SharePoint is traditionally used as an employee portal for managing employee directories, communication, information, and workflow. But over the years it has been observed that organizations who have incorporated such platforms still face the problem of high employee turnover rate. Why? The answer is simple – ineffective employee engagement. The internal portal or intranet is kept organization-centric, not employee-centric. It is solely meeting the ends of the organization by helping them manage identities and workflows, but employees’ experience remains unaddressed.
Employee engagement is beneficial for an organization as it foremostly increases productivity. It retains employees for a longer period, enhances innovation, and improves customer service since an engaged employee is more motivated and driven to work with zeal than a disinterested employee. In the pursuit of alleviating employee experience, the intranet plays a critical role. And while it is part of every organization today, it has been observed as aforementioned that not many have been able to harness all the benefits of an intranet platform.
To resolve this, we have curated the list of 5 best practices that you must integrate into your SharePoint intranet platform to ensure success and engagement.
Making the internal portal an onboarding portal
While your existing employees might be acclimated to the intranet, the newly recruited ones might not be accustomed to the same. You can use the portal to give them a walk of your organization, with interactive employee experience videos, training modules, brief information, and documents centrally stored in place. For instance, at the end of their onboarding, you can put up quizzes and forms to know how much they have understood the organization and share its vision.
Gamifying tasks
Quid pro quo or something for something is appreciated by everyone, even employees from time to time. Gamifying tasks and allotting target-based badges, rewards and recognition also motivate employees to engage with the platform extensively, while completing tasks that they might have otherwise found mundane. It also adds zeal and a healthy competitive environment in the workforce. For example, you can allot points or badges for tasks that are observed to be monotonous like data entry and maintenance.
Incorporating AI chatbots
Everyone is intrigued by AI and using advanced AI chatbots you can address pressing queries faster. For example, you can add an AI chatbot for basic IT Helpdesk queries and queries related to the organization induction. Furthermore, you can use AI for analyzing the search queries of the employee, study their behavior, and automate repetitive tasks.
Adding EGC
Rather than creating a unilateral content space, you can ask employees to publish blogs, snippets, and videos that showcase their interests and expertise. Employee-generated content shall keep them hooked to the platform, create a strong company culture, improve intranet adoption and develop the creativity of the employees. Remember that what gets recognized, gets repeated. Also presenting a personalized feed including the allotted tasks, projects working on, pending, and the ones lined up both, for the team and the employee will help everyone to keep track of things cumulatively as well as individually.
Feedback tools (forms and polls)
You must consider your intranet as the public forum of the organization, which means it should be the primary mode of communication. Many traditional intranets have become obsolete simply because they became one-sided, i.e., only rallying information from the higher hierarchy to the lower. Communication must remain a two-way street if you wish to leverage the benefits of SharePoint intranet optimally. As part of the Microsoft 365 suite, it offers several channels of communication integrated, that offer good employee experience and engagement. This can be practiced through feedback forms. In the era of social media, it goes unsaid that adding social elements like discussion groups, polls on popular industry-related trends, etc. will create an interactive environment in the organization.
Following these practices shall improve the employee experience and engagement on your intranet significantly and render better corporate communication and collaboration. It will then result in higher productivity, easier onboarding, successful training, creating a healthy corporate environment, and higher employee retention. With the foundation of the intranet and its information and communication management features, all you need to do is enhance and add features that engage the employees, grab their attention, and keep them interested and motivated to accomplish the organizational goals.
