Our frontline workers can sometimes end up being left out of the digital proceedings within the company itself. The digital flow of our organization could completely exclude them and thus make them less involved with the entire organization. Depending on the industry, you could have most of your employees be the frontline type of worker and thus lose a lot of interconnectivity. The lack of proper integration of frontline workers can easily affect our profits but more importantly, it impacts the morale of frontline workers. By employing an intranet to engage your employees in a digital workplace, you’ll maintain their motivation and dedication.
How to go about intranet inclusion?
When coming up with ideas. It can be easy to overlook the usual factors of our workplace. While it’s simple to keep our employees who work on computers up to date, we have to take into account those who barely utilize them.
However, it’s exactly these types of workers that we need to keep up to date on all the latest processes. The frontline employees are better acquainted with the immediate interaction between the customer and the market than most, due to their proximity to this interaction. They are also the lowest part of our managing engagement, making sure each workstation is operating properly.
However, it’s very possible that the effectiveness of our frontline workers will lag behind when new information is to be delivered that could improve their engagement in the workplace. This is due to the fact that a slew of information we’ve got circulating throughout our digital workplace simply doesn’t make it to them. The key to informing them is by employing easily accessible intranet.
The most basic of interactions we can achieve come from having more staff meetings, bulletin boards, and other forms of very slow information delivery. Nowadays, we needn’t bother with something as cumbersome as this. Not only do these types of information delivery types fail to achieve proper speed and cost a lot of time overall. The real way to go is a mobile-friendly intranet.
What is mobile-friendly intranet?
The intranet is an internal network that is employed as means of interacting with the people inside it. When it comes to enabling our frontline workers a quick and easy access to all the important information it is also our key solution.
However, making it mobile-friendly requires some additional preparation. The intranet’s design should be straight-forward and streamlined enough that even those with little experience with intranet can get the hang of it quickly. A good mobile-friendly intranet also needs to work well with smaller screens without compromising readability. You could use AgilityPortal to achieve a quick setup that you can further customize.
A well-made intranet helps everybody engage to their best possible extent. The practical part of making this possible includes cutting big blobs of text into smaller chunks that can be digested a lot easier. These chunks of text are also easier to represent on a smaller screen, which adds to the mobile friendliness.
Reducing the size of any page elements is also a good way to go. No matter whether it’s a menu, search bar, or whatever another bit of our website we need to make it smaller. You can even cram some of them into a drop-down menu to free more space.
You should also use filters that will showcase only certain bits of info from the intranet. These filters basically act as search results from a search bar and can make the use of intranet a lot faster for your employees. For those who have a lot of segmented groups with different instructions, filters can be exceptionally useful.
Don’t slack on checking how the design looks both on mobile and desktop configurations. There could be some off behavior that you want to be rectified quickly for the sake of optimal engagement with your frontline workers without any odd issues dampening the experience.
After all, is said and done, you should have a well-optimized intranet to relay information through. It does take some investment to get it going but once you do the benefits will show themselves quickly. The benefits themselves will be elaborated on below.
Benefits of intranet
A well-made intranet will help your frontline workers stay in the loop especially those in more remote locations. However, let’s see the overall effects of the intranet.
The first advantage is that you can share any information with the entire organization quickly. While you could go for the email information delivery style, it will cut into the overall engagement your workers have with the actual job. The distraction constant checking of email poses also disallows them from fully dedicating themselves to work because they need to check if any changes have been made. By using intranet, especially one with a proper notification system, they will get a curated list of important information that concerns them without having to spend much time looking for said information.
The curated content is probably the main advantage. Initial coding work will serve any sort of worker later on even if we expand our operation or experiment with new departments who have their own set of necessary information to absorb. Any team will be able to locate the information they need in a matter of seconds, saving everybody a lot of time.
Intranet could also be used for meetings, which is useful when you need to get in contact with different managers in remote locations or wish to engage the entire team without having to travel to them. Of course, with the current pandemic it’s also safer and more responsible to do the meetings online rather than doing them in person.
There are other advantages to consider but these are a few main ones that will enhance the overall workplace and especially the workplace of remote frontline workers.
Conclusion
The improvement that the intranet can give to our organization and especially our frontline workers is huge. Keep in mind that for it to operate correctly it also needs to be properly made so don’t be afraid to shell out a bit more for a good service. Refinements and upgrades can easily be added onto a proper intranet so you can rest easy knowing it won’t get outdated as years go by.
