Engage your users with 3 trends in successful intranets

Editor's Notes

1. Twitter
2. We have an opportunity in front of us. As intranet communications professionals, we can provide a place for our leaders to engage with their internal audience. Engagement online is a different world than engagement in person. It offers more opportunity for connecting – across oceans, across departments, across hierarchy. And the consumer online space offers us experience and insight into where intranets are going.
3. Here’s a scary thought. Will employers stop buying us computing equipment? Gartner thinks so. And in the near future. By 2017, half of employers will. We’ve got to prepare for that. And the movement goes beyond devices. With devices come mobile web browsers and apps. Consumer and business technology lines are blurring.
4. Consumer technology is easy to use. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t buy it. Inside businesses, technology is often pushed on employees by corporate policy. Is that engaging? – No way. If we want employees – and leaders - to come together, and engage in worthwile discussion and collaboration, we’ve got to make our intranet technologies EASY.
5. And, more and more, consumer technologies are connected, to people and to systems, by default. Is your intranet connected? Are you connected to your co-workers? Because of your intranet or despite it? Intranets today are disconnected platforms and that’s not engaging.
6. The 3rd major trend in successful, engaging intranets I’m seeing is portability. Can you access your intranet on your phone and tablets? Smart phones are engaging. I doubt we’d call them SMART if they weren’t. If you’re like me, you’ve probably spent almost as much time using your phone as a PC today. Maybe more, because I was working on your slides. If you want to engage your employees and leaders, take the intranet to where they work and live.
7. I’m proud to work at Jive Software, a recognized leader in modern communication for business. Feel free to ask me more about it after the presentation.
8. Have you ever found yourself working harder for an employer that cared what you thought and how to make you more effective at your job? Some of this seems like common sense. Make people happy and they’ll do more for you. This is kind of soft, I’ve got some stats for you on a related topic.
9. One of the most common difficulties companies face in strategic planning is turning their vision into a reality. To transform your organization into the one you envision takes more than great strategy and implementation, it takes frequent communications, and reinforcing messages, of the strategy and its impact on specific roles/departments, Aligning everyone in your organization with your strategy is one of the most important things you can do beyond formulating and implementing great strategies. Alignment will make it much easier for your management team to push the organization in the direction you intend. Without good alignment with the strategy, every bit of forward motion will be a struggle. Furthermore, while 65% of organizations have a defined and agreed-upon strategy, only 14 % of employees understand the organization’s strategy. The results are devastating; with less than 10% of organizations able to successfully execute on the defined strategy. SOURCE: http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrymyler/2012/10/16/strategy-101-its-all-about-alignment/
10. Costs For example, a pharmaceutical firm I'm familiar with saved $3 Million dollars in outsourced help desk calls through and IT Service portal Cost of training, support, development, infrastructure and licensing of intranet platforms Decrease in Email Increase Employee Productivity Successful self service portals will decrease problem resolution time Reduce time to find expertise Reduce time wasted searching for common information (holiday schedule, cafeteria menu, key company performance metrics) Faster new hire onboarding Adoption Time on site Pages per visit Home Page bounce rate Active Users Participating Users Increased employee engagement More connected employees Decrease in Turnover Impact How many people viewed the CEO's message? Liked it? Shared it? Commented on it? Who are the greatest influencers? Who isn't getting the message? Is there negative sentiment around a message?
11. Costs For example, a pharmaceutical firm I'm familiar with saved $3 Million dollars in outsourced help desk calls through and IT Service portal Cost of training, support, development, infrastructure and licensing of intranet platforms Decrease in Email
12. Increase Employee Productivity Successful self service portals will decrease problem resolution time Reduce time to find expertise Reduce time wasted searching for common information (holiday schedule, cafeteria menu, key company performance metrics) Faster new hire onboarding
13. Currently over 13.4 million people work from home in America alone. 64% travel while working. Most employers know by now that every employee – regardless of where they live, work, or sit from day-to-day – needs equal access to resources, opportunities, and support services. That’s the reality of a managing a flexible and global workforce.
14. We’ve had 7 years of Apps. The numbers are astronomical. No one could have predicted the power of that 2008 launch or the success of copy cats. Microsoft is trying to catch up. Word was one of the top apps on Apple’s store last year.