will especially be of value to sales and marketing teams and operations managers.
5)Excellent Search – A portal’s success is largely determined by how quickly the material can be found within it. This functionality also helps employees trust the portal’s correctness, relevance, and dependability when they need it the most. Content indexing and sophisticated search capabilities (wildcards, autosuggest) are the necessities of today’s business search requirements. Encourage the addition of metadata to the material so that a search engine can evaluate if one result is more relevant than another. The search box’s location and occurrence on every page visit are also critical to optimize its usefulness.
As a result, you should consider these factors before deciding on an employee intranet portal. And if your terms and requirements mee with these factors, establishing an employer portal is a smart option for you.
