5 Ways Your Intranet Will Revolutionise the Way You Work in 2015

We are constantly learning from and solving the challenges and frustrations work presents employees on a daily basis. Through our customer Community, Customer Advisory Board and our passionate employees, we see a range of ideas for potential enhancements that could help our customers to work more effectively using our software and in 2014 over 160 ideas from these channels made it into Interact Intranet.

So bearing all of this feedback from real customers with real problems in mind we think these are the game changers you should expect to be key to your work in 2015.

1. Cloud Will Be Standard Practice

2015 will be the year when Cloud becomes the expected way to host your intranet.
We have seen a dramatic shift in the way companies are hosting their software with the majority now opting or seriously considering moving their solutions to the Cloud. This drastically reduces your demands on IT resources and lets you focus on making your intranet essential to your business and employees. Whether buying your own dedicated server (private Cloud) or sharing those resources with a couple of other intranets (public Cloud), it is often less labour and cost intensive than keeping your servers in-house.

We expect this shift to the Cloud to really gain momentum in 2015 with the rise of SaaS models enabling businesses to ramp up at greater speed their application use and effectiveness, paying a per head per month cost to have access to software rather than a larger up front cost to purchase and implement it.

Forbes have predicted a growth in the percentage of revenue generated by SaaS applications in the software industry to have jumped from 16.6% in 2013 to 27.8% in 2018 (“IDC Predicts SaaS Enterprise Applications Will Be A $50.8B Market By 2018” Forbes 20/12/2014)

2. Search will become Solve

Over the years the industry has seen search as pivotal to the success of an intranet, pulling together a list of relevant individual pieces of content and profiles. However, imagine being presented with the solution to your problem not just as a list but a complete solution which identifies content to guide you, the experts in your business to help you with it, additional information to fill the gaps and proposed tools to help you with your next steps. With Interact’s Intelligence engine you can be sure nothing important is missed.

These are the demands we want to be making on search to enrich the employee experience, turning search from solving a need to adding value to the journey, driving self-serve behaviour and shortening the time from problem realisation to problem solving.

3. Your Culture Will Shift From “You and Me” to “We”

We are expecting your users to be more demanding and this is a good thing!
The user journey will have shifted from ‘where do I find’ to ‘how do I create?’ If you aren’t already seeing a prevalence of user generated content over traditional authorship within your governance model, now is the time to loosen the reins and trust your employees to make the world a better place.

How do we create a team? How can we blog? Who can help us? With an intranet bursting with innovation rather than top down communication, where can your brilliance as a business take you?

Whilst hierarchies will still be a staple of business, a problem solving culture catalysed with simple and effective tools will drive a need to get problems solved. Interact Tasksenables these pockets of energy to ensure ideas become reality.

Meanwhile individual encouragement is still given with Influence Scores and peer to peer Rewards, encouraging gentle competitiveness and uncovering who makes a difference across your business.

4. We’ve Always Done it that Way Will be Questioned Like Never Before

An informed, engaged and empowered workforce will start to question the way things are done, not to criticise but to make work easier and more effective.

Dollar Finance have got a lot of us questioning why we aren’t making change a crowdsourced behaviour rather than relying on expensive third party consultancies. With their brilliant social intranet, recognised by the Ragan Awards in 2014, Dollar Finance have set a benchmark and it’s up to the rest of us to catch them now.

Top down communications will be turned on its head. Bottom up communication makes the micro changes which culminates in greater performance as a business, whilst building loyalty amongst your employees. Internal Comms will be facilitators rather than translators of high level communications to the masses.

Rather than dictating, trust, listening and replying are some of the major skills we will want to build into our C Level execs.

5. Rise of Employee Advocacy

Your employees are customers. Employee advocacy is now an established HR practice and should also be a dream for your intranet which makes it so easy to do.

Engage users, crowd source ideas, get a feel of what working in your business feels like to them and empower them to inspire positive change:

  • Polling helps you understand your employees’ views
  • Rich media helps you to get employees excited about the direction you are heading whilst engaging content shows you have invested the time to wow your audience. With Interact’s page composer, brilliant is easy to create.
  • The rise in collaborative activity previously discussed will help you consider problems in different ways as well as solving them.
  • Trust, listening and replying are some of the major skills we want to build into our C Level

So 2015 will be the year of even quicker, even easier, more effective and even more productive, we’re making it happen, are you?