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Convinced of the benefits of a corporate intranet for collaboration and internal communication within your organization, you have started to design your own private network.
During this phase of writing your specifications, you wonder about the different features to integrate into your corporate intranet . The possibilities are indeed numerous.
To help you in your approach, Mozzaik365 presents a selection of 16 features to add to your corporate intranet to improve collaboration and internal communication within your structure.
Read the following carefully and be inspired!
Each company has its own intranet (features)
In a previous article, Mozzaik365 presented you different examples of corporate intranet and gave you its best advice to create your own Digital Workplace.
Let us recall at this stage that there is no single model of corporate intranet.
The corporate intranet, a tool to be customized
And for good reason: each organization is unique and has its own way of operating, its own culture, its own market and, of course, its own internal issues.
Some organizations, like large retail groups, need to facilitate communication with their field teams. For others, such as companies in the banking sector, the challenge is more to secure their exchanges, especially in hybrid work situations.
When it comes to setting up its own intranet, each company must therefore carefully select its features in order to design an internal site that corresponds precisely to its specific constraints.
One or more corporate intranets?
Moreover, an organization can equip itself with several intranets, in order to respond to different internal issues.
For example, a company can set up an intranet dedicated to its internal communication, another dedicated to HR information and another to document a project. These intranets are complementary and must allow easy navigation from one to the other to create a fluid and clear global experience for the user; the whole forming a seamless ecosystem: a Digital Workplace.)
But, in concrete terms, how do you go about designing the intranet or intranets that will make your structure run more smoothly and meet the various specific needs of your company?
SharePoint, the application to create corporate intranets on your terms
To create the intranet site (s) your company needs, you can rely on the Microsoft SharePoint application. This software allows you to easily build customized digital workspaces.
In concrete terms, with SharePoint, you can build intranet sites. But that's not all. You can also enhance your sites with various features. To do this, you need to add and configure the Web Parts of your choice.
☝️Mozzaik365's advice: setting up a Digital Worplace is a demanding and sometimes complex exercise. Therefore, think about being accompanied by an integrator. This expert will notably help you identify the needs of your teams and translate them into features that you can add to your corporate intranet.
With these basics in mind, let's move on to the presentation of the best features to integrate into your corporate intranet to make it an effective tool for collaboration and internal communication.
Intranet Feature #1: Customize your internal site with your corporate colors
The visual identity of your organization is an important lever of internal communication. It contributes indeed to the diffusion of the culture and the values of your structure to your teams. It is therefore essential to opt for an intranet that adapts to your graphic charter (logos, colors, images, etc.).
The native version of SharePoint offers limited design possibilities. Mozzaik365 Digital Workplace pushes these limits and allows you to create an internal site with an aesthetic impact. You can apply a theme to your intranet sites to customize the design while maintaining consistency across your pages. Thanks to this feature, employees clearly identify the workspace in which they are located and become imbued with the visual identity of their company.
Intranet Feature #2: Create a custom news gallery
Did you know that? According to an Inside-OpinionWay survey, 1/3 of the employees questioned consider themselves "badly informed" within their company and 20% even declare "not having the information they need to do their job". An intranet dedicated to internal communication can alleviate this problem since it is an effective information channel.
To fully ensure its media function, the intranet must present a news gallery. The Mozzaik365 Digital Workplace thus integrates a "News Wall" module. This module allows you to create in a few clicks beautiful blog articles that make you want to read them. It is also possible to add images, videos and clickable links to them. All of which makes for attractive and memorable content!
Even better, Mozzaik365's "News Wall" offers advanced features that enhance employee engagement. Indeed, the contents which are diffused there can be targeted to a precise audience. In addition, each user can customize their own news wall by subscribing to the topics of their choice. Finally, employees can react to the news.
The icing on the cake, the "News Wall" module of the Mozzaik365 Digital Workplace also has an impactful design .
Intranet Feature #3: Allow employees to comment on content published by the company
With the right features, your corporate intranet can improve not only top-down internal communication, but also bottom-up and cross-functional internal communication. In short, your private site is a great way to interact with employees and increase their engagement.
To encourage exchanges between your group's stakeholders, be sure to add a feature to your intranet that allows employees to comment on articles and other shared content. The Mozzaik365 Digital Workplace offers such an option. Users can be allowed to react to posts made by the internal communications department on the organization's "News Wall.
Intranet Feature #4: Distribute content in a targeted manner
Employees are too often victims of information overload. This infobesity can harm their productivity, increase their stress and lead them to burn-out. According to Nadia Boukef, quoted by Caroline Sauvajol-Rialland, 74% of the managers questioned said they "suffer from information overload and a generalized sense of urgency".
When it is well designed, the corporate intranet provides an appropriate response to this internal communication issue. In this respect, the "News" component of the Mozzaik365 Digital Workplace integrates a feature allowing to target the populations that will receive information. The objective: send the right message to the right person at the right time and, in fine, preserve the available brain time of the employees (and their nerves!).
Thanks to this feature, news related to finance can, for example, be relayed exclusively to the "Controlling" department and the announcement of a new transport provider only to the "Logistics" department.
Better yet, with such a tool, it becomes possible to adapt the same message to different user profiles. For example, the CEO's New Year's greetings can be sent in video format (more easily consumed on a Smartphone) to field teams and in written form, with a PowerPoint, to employees at headquarters.
Intranet Feature #5: Integrate Microsoft Teams internal collaboration application
With no less than 270 million monthly users worldwide, the internal collaboration application Microsoft Teams is now an indispensable tool for many organizations. To improve internal collaboration within your structure, it is strongly recommended that you add this tool to your private network.
By integrating Teams and SharePoint with your corporate intranet, you centralize all communication and project management tools (Microsoft Planner, Task, ToDo, etc.) in a seamless environment. With this feature, offered by the Mozzaik365 Digital Workplace, you optimize your employees' user experience and facilitate collaborative work.
Intranet Feature #6: Provide access to documents
Attachments that get lost, failed downloads, recipient errors, etc. Document sharing is a major issue in internal communication and collaboration, and even a security issue. The solution to simplify this process? A corporate intranet with a feature to store, order and access files in a seamless and secure manner.
Mozzaik365, based on SharePoint, allows you to create an EDM (Electronic Document Management) completely integrated to your Digital Workplace. With this feature, you can centralize your company's knowledge, make it available to all your employees and allow each employee to enrich the content to build a real knowledge base.
Better yet, with Mozzaik365's Search component, employees can find the content they need to work with at a glance. In addition, with shared document storage on SharePoint, employees can work asynchronously on the same file and view its modification history. This makes it possible to collaborate more efficiently, especially in hybrid work situations.
Intranet Feature #7: Display a dynamic Who's Who
The corporate directory is a valuable support for new talent and for employees of large organizations. It allows you to put names to faces, identify roles and get in touch with colleagues quickly. It is therefore a basic tool for internal collaboration.
📍To go further on this topic, find out why the corporate directory is an essential for your internal collaboration.
Based on this observation, we recommend that you integrate a "Dynamic Who's Who" feature into your corporate intranet. This component, proposed by Mozzaik365, allows you to reference employees, and also to search for people by name, department, function or skills, and even to apply filters and make contact in one click. The ideal way to quickly find the right contact and move forward on your projects.
Intranet Feature #8: Create shortcuts
To improve internal collaboration and user experience, turn your private network into a true hub that opens up to all the resources and software your teams need. This way, employees will never again be "lost" in your company's digital environment.
In this perspective, your company intranet must include a feature allowing to create shortcuts. You can then set up links to business tools, websites, files and other intranet pages useful to employees. The Mozzaik365 Digital Workplace offers this possibility.
Mozzaik365 offers an "Application Launcher". Thanks to this feature, links to applications useful to employees appear directly in the Digital Workplace. This way, employees know which tool to use and do not get lost in the multitude of existing applications.
Intranet Feature #9: Aggregate the company's social networks
In 2022, according to We Are Social and Hootsuite, 58.4% of the world's population will use social networks. It is therefore likely that your employees are also active on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. So why not go on their ground and use this lever to improve your internal communication and boost your external communication?
To do so, add to your corporate intranet a feature aiming at centralizing the contents published on your company's social networks. Employees will thus have an overview of the external communication of your structure. They will also be able to participate in discussions, create engagement around your posts and act as ambassadors of your brand (commercial and employer) on the different platforms. A must.
🚀 To dig into this theme, find out how the "social media wall" feature turns your employees into ambassadors
💡Did you know. According to a study called "Kredible Employee Advocacy Study" and relayed by Influencer Marketing Hub,Employee Advocacy ("employee ambassador" in the text) programs with at least 1,000 active participants could generate up to $1.9 million in advertising value, and at a lower cost! So it would be a shame not to give it a try, for example by using the "News Wall" of the Mozzaik365 Digital Workplace .
Intranet feature #10: Ask your employees for their opinion
Let's remember that good internal communication has several dimensions. In particular, it is important to encourage upward communication, i.e. to regularly collect feedback from the teams. This practice allows you to take the pulse of your employees, identify their problems and provide relevant solutions (often inspired by the field!).
If well designed, your corporate intranet can be an effective tool to promote this Bottom-Up approach. The Mozzaik365 Digital Workplace can for example be enhanced with features that allow employees to ask for their opinion such as the suggestion box, polls or quizzes.
