For a company that needs to improve its internal communications, Abel Solutions will design an effective employee intranet. With an emphasis on centralizing information, promoting collaboration, and automating operations, our custom-built SharePoint solutions help clients boost their efficiency.
Importance of an Employee Intranet
Growing businesses will eventually reach a size at which communication becomes difficult. Coordinating an extended group effort between employees of multiple departments is a task that email alone cannot handle. Corporate announcements, policy updates, event reminders, and other important information can get buried under daily correspondence, leading to cluttered inboxes and a lack of general awareness. An employee intranet is an effective means to bring order and stability to internal communication efforts.
An intranet enables employees to access the information and tools that they use to complete their daily tasks. The home page acts as a hub that hosts any combination of resources, from a searchable company directory to their timesheet. Because it is so highly visible, the home page ensures information that needs to be seen company-wide (such as a corporate message board for announcements and a calendar for highlighting upcoming events) is consumed by a maximum number of recipients. Shared access to centralized project files eases collaborative efforts and prevents information silos.
An effective intranet can solve a host of internal communication issues, but it does no good if employees do not use it. Employee resistance to change and hesitancy to adapt to newly implemented tools can impede or halt the adoption process, delaying or defeating the returns on investment sought through installing an intranet in the first place.
Ensuring Adoption and Long-Term Use
First and foremost, an effective intranet must cater to the needs of its users. For example, let’s say HR is having difficulties processing the volume of requests that they are getting for personal time off. If you implement an intranet that doesn’t relieve some of their workloads or improve the review and approval process in some way, HR won’t have any incentive to use it. Making sure that your intranet solution is targeted to handle actual points of stress within the company is important to its widespread use.
Secondly, an intranet must be functional and user-friendly. Regardless of whether it addresses communication problems or improves the company’s operations, no one will want to use the solution you imposed if it is difficult to use, contains unnecessary or inaccurate information, looks dated and unwelcoming, etc. Further, not educating employees on the features and uses of an intranet will relegate it to the forgotten corners of their desktop as opposed to a valued tool.
While these pitfalls can get in the way of actuating your vision for an efficiency-boosting intranet system, Abel Solutions custom-builds digital workplaces to avoid these problems. By leveraging SharePoint as a powerful and flexible platform, we can deliver a robust, comprehensive intranet solution to clients struggling with internal communication issues.
An Abel Solution
The implementation process begins with an analysis of what difficulties the client company is facing, where they have room to improve, and what they want out of their intranet. A SharePoint consultant from Abel Solutions will discuss these matters with you to determine specific considerations to keep in mind when designing your employee intranet system. Our custom solution designers will then create pages and sub-sites dedicated to specific groups and subjects such as project management document libraries and department hubs. Filling the home page and department sub-sites with valuable resources and links that employees use daily will help ensure system adoption. After automating certain operations to speed along internal processes, we will brand your site as appropriate to your company’s mission and values. Finally, after implementation Abel Solutions will help educate your employees on what your new SharePoint intranet is capable of and how they can use it to their advantage.
For those clients who need a quickly-deployed solution, we provide an out-of-the-box intranet software option called Share|Net. Also built on the SharePoint platform, this intranet system is a pre-configured solution that comes with a fixed list of efficiency-boosting features. While still a highly customizable system, Share|Net requires additional support to extend beyond its standard capabilities.
About Abel Solutions
For over 20 years, Abel Solutions has been easing companies’ IT difficulties by delivering impactful, SharePoint-powered solutions. We proudly serve clients from around the country with a variety of needs. Abel Solutions provides comprehensive IT support by offering services such as network administration, data security, and helpdesk support. If inefficient communication is getting in the way of productivity, talk to us today – Abel Solutions will design an intranet system to fulfill your needs.