Transform your internal communication

If 2022 was a year of communication challenges for your business, it’s time to put that right this year and move forward with a solution.

Ensuring your team can communicate effectively with colleagues and their management teams will prove crucial in 2023 as hybrid working becomes the norm and we continue deeper into a recession that will pressure businesses of all kinds to be more efficient than ever before.

Troubled times in 2022

The shift to remote and hybrid working in recent years has exposed flaws in the internal communications plans of many businesses. With staff being asked to work remotely, then in the office, and then in a hybrid style, internal communications teams everywhere have been fighting an ongoing battle.

People were given tools like Teams, Power BI, and Sharepoint and then asked to get on with their work as usual without comprehensive training, procedures and technical support in place. This unprecedented situation resulted in stress and staff turnover for businesses that were already under pressure due to the disruption of the pandemic, staff shortages, and, more recently, the increase in costs that are affecting all of us today in 2023.

Time to take stock

Take what you’ve learned from 2022 and the years that came before it. Review your existing systems, processes, and feedback gathered from your team. Decide which elements were successful and which were not.

Being honest about what has worked and what has been terrible is a great basis for your new and improved plan for this year. Ensure any goals you set are in line with your company’s aims. And most importantly, find out how best to measure the outcome of all communications and how effective they were.

The right tool for the year ahead

By focusing on your internal communications and putting an effective strategy in place alongside an appropriate tool to manage it all, you can help improve productivity and profitability – and create a motivated workforce based on a transparent culture to deal with whatever the year ahead brings, the good and the bad.

Whether you have an intranet or other tool in place to manage internal comms or are thinking about a new solution for 2023, it must be robust and flexible enough to deal with new (or even fewer) staff and able to counteract any effects of future disruptions to ‘business as usual’.

Prepare for transformation

So, how can you transform communication and collaboration in your business? The answer is by combining a modern-day intranet with a transformative Digital Workplace strategy. 

In the early days of the pandemic, people were sent home with the primary means of communication being implemented so quickly that there wasn’t time to test its effectiveness. Now it’s time to implement a one-stop platform where everything can be stored, shared and accessed quickly – combined with a strategy fit for today’s workplace and the interesting times that lie ahead.

Plan your approach with a Digital Workplace strategy

The Digital Workplace encompasses all of the technologies and processes people use to get work done today and in the future. It ranges from HR and core business applications to email, instant messaging, enterprise social media and virtual meeting tools.

Organisations have seen a 67% increase in productivity, a 53% increase in employee engagement, and a 43% increase in revenue by implementing Digital Workplaces.  

Avanade’s Digital Workplace Research

A Digital Workplace strategy – if implemented correctly – will deliver increased productivity, better communication, boosted business performance and revenue, improved employee experience and retention, reduced IT costs, and more.

It should focus on the ‘pain points’ of your employees to ensure the intranet platform you put in place to manage internal communication can quickly deliver value and a great return on your investment.

So, what does this transformation look like?

Here’s an example of the typical process we follow when implementing a Digital Workplace strategy and intranet solution as part of our RADION intranet + strategy service:

1. Consultation of key business stakeholders
2. Establishing the vision and goals for your Digital Workplace
3. Digital Workplace strategy launch
4. Recruitment of Digital Workplace champions
5. Assessment of your Microsoft 365 and technology ecosystem
6. Ways of Working Strategy
7. Communication and education within your organisation
8. Delivery of a Training Strategy
9. Development of an effective governance model
10. Measure success and deliver improvements
11. Ongoing adoption programme
12. Professional services on demand

And what’s the outcome?

With a Digital Workplace strategy combined with an effective intranet, your people have both the tools and the training to communicate and collaborate more effectively than ever before – no matter what the year brings! And it’s all guided by a smart strategy to ensure you get a return on your investment. 

The days of buying a tool and hoping it works out are long gone, especially in today’s cash crisis climate.

Implement a modern-day intranet to transform communication and collaboration

Your intranet is the springboard for your workplace strategy. It’s the place your teams will find critical information that doesn’t disappear as new stuff is added, frequent and relevant content, flexibility for publishing, and a launchpad to link to common apps and navigate quickly and easily. It’s where people can communicate without email chains, missed notifications, or lost threads of conversations.

A single place to communicate

Poor internal communication in the workplace can very quickly lead to unrest; employees get frustrated that they missed vital job promotion opportunities or have missed out on benefits or essential deadlines, for example.

A solid intranet will offer easy integration with Teams and other essential 365 tools to create the perfect one-stop platform with every form of instant communication available to staff. It’s where everything can be stored, shared and accessed quickly.

Creating and sharing content

While intranets are mainly about communicating and sharing, content sharing is also critical in the digital workplace. For example, our intranet solution can be fully utilised to allow content publishing and document management to meet all your company’s needs.

Features like approval workflow, calendars and news templates are also included, along with social features like newsfeeds and chats. Your content can also be targeted to different groups, meaning it can appear seamlessly together and target different employees.

Collaboration

Collaboration seems more difficult now than in the past. Remote workers can feel disconnected from colleagues, and with fewer staff in the office, it’s no longer possible to simply spin around in your chair to ask a quick question about a project.

However, a modern-day intranet allows workers to collaborate quickly and easily. A good intranet solution will offer a user-friendly platform for staff (of all ages and abilities) to work together seamlessly. For example, co-editing content and leaving feedback using the commenting feature directly in a document. Your intranet should offer helpful and familiar features like messaging, tagging, and liking for instant responses.

Check in on your staff

It’s more important than ever that you have a good system to ensure your employees are coping with workloads and feeling well physically and emotionally. Employee satisfaction is a crucial part of retaining staff and so checking in regularly is important.

An effective intranet solution will allow you to communicate easily with your teams through Microsoft Teams and even via a blog. It should enable each staff member to find the information they need and have the chance to comment on it without feeling too overwhelmed.

Bespoke to your business

One barrier to the ability of workers to do their jobs as efficiently as possible stems from them not having fast enough access to the information and systems they rely on each day. Employees want easy links to commonly used forms, e.g. holiday leave forms, and don’t want to waste time trying to find them.

An intranet should offer an entire digital workplace, customisable to how you work. For example, if there are certain kinds of content, forms, or tools that your staff rely on more than others, the system can be customised to promote them and make them easy to find.

Better onboarding

No one wants to pay more admin costs than necessary. But that’s what happens when onboarding processes take too long.

A modern-day intranet can help new starts by letting them serve themselves efficiently and become more productive, faster. New employees have instant access to any paperwork they need and videos on the intranet’s training portal.

Be ready for whatever the future brings

Your intranet will be a platform your business will come to depend on as part of your Digital Workplace strategy, so it should evolve with your needs over time. 

The intranet solution offered through our RADION service uses analytics to help you determine how staff are using your intranet. For example, if engagement on a job promotions board on your intranet’s homepage increases after an internal campaign, you could determine that a success as it would ultimately lead to better employee engagement. 

Contact our team today to learn more about transforming your internal communication in 2023.