3 intranet design best practices to personalize internal communication
There are no shortcuts and understatements when fighting for the best employee engagement. Every lapse has its consequences, especially when it comes to such subtle things as internal communication.
Therefore, before starting the configuration of a new intranet, learn about the three intranet design best practices that will make your employees feel that they are treated as they deserve – exceptionally.
One of the strongest trends in intranet design is personalization. Over the past years, there has even been talk about hyper-personalization in the context of internal communications proving that user experience and employee experience have a lot in common. In both cases, you should plan carefully and stepwise all the processes, founding your actions on respect for your client or the user. If the intranet’s purpose is to help to build engagement, strengthen internal values, and support organizational culture, it must be designed based on best practices on the market. The best practices, which are what?
Internal communication in times of crisis
Before 2020, a personalized approach towards employees’ experience in the organization was a strong suggestion from management authorities, even though it remained in the sphere of dreams of many HR specialists and employees. However, the world of business has changed irrevocably.
With this change, the time has come for an individualized approach to the employees’ needs and expectations, inclusiveness and understanding of diversity, and openness to dialogue. That, in turn, forced a different look at the tools we use to communicate with employees. Examples of the best-designed intranets show that they must consider the needs of all their users and personalize the messages. What does it mean in practice?
Employees take the floor
Despite hard work, the time of pandemic was a breakthrough on many levels in the communication and HR departments. Finally, after many years of striving for due recognition as strategic areas for business, no one denies them merit. What has changed in practice? In many companies, it has become more evident than ever before that people are their strength. Therefore, they focused on empathetic management, on returning to core values, and taking care of the needs of all employees.
Shaping the employee experience, modeled on user experience, has ceased to be a nice-to-have practice and has become a standard. This is clearly seen in the evolution of the intranet – a tool that began to be designed with people in mind, not just with the functions it is supposed to fulfill.
A new approach to intranet design
A new approach to internal communication management usually means increased trust in employees and openness to different viewpoints. Companies are beginning to understand that the best experts in the field of employees’ needs are themselves, not management and HR. This is the perfect starting point to design a tool for two-way, personalized, dialogue-based communication that is precisely the best function of a modern, well-designed intranet.
Perfect intranet. And what is that exactly?
The world’s best intranet designs examples show that the most appreciated solutions are above all elastic. Today, it means chiefly the ease of use, practicalness, and the ability to adapt quickly to constantly changing organizations and their employees. Modern solutions are personalized, thus taking into account the needs of the message recipient and sender. Thanks to this, you can:
- build both-sided relation and trust culture,
- strengthen the engagement,
- design User Experience,
- build a knowledge-based organization – both in terms of sharing experiences, best practices, and collecting feedback. How can this be achieved? There are no universal and obvious solutions here. However, by using several technologically advanced but easy-to-use and practical functions, you can design a unique and very effective intranet. Here they are.
3 intranet design best practices
A traditional approach to personalization in internal communication is associated with the replacement of the timeless dear all with the name of the message recipient. Yes, such a seemingly slight change can be of great importance for strengthening the message and the recipient’s interest in the content. But the best-designed intranet gives you many more options.
1️⃣ Message targeting
One of the most important intranet design best practices is comms targeting – too much information is the bane of modern times. That is more acute in the corporate reality. Directing any information to all employees is practically discouraging and irritating. The function of targeting messages to specific groups, teams, or selected people allows you to avoid information chaos. But be careful! Examples of best-designed intranets show that only agile and flexible solutions are fully used.
Newsletters created in the workai tool using a practical drag and drop CMS allow you to quickly create visually attractive content without the technology and graphic design knowledge. This will encourage not only their audience but also creators to use their technological abilities to the full.
2️⃣ Subscriptions and notifications
Employees know best which information they need to perform their duties well and effectively. Such trust of the employer combined with other actions can translate into greater involvement. When designing an intranet, you can plan the possibility to subscribe to and unsubscribe from newsletters.
An extremely useful function is also a personalized system of notifications that allows employees to be up to date with the news and updates they want.
The workai.intranet practical tool also has a tagging function, borrowed from social media. This small convenience can incredibly organize and facilitate communication in every company.
3️⃣ Personalized home page
Imagine an intranet that provides the employees with the information they need and willingly use from the first page. Do not hide the truth that its layout must be attractive, responsive, readable, intuitive and, above all, designed for employees who are supposed to use it, after all, daily. A personalized home page allows you to achieve the best effect that every employer cares about.
However, it is not only about the ability to configure the practical menu, select favorite pages or navigate easily but also the possibility to display the correct content tailored to the recipient. In this way, we provide the employee with valuable, useful, and engaging content for him. We build his personal experiences that translate into productivity.
Personalization fulfills essential functions in internal communication. Most of all, it makes employees feel noticed and appreciated as individuals that have their needs and preferences. Therefore, it is worth taking full advantage of the intranet’s potential, designing it following the best practices on the market.
workai will help your company to conduct personalized internal communication. How will it do this?
Our main goal is to convince every employer that the employees should not be limited by any technologically complicated tools.They should be supported by functional and user-friendly software to execute efficiently their internal communication or HR processes and to get better results. Workai applies comms-friendly drag and drop CMS that allows everyone to publish high-performing, engaging, and personalized content, without having great knowledge of IT or graphic design skills. Ready-made content blogs, content types, and ready-to-use intranet design templates facilitate the creation of attractive content. Decide to deploy workai to make your internal comms modern, responsive, and always engaging – no matter what kind of device you use.
It happens very often that enterprises undergoing digital transformation concentrate their actions mostly on making the customer experiences more innovative rather than on Employee Experience. However, it’s a critical success factor that shouldn’t be overlooked. workai is an Employee Experience Platform that unifies multiples functions. Using workai, employees can not only find the right information at the right time, but also get personalized updates, have training sessions, listen to podcasts, communicate with each other, or share documents.
We cooperate closely with hundreds of organizations to ensure that all the workai’s features support people responsible for internal communication in their daily duties and to boost the remote, hybrid, or onsite employees’ engagement.