Having a dynamic intranet is an important advantage because the parallels between superior employee experiences and business performance are striking. According to Gallup's 2016 Q12 Meta-Analysis Report, companies with highly engaged workforces are 21% more profitable than those with poor engagement levels.

In this article, we’ll take a closer look at how companies from a variety of industries are using intranets in innovative ways, and why you should consider implementing it.  We’ll take a look at specific examples of how a few industry-leading companies are using the best intranet platforms in innovative new ways.

Before implementing an intranet of your own, it's important to familiarize yourself with the concept. A corporate intranet is a virtual hub that stores a variety of programs, communication tools, and other collaboration software that is accessed by team members daily.

Try Out Our
Employee Engagement Software For Free

Start Your Free Trial Now

No credit card needed Less than 5 min to set up

7 Examples of How Different Industries Use Intranet

You may be saying to yourself, “A corporate intranet sounds great, but how will it fit into my company’s day-to-day activities?” Great question. It can be difficult to visualize exactly how an intranet will play its part in enhancing your company’s culture. That’s why we’ve outlined ways that three different industries can use a corporate intranet to optimize your team’s communication and collaboration.

Example 1: Finance Technology

Financial technology organizations, especially legacy businesses in desperate need of a culture facelift, can use their intranet’s powerful announcement feature to improve communications and strengthen their corporate culture. 

Companies can develop a prominent company feed used to manage important messages and encourage their entire workforce to do the same. The intention of this feed is to publish various recognition announcements—such as appreciation posts, automated employee birthday and work anniversary congratulations, and more. This can help drastically improve another employee's engagement-wise serious office environment and guide leadership as they work to create a dynamic culture. 

Using Workmates’ kudos feature to offer recognition for employees’ hard work or any examples of exemplary behavior is also an excellent way to boost morale. This practice is extremely helpful in showing the entire workforce that the company appreciates their contributions—no matter how small—and how their efforts support larger accomplishments.

Example 2: Health Care

Healthcare professionals have to work together as a team to provide high-quality care to their patients, but with rotating shift schedules, individual employees’ work can often go unrecognized. It can be extremely valuable for healthcare companies to use their intranets to focus on employee recognition and rewards. 

Using Workmates’ kudos feature to encourage employees to recognize and reward their peers is an efficient tool to create a collaborative and enthusiastic work culture in hospitals, clinics, and beyond. Employees can publish a post at any time to officially thank any other employee. A reward program where employees can receive gift cards, branded corporate items, or other thank-you mementos can also be created.

Even better: List top kudos recipients on a prominent leaderboard within your corporate intranet. This lets them receive even more attention, but it also fosters an ongoing culture where all employees now strive for excellence and higher levels of job performance. 

Example 3: Commercial Real Estate

A commercial real estate company can create an intranet with social feeds and a number of customizable group channels to let each specific team send messages and updates to other departments or the entire company. 

For example, an employee can post certain announcements to the social feed, including welcoming new hires, sharing employees’ personal events (a new baby!), shoutouts to other teams or employees (like congratulating a real estate agent for closing a deal), office culture updates, and more.

This experience makes communication and collaboration fun. Employees can upload pictures from a corporate event and share them with the whole company. They can also create and post surveys and polls—for example, “What type of cake should we get to celebrate Susan’s birthday?” 

Employees can also post memes and hashtags to their social feeds, all to increase camaraderie, collaboration, and teamwork. The company can even use a powerful analytics dashboard to track active users and the overall engagement level with the intranet over time.

Example 4: The Technology Industry

One leading technology company uses its intranet to improve communications and strengthen its corporate culture using a powerful company announcement feature. 
In this case, the company developed a prominent company feed that it used to manage important messages and encourage the entire workforce to do the same. This feed publishes various recognition announcements, such as appreciation posts, automated birthday and work anniversary congratulations, and more. 
The company also used a kudos feature to offer recognition for employees’ hard work or any examples of exemplary behavior. All of this has been extremely helpful in showing the entire workforce that the company appreciates their contributions—no matter how small—and how they support larger accomplishments.

Example 5:  Background Screening Services

Another company, one that provides background screening services, chose to use its intranet site as a full-featured content management system (CMS). This company used its corporate intranet as a better way to upload and store documents, which gave employees a much better way to share documents, track activity, and access important information—from any device at any time.

Additionally, this company created a new internal help center for the HR department, which was accessible to all employees. This helped workers know exactly where they should start if they had questions or issues, gave them self-service access to critical forms and documents, and eliminated a lot of confusion. 

It also saves a significant amount of time over the company’s previous system where employees would call or email requests for help—and get frustrated when they didn’t know where they stood.

Example 6: Fast Casual Dining

As the name implies, fast casual restaurants move quickly. That means there’s no time to waste when it comes to scheduling shifts. It also means that employees, like servers and cooks, may feel underappreciated. A successful company intranet can improve employee communication and even inspire recruiting efforts. 

A chain restaurant can use its intranet to share announcements with specific updates. For example, an announcement can let employees know they can pick up shifts at another local location. This saves the restaurant from being short-staffed and helps employees earn more. Announcements can even highlight staff achievements by individual staff, like employee of the month, to improve engagement.

Restaurants can also make their employees their best advocates. Using a company intranet, restaurant chains can create pre-written, approved posts designed for employees to share on their personal social media accounts, including job openings. About half of businesses say their top-quality hires come from referrals, and a positive post on social media can get those referrals moving.

Example 7: Retail

Retailers need to make the customer shopping experience as pleasant as possible. A company intranet site can help make sure that employees have the training and seamless technology to make that happen. 

A company can create an extensive training site to make sure every employee has the information they need in one easily accessible place. A comprehensive training site also makes sure that each employee is given standardized training so everyone is prepared for the job. And if they have questions long after onboarding, employees can always refer back to the training site. 

The retailer can also develop an interactive shift-swapping app so employees can easily trade shifts — without bothering busy supervisors. Employees with more connections are happier, and so are customers at a fully-staffed store.

Here Are Some Ways To Use the Internet in Your Business: 

An intranet can transform your business operations by centralizing communication, enhancing collaboration, and streamlining administrative tasks. Leveraging this powerful tool can boost productivity, engagement, and efficiency across your organization. Here are some practical ways to use the intranet in your business:

• Internal Communications: Share company news, updates, and announcements. Create newsletters or bulletins to keep employees informed.

• Collaboration Tools: Host project spaces, forums, and discussion boards for teams to collaborate on tasks and share documents.

• Document Management: Centralize documents, policies, and procedures for easy access and version control.

• Training and Development: Offer online training courses, webinars, or resources for employee skill development.

• Employee Directory: Maintain an updated directory with contact information and organizational charts.

• Feedback and Surveys: Conduct employee surveys, feedback forms, or suggestion boxes to gather insights and improve processes.

• Social Features: Implement social networking features for employees to connect, share ideas, and build a sense of community.

• Resource Sharing: Provide access to tools, templates, and resources that employees may need to perform their roles effectively.

• Corporate Culture Promotion: Showcase company culture, values, and achievements through stories, photos, and videos.

Why Should You Consider Using a Social Intranet?

Facilitating seamless communication among remote workers and fostering a culture of knowledge sharing and innovation, social intranets offer vast and transformative benefits. Using a social intranet in today's digital world can propel your business forward.

A modern-day social intranet can benefit businesses in several ways:

Enhanced Communication: A report from Gitnux found that 63% of organizations use an intranet to enhance internal communication. Social intranets provide a platform for seamless communication among employees, departments, and teams. This can improve collaboration, information sharing, and problem-solving across the organization. 

Increased Employee Engagement: By incorporating social features such as likes, comments, and sharing, social intranets promote interaction and engagement among employees. Gitnux report shows that 74% of intranet users access their intranet daily, and the shows that intranet can foster a sense of community and belonging, leading to higher employee morale and productivity.

Social Intranet Software that Encourages Employee Communication

Finally, a Better Intranet Experience Your Employees Will Love.

Learn More

Knowledge Sharing and Collaboration: Social intranets facilitate the sharing of knowledge and best practices among employees, through features like forums and discussion boards. According to Webinar Care, 85% of employees say they’re most motivated when management offers regular updates on company news, and 92% of businesses with intranets report improved collaboration.

Remote Work Enablement: With the rise of remote work, social intranets provide a central hub for remote employees to connect, collaborate, and stay informed. 60% of companies find employee engagement increases through intranet use and virtual workspaces enable seamless communication and collaboration regardless of physical location.

Streamlined Processes and Workflows:  Social intranets often integrate with other business tools and systems, such as project management software, document management systems, and CRM platforms. Intranets improve workflow efficiency by 23% by streamlining processes and workflows as well as reducing manual tasks.

Employee Recognition and Feedback: Social intranets can incorporate features for recognizing and rewarding employees for their achievements and contributions. Additionally, they provide a platform for gathering feedback and suggestions from employees, helping to improve employee engagement and satisfaction. Exploding Topics found that employees who receive recognition from management are 69% more likely to do better work and that 96% of employees say getting regular feedback is a good thing 

Centralized Information Hub: Social intranets serve as a centralized repository of information, policies, documents, and files shared by the company. This ensures that employees have access to the latest information they need to perform their jobs effectively, reducing confusion and enhancing productivity by 20 - 25%.

Workmates: A Comprehensive Intranet Solution

Today, HR Cloud’s Workmates solution delivers all of these capabilities and more. With dynamic features like "kudos" and a variety of company communication tools, don’t be surprised when your employees’ productivity, happiness, and morale increase significantly once you implement a corporate intranet for your team to collaborate in a user-friendly, efficient way. To see how Workmates is revolutionizing the way companies use intranets, request a free, no-obligation Workmates demo today!

Try Workmates Interactive Demo

Click through it yourself with
interactive demo.

Try It Now

Author Bio:

This article is written by a marketing team member at HR Cloud. HR Cloud is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications & engagement, and rewards & recognition. Our user-friendly software increases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.