The Intranet has proven to be more than useful in the last couple of years, with the work from home setup. A successful intranet needs to be designed with an understanding of your team workflow, technology stack, industry best practices, security landscape and a whole host of other considerations. An intranet is far more than just a single focus communication tool, it is a link for all your internal communication and collaboration. Your team has particular needs when it comes to cloud collaboration and expect that you, as business management, will meet them. This includes keeping your intranet up to current trends. Some trends help to better internal communication, others with task collaboration and others with team building across departments.
These are the trends we have seen so far in intranets in 2021:
Mobile Integration
Information at your fingertips on the go has been a growing trend, but the last 2 years (since lockdown) have made it a must. As employees worked towards adjusting to a remote and uncertain work environment, mobility became a key work survival mechanism. Mobility gives access to employees who are working outside the office environment, whether at home or while travelling.
Making your intranet accessible via mobile devices will make working simpler regardless of their location and situation. Ensuring a mobile friendly user experience through responsiveness is a great and simple way to expand access across devices.
Personalized Experience
Offering a personalized experience for your employees does far more than make them feel more appreciated. It makes each individual employee work more efficiently. Intranets can offer a plethora of ways to personalize, these are some popular options:
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- Allow your team to view recently visited links or pages, to keep their focus where it needs to be and make their experience on the intranet worthwhile. As a manager, you want your company’s intranet to be an avenue for productivity and collaboration by offering resources that simplify tasks. Offering recently viewed links/documents makes connecting to information effortless.
- Related Documents based on departments can reduce efforts and allow for more focus on more important tasks. Create resource libraries with appropriate documents and materials for each department or specific employee group. This simple setup can make both employees on-boarding and access to frequently used documents painless. The organization for such libraries can be done either by department or skill set.
Integrate Across Systems
The most effective thing is to have everything in one place because no one tool or software can do it all. Integrating your key business software/tools with your intranet can boost productivity greatly. For example, Integrate Microsoft Teams or Google Drive with your intranet so any files shared on these software directly save onto your intranet. Not only does this make it easier for your team to save data, but this enhances data organization and security.
Design
UX/UI is amongst the most popular 2020/2021 trends across all industries. The user-experience and user-interface heavily depend on one another and should always be built with the user’s psychology in mind. When creating an intranet, your user is your team and your purpose is to promote productivity. In the past, an intranet’s visual appeal (design) may not have been at the top of a company’s priorities, but in 2021 it should be. We know that to enhance your company’s productivity and get the most out of your intranet, your employees need optimal experience. The user’s experience is only complete with a well thought out and planned design. Give your team a good experience to promote their creativity and potential.
Smart Marketing Group has an expert team of UX/UI architects, who focus on researching the most up to date trends and implementing them to all designs. Learn more about SMG’s Digital Marketing Team.
Smart IS International offers both custom intranet solutions across platforms including Microsoft SharePoint. Our custom development team can draw on our experience across a complete range of industries and platforms to analyze your company’s needs in-depth and build, run or improve your intranet solution.
Source: https://www.elcom.com.au/resources/blog/10-intranet-trends-for-2021
