With many economies in total lock-downs due to the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations have been forced to implement a remote working policy across the globe. This shift, while may be critical to reduce the spread of the virus, has however drastically affected business continuity. Without effective processes to guide them at home, several employees have experienced a massive drop in productivity.
While these are huge challenges, they also present an opportunity for organizations to accelerate their digital transformation efforts to keep employees engaged and productive, encourage collaboration, and centralize crisis response efforts.
While there are many ways and tools to do this, utilizing a modern cloud-based intranet with AI that can deliver personalized content to individual employees mimicking the work from office wrt knowledge sharing is the most viable option. It combines multiple tools needed to effectively manage a remote workforce. They not only improve communication, collaboration, and efficiencies but also enable easy access and sharing of highly relevant and personalized data.
Fully Leverage Your Intranet During Uncertain Times
Why would you want to use separate tools for communication, collaboration, document sharing and productivity when a modern intranet built on Office 365 provides all these capabilities? With an intranet, organizations possess a centralized and powerful tool that can help their employees better utilize their time.
Here are some more reasons why using an intranet during uncertain times is a no-brainer.
1. Streamlined Internal Collaboration
The intranet is a central hub for an organization’s online activities, bringing employees from multiple locations together – a must-have for successful remote working. It increases engagement by enabling direct chats, likes and comments, and forum-style group conversations. In fact, through the intranet, every person within the organization can have insights into what’s happening throughout the organization.
2. Effective Knowledge Management
A modern autonomous intranet like Mesh leverages AI and knowledge mining techniques to tap into the existing organization-wide knowledge to ensure the right information is available to the right person at the right time to take decisions faster and improve business efficiency.
It uses applied AI to create a smart content repository. It automates manual tasks like metadata management, tagging and provides taxonomy recommendations, which in turn enables easier content discoverability and thus enhances productivity.
3. Improved Project Management
Project managers can use the intranet to track and update their team’s calendars, task lists, milestones, and deadlines whilst providing useful comments and feedback that will be available in real-time. This not only helps to streamline remote work processes but also saves time and energy, improving results and increasing overall productivity.
But Your Traditional Intranet Won’t Suffice…
While an intranet provides incredible benefits to an organization, a traditional one doesn’t cut it during crisis times like this pandemic. It has certain downsides that cannot be ignored and can be detrimental to the entire organization.
1. Security Risks
With employees working from home, they are using their electronic devices to access critical and sensitive data on the intranet via unsecured networks, thereby creating multiple entry points for potential hackers. A traditional intranet technology is quite fragile and the risk of security and data privacy is higher.
2. Poor Personalization
During crisis times like this, your employees want quick access to localized and personalized news and updates. They want to stay updated on the latest news in their location, recent changes in their departments, and how people in similar roles are tackling the situation.
In short they need content that is based on their interests, preferences, and needs.
A traditional intranet can’t provide this level of personalization.
3. Ineffective Search
During these stressful times, a traditional intranet’s poor search feature adds to employees’ existing frustrations. How annoying and unproductive will it be if you cannot find the information you need within an intranet and have to spend hours switching multiple apps?
If employees don’t get the searched information with ease, they’ll quickly become disengaged.
4. Difficult To Measure
In light of the current global uncertainty, the management needs hard facts on productivity, engagement, collaboration, and alignment with goals, to better assess processes and measure performances. However, these metrics may be difficult to obtain as traditional intranets lack a robust and useful analytics module.
How Can A Modern Intranet Help?
Along with the advances in AI, cloud and enterprise mobility, intranets have also evolved a lot in recent times. AI in intranet is being used in the delivery of highly relevant information in a contextual way. It enables employees to get the information that they need quickly to do their best work and be more productive.
A modern autonomous intranet like Mesh 3.0 also comes with a multitude of sophisticated features that can not only help organizations in the current crisis but also prepare it to scale effectively after it.
Let’s deep dive into how modern intranets can help during remote working.
1. Drive Engagement With High Personalization
Modern intranets such as Mesh 3.0 are equipped with AI and machine learning capabilities that analyze the interests, preferences, location, and preferences of the employees and recommend highly contextual articles, insights, documents, news, and expert opinions to users. This personalizes the intranet experience for employees and increases engagement.
2. Improve Productivity With Cognitive Enterprise Search
From the traditional enterprise search to cognitive search, the search feature in an intranet has made some incredible advancements that have made access to information easier. Cognitive search connects Office 365 and all your enterprise apps and acts as a “one stop search” for your organization. This boosts productivity as employees don’t have to waste their time searching for relevant information across multiple applications.
The advanced search feature also utilizes AI to anticipate, recommend, and auto-fill search terms based on past actions, user profile, and keywords and semantics present in the stored data. This has taken the effectiveness of the search feature to the next level.
3. Improve Collaboration With Social Networking
Remote employees struggle with loneliness, which negatively impacts their output. The Harvard Business Review confirms this fact. Modern intranets function as your Virtual Water Cooler by providing the perfect platform to collaborate and communicate with your colleagues.
They are equipped with interesting social features such as discussion forums, polls, likes, comments, @mentions etc. across different channels and enable users to be more collaborative. They also provide an AI-enabled approach to “recommend” relevant Subject Matter Experts based on the user’s role, interests, activities, location, preferences etc.
4. Measure Engagement With Analytics
Analytics tools in modern intranets provide reports on engagement across departments, content consumption, intranet usage, popular documents, and the overall effectiveness of intranet. This helps management to take informed decisions during remote working.
5. Mitigate Risks With Robust Security
A modern intranet causes zero security and privacy complications and provides the right user authorization levels across departments, teams and locations. A good intranet ensures secure access to confidential or sensitive information based on the company’s governance policies and security practices.
Conclusion
As the COVID-19 crisis continues to unfold, the work cultures will continue to change as employees increasingly adopt the remote work option. Organizations hoping to build and maintain their competitive advantages will have to evolve with the needs of their workforce accordingly. A modern intranet is a platform upon which organizations can unite their remote workers across multiple geographies and time zones to ensure that they are able to easily engage and collaborate and drive results.
About Acuvate’s Mesh 3.0
Acuvate’s Mesh 3.0 is the world’s first autonomous intranet, that delivers the relevant content at the right time to the right people to increase productivity and business efficiency. Mesh 3.0 equips your employees and users with a single point of access to contextual information tailored based on their activities, Geo, preferences, teams, etc. The intranet solution taps into the organization wide knowledge spread across multiple enterprise’s back-end applications, creating a single user interface to communicate, collaborate, search and share information.
Further Insights:
- 10 Must Have Modern Features In Your Intranet
- Why Modern Intranets Are The Gateway For A Modern Workplace
- The Future Of Intranets: Trends And Modern Features
- Virtual Water Cooler: Unique Potential Of Informal Communication
If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our AI and digital workplace consultants for a personalized consultation.
