How Social Intranet Portal Software Helps With Remote Working

Even before the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, companies everywhere had the potential to benefit from the use of a social intranet. Now that many organizations have switched to remote working, having a powerful intranet portal software can help facilitate many of the important process required to effectively work from home. Let's take a look at several different ways that using a social intranet can help your employees work remotely.

It Helps Improve Employee Engagement

Employee engagement is one of the most crucial aspects of business success. In fact, studies have shown that companies that have higher employee engagement are nearly 21% more profitable. However, employee engagement is something that most companies tend to struggle with. According to Gallup's State of the Global Workplace report, only 15% of employees are actively engaged in the workplace. This means that 85% of the workforce is either unengaged or actively disengaged from their daily work. What impact does low engagement have on companies? Well, according to a recent employee engagement study, disengaged employees have cost organizations between $450-550 billion each year.Even if your workforce is completely engaged, the forced switch to remote working can cause your employees' engagement to decline. In our experience, we know that using an intranet portal software can help companies increase employee engagement even while working from home. A social intranet helps with this as it allows you to easily measure employee engagement and respond accordingly. You're able to see what they're doing and how well they're doing it. That way, if you see that engagement is slipping, you can quickly address the problem and pull your team back into peak engagement. This is especially great when your team is working from home and you cannot measure their work as you would normally. While an intranet portal isn't the perfect solution for any engagement issues you may have, it can be a massive help for building employee engagement.

Allows Easy File Sharing for Collaboration

A recent study from Queens University found that 39% of employees surveyed believe that people in their organization don't collaborate enough. Ensuring that your employees are effectively collaborating is vital - especially when everyone while everyone is working remotely. Having poor collaboration can have a huge impact on your company's success. 97% of employees and executives believe that a lack of team alignment negatively impacts the outcome of a task or project. Additionally, 86% of employees and executives say that a lack of collaboration is the cause of many workplace failures. Note that these studies were done while everyone is in office. With people working remotely, that number is bound to increase.

A social intranet is one of the best tools that you can find for overcoming collaboration issues while your team works from home. An intranet portal software allows your team to store and share documents quickly and easily. Since everyone is working from the same document, everyone is able to see each other's contributions and ensure that nothing important gets lost. In addition to that, many intranet portals allow you to assign workflows and specific roles to each team member. This way, each person knows what they're doing, why they're doing it, and when it should be done by. By doing so, you can ensure that there is no redundant work or confusion over who is doing what. By eliminating the more common collaboration issues, your company is more likely to succeed while working from home.

Social Networking Connects Teams

While remote working has been effective at getting companies through this crisis, it may end up affecting your company's culture. Without normal day-to-day interactions, your employees risk their relationships with one another eroding. This can have a negative impact on your company. A recent study of companies found that businesses with the best corporate cultures - where employees had strong connections with one another - saw a 682% growth in revenue compared to companies that didn't who only saw a 166% growth. It's important that your company find ways to keep employees connected and engaged with one another.

Thankfully, that's where the "social" part of a social intranet comes into play. An intranet portal provides a centralized online space where employees can work, discuss, socialize, build relationships and more. Your team will be able to direct message each other, post in distinct message forums, and share status updates about what they're doing. Having a tool that facilitates communication between your employees is vital when they aren't in office. If they can't communicate, how will they be able to do any of their projects in a timely and effective manner? It's important to have a tool like an intranet portal software that provides a wide range of communication options when your team is working from home.

Reduces Security Risks

In the past, one of the reasons many employers resisted remote working was related to cyber-security. Many employees don't have the same level of protection on their home network as their employer does in office. While you can limit what types of devices access your network in the office, at home, your employees' network is being accessed by all sorts of devices including laptops, smartphones, gaming devices, and more. Because of this, there are plenty of ways that hackers can access your employees' information while they work from home without them knowing. If you're not careful, these hackers may be able to use the vulnerabilities in your workers' network to be able to gain access to your company's important data. That's why it's vital that your company look into different tools that can help keep your information safe.

While there is only so much you can do to ensure the safety of your employees' networks, using an intranet portal can bridge much of that security gap. Instead of hosting important files and documents on their own computers, your employees will be storing essential information within your secure intranet portal. Some intranet portal software, store information using Microsoft's cloud ensuring that everything is safe and secure. No matter what platform your intranet portal is built on, everything your employees work on from home will be much safer than they would be if you weren't using a social intranet. This, in conjunction with all of the other points we listed above, can ensure that nothing will interrupt your business's performance even while everyone is forced to work from home.

Conclusion

The switch to remote work has been hard on everyone, but that doesn't mean it has to be hard on your company's productivity. If you're still on the fence about adopting a social intranet for your business, think more about the reasons we listed above for how it can help with remote work. While it can't solve all of your problems, making use of an enterprise level intranet portal can help you with any issues you may be having with working from home.