An intranet can help organizations by streamlining communication, automating tasks, providing fast search, facilitating collaboration, and improving employee engagement and productivity. A modern intranet acts as a one-stop shop that connects the organization, allowing employees to easily complete tasks, communicate, collaborate, and share knowledge. Features like personalization, simplified collaboration tools, and integrated communication help cut down on distractions and give employees back their time.
1. How an intranet can
help you work
smarter, save money
and improve
employee wellbeing.
Developing extraordinary
experiences for a digital world
2. Transformational Intranet | 2
WorkplaceGive your people their time back
Productivity at work is a well-known area of research and there's a lot we know about how
inefficient work practices can seriously affect an organisation's bottom line, employee
satisfaction and employee retention. Time is money, right? So let's start with the bad news:
● A business with 100 employees spends an average downtime of 17 hours per week
clarifying communication, translating to an annual cost of over half a million dollars.1
● Actively disengaged employees cost the US $450 to $550 billion per year in lost
productivity and in the UK the cost of lost productivity due to ill health and
'presenteeism' is around £61 billion per year.2
● Organisations with low employee engagement scores saw 18% lower productivity,
16% lower profitability, 37% lower job growth and 65% lower share price over time.3
Yet similar research clearly shows that an informed, engaged and technologically empowered
workplace sees an increase in these areas, so here's the good news:
● The McKinsey Global Institute found that productivity improves by 20-25% in
organisations with connected employees. That kind of increase in productivity has
the potential for revenues amounting to $1.3 trillion per year.
● When employee engagement increases, there is a corresponding increase in
employee retention by up to 87%.4
● Information workers prefer newer communication tools, particularly instant
messaging, over more traditional ones like e-mail or team workspaces and can
increase employee satisfaction by a median of 20%.4
But how do you give employees their time back, increase engagement and productivity?
1. Four Steps to Avoid Miscommunication
2. Presenteeism & ill health: the cost to British businesses is £61 billion a year
3. Engaging Employees
4. Deloitte - The Digital Workplace
3. Workplace
Modern intranets - or digital workplaces - can empower
an entire organisation to be as efficient as possible.
It's common that organisations run a number of different digital tools - HR and payroll,
customer relationship management, planning, organisational structure and document
storage. It may even allow some cross-organisational or departmental communication.
But when people can't quickly find what they're looking for, to complete the task they need to
do via clear and intuitive interfaces, it can be incredibly frustrating and a significant waste of
time.
A great intranet - or digital workplace - is the one-stop-shop to connect your organisation and
allow your employees to complete tasks, communicate, collaborate and share knowledge to
deliver better outcomes. It will also support an organisational culture that people want to be
part of.
A truly effective intranet solution will:
● streamline communication
● automate recurring tasks
● provide fast and accurate search
● integrate with existing systems
● facilitate collaboration
● improve staff relationships
● increase engagement
● promote the organisation's culture
Let's explore how a modern intranet is an essential ingredient in improving productivity.
Transformational Intranet | 3
4. The way we work has changed. It's always been changing and
for the last few hundred years, the change has been slow and
incremental. Today, tasks that used to take hours, days or even
weeks to complete can happen in an instant.
Breakthroughs in technology have had an immense impact not
just on the way we work and how organisations manage
information, but also on where we work and how we interact
and communicate.
Initially disruptive, these same breakthroughs have also given us
easy-to-use and intuitive interfaces which, connected to
communication networks, have created new ways of working
and collaborating.
But these technologies have also made it easy to bombard
employees with unnecessary information, emails, meetings and
processes.
A truly effective intranet solution doesn't just help people do
things better and faster than in previous eras, it also enables
new ways of control, coordination, and collaboration on
activities, faster and at a lower cost.1
Workplace
Disruption is not a dirty word
Transformational Intranet | 41. How Technology Is Changing Work and Organisations
5. Be honest, how long
since your own email
inbox was at zero?
Transformational Intranet | 5
Workplace
Cut the clutter and reduce the noise
While you're reading this eBook, it's likely you'll check your phone, reply to a text message, read an email, pop
in to a meeting or stop to answer a question from a colleague.
Let's take a look at some of those distractions and how an effective intranet solution tackles them.
Email overload is a significant problem in most workplaces with the average employee spending 2 to 2.5 hours
per day reading and writing emails leading to feeling stressed and isolated, fragmented tasks and longer
workdays.2
Email overload is caused by the volume of messages, poorly targeted emails, numerous attachments, long
email chains and is often caused by emails being sent to too many people as CC or Reply All when not
necessary or not relevant to the recipient.
A well-designed intranet can help cut the clutter and reduce the noise in an employee's email inbox by
providing the tools to better handle information flow and reduce disruption.
Emails and messaging can be more effectively targeted to specific departments or groups meaning less time
spent on sorting through an inbox of useless information. Using advanced social tools can reduce the time
spent communicating through email or phone.
And frankly, if the individual receiving an email doesn't actually need it - it's simply corporate spam clogging up
their inbox.
A typical office worker
is interrupted on
average every 11
minutes and it takes an
average of 23 minutes
to return to the original
task after an
interruption.1
1. The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress
2. Managing Email Overload in the Workplace
6. Is that meeting really necessary?
While important, meetings need to be relevant and well-
organised. Unnecessary meetings are an incredible waste of
time, money and the goodwill of your people. It's said that
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos applies a simple rule to all meetings:
Don't plan a meeting at which two pizzas will not feed
everyone present.
Meetings are another area that can often be handled well
using the tools available in a great intranet, and many of
these are based on social media tools that people are
already familiar with and find easy to use.
Consider if your proposed meeting can actually be handled
more efficiently via email, video conference, chat group or
instant messaging. Taking the 'meeting' to where people are
using digital tools also makes it easier for people to be
efficient, record actions and provide feedback.
Workplace
Transformational Intranet | 6
7. Transformational Intranet | 7
Workplace
Make it personal and relevant
Personalisation in the workplace is rapidly becoming the new normal and is increasingly expected by employees.
Digital workplaces are now providing employees with communication and engagement tools at work that they've already been using for years in other
consumer technologies such as social media and online shopping, and probably on a mobile device.
A central digital workplace that fosters a culture of collaborative engagement and two-way communication across an entire organisation is a powerful way
to keep staff aligned with your organisation's strategies.
Research shows that productivity improves by 20-25%1 in organisations with connected employees and employee retention increases by up to 87%2.
At work, your employees expect your intranet - or digital workspace - to make their lives easier and deliver to them exactly the tools they need to do their
job, and to do it fast and efficiently. It will:
● promote efficiency by integrating with existing systems to provide seamless information flow
● provide easy access to each individual's unique workplace tools
● act as a one-stop-shop for all internal content, information and services with unified messaging that supports the organisation's strategic plans
● save time with exceptional search functionality
● facilitate fast and easy transparent communication across the organisation
● encourage and enhance collaboration
● streamline common or regular tasks and workflows
● be mobile and support modern, flexible workplace and remote working policies
A great intranet helps to facilitate the flow of information, communication, collaboration and feedback and does it by giving people both powerful tools to
do their tasks and easy communication across silos.
So, give people what they want and what they need and hide the rest.
1. The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies
2. Deloitte - The Digital Workplace
8. Workplace
Transformational Intranet | 8
Two heads are better than one.
Sharing ideas, skills and time in a truly collaborative environment offers
huge value to organisations in terms of economic dividend but also
employee engagement and satisfaction.
According to Deloitte1, when employees collaborate:
● they work 15% faster, on average
● 73% do better work
● 60% are innovative
● 56% are more satisfied
Simplified and organised workplace collaboration means great
teamwork. It can shorten decision-making cycles, increase productivity,
simplify business processes and improve workflows.
And it enables you to transform your employee experience by fostering
open communication across all departments and management, breaking
down communication silos.
1. Deloitte: The Collaborative Economy
9. Squiz Workplace is an out-of-the-box intranet that allows you to communicate, collaborate and share knowledge.
At Squiz, we believe in the power of our technology to transform your organisation and to help you move forward, faster. We built Squiz Workplace to
empower people to connect, communicate and collaborate at work which in turn helps to foster a sense of community across your organisation. It
improves agility and productivity, supports talent recruitment and retention, encourages innovation knowledge-sharing, and is key to creating a truly
great employee experience. Here's some of the key features:
Workplace
Transformational Intranet | 9
company branding and colours
built-in analytics to measure employee engagement
across the platform and optimise content based on usage
communities to encourage communication and
collaboration based on projects and interest groups
user-friendly information architecture that is task-
based, not team-based
classifieds that act as the company’s very own online
marketplace
security features that meet Government standards
alerts that display urgent, organisation-wide messages
integrations with existing business systems allowing
employees to conduct multiple tasks on one platform
relevant communications with news, events and alerts,
personalised for each employee
real time updates with alert banners and notifications
for urgent messages
organisation chart and employee directory that’s
always up to date through integration with their HR
system, saving employees time otherwise required to
update manually
enterprise predictive search that surfaces information
across keywords, documents and employee profiles,
reducing time spent searching manually
two-way conversations with an embedded social
network, which also breaks down organisational silos
easy content editing to empower employees to
contribute to the platform and reduce pressure on
internal communications teams to maintain content
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amet, consectetur
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eiusmod tempor.
Squiz - About usServicesTechnology
Solutions Begin…
Squiz is a global digital services company with
around 500 employees across the globe in
places like Sydney, New York,
Edinburgh,London and Melbourne.
Technology is still at the heart of what we do.
Our software is positioned within three
Gartner Magic Quadrants (Enterprise Search,
Horizontal Portals and Web Content
Management) and we’ve been named as a
world leader by Ovum in their Web Content
Management Solution Decision Matrix every
year since 2012.
Our next phase of growth lies in designing
solutions that leverage new waves of
innovation. We will help our clients move
forward, faster - towards a more productive
future that’s driven by new levels of
automation, and a host of new services and
devices.
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