It wasn’t that long ago that intranets seemed like a thing of the past. As online collaboration tools became all the rage, many companies wondered whether traditional intranets still had a place in the digital workplace.
However, modern intranets have been making a comeback by adapting to changing needs and incorporating new features that benefit organizations and their people. Let’s take a look at why intranets still play an important role for companies today.
Intranets Facilitate Visibility Across Remote Teams
With remote and hybrid work becoming standard, intranets enable leadership updates and cross-departmental news to reach everyone easily. Centralized access to communications and documentation fosters transparency between on-site and off-site staff. This visibility maintains alignment even when teams flex between home offices, co-working spaces, and the main campus.
Dedicated portals for department and project groups further nurture a culture of openness regarding daily objectives and potential roadblocks. With staff dividing time between various work environments, intranets sustain organizational cohesion.
Centralize Vital Institutional Knowledge
Document scattered across personal drives and clouds suite slow productivity and inhibit transparency. Modern intranets organize policies, guidelines, subject matter expertise articles, eLearning modules, and other vital institutional knowledge into easily discoverable, searchable repositories.
Consolidating this content fuels self-service access and reduces repetitive questioning of co-workers trying to find answers. Over time, intranets evolve into indispensable knowledge bases harnessing an enterprise’s cumulative experiences.
Enhance Data Security
Rather than rely on disparate personal productivity suites and unauthorized cloud storage solutions, unified intranet platforms allow IT and infosec teams to implement consistent, enterprise-grade security protocols for safeguarding sensitive company data.
Controlling credentials also ensures only current employees access confidential documentation. This is far safer than alternatives like email attachments, which can still be accessed after individuals depart.
Boost Employee Engagement
Between an intuitive interface, expansive knowledge base, and online community message boards, a well-designed intranet hub typically enjoys high daily active usage from employees.
Easy access to the latest internal communications and hot topics keeps everyone energetically participating. High adoption nurtures cultural cohesion even between far-flung remote teams.
Enable Contextual Content Delivery
Thanks to native integrations with frequently used apps like Slack, Salesforce, MS Teams, and Office 365, intranet answers and updates surface right within daily workflows instead of requiring switching contexts.
Reduced context switching, combined with proactive notifications when relevant new information is published, can boost productivity for deskless and mobile employees.
Enhance Enterprise Search Capabilities
Harnessing AI and semantic intelligence, modern intranets underpin advanced relevance-based search. This ensures queries return only the most pertinent articles, documents, conversations, and profiles across the enterprise landscape.
With fast access to reliable information, employees can self-serve what they need without handholding, which slows subject matter experts. Over time, intranets continuously fill in knowledge gaps through rapid publishing.
Closing Thoughts
As more businesses embrace remote and hybrid work, next-gen intranets will remain indispensable tools. When architected using these pillars, these intranets securely enhance transparency, fuel productivity, and nurture engagement across modern remote teams. They provide employees with easy access to information, no matter where they are, and create a stronger corporate culture in the process.