The modern office is anything but.

COVID has accelerated the move to remote work for many organizations. Combine that with the widespread availability of fast, reliable and low-cost connectivity, and it’s no surprise that the workforce is more mobile than ever.

The shift has been accelerated even further by the changing demographics of the workforce—by 2030, more than 70 percent of the workforce will be Millennials and members of Gen Z. Those are generations very comfortable with unconventional working hours and non-traditional office setups.

What is a Mobile Workforce?

Mobile workforce is the term used to describe a group of workers who work outside a traditional office setting. That can mean people who work in places like their cars (e.g., rideshare drivers or restaurant delivery workers) or people who work from wherever they deem productive (e.g., those who work from home or at a remote work hub).

The idea of leveraging technology to work from somewhere besides an office is not new, of course. “Telecommuting” was popularized in the 1970s when NASA scientist Jack Nilles successfully executed a complex project remotely and championed the advantages of working from a non-centralized location. The idea only got more popular over time. Terms like “deskless worker,” “lone worker,” “disparate worker,” “mobile worker,” “remote worker” and more are used to describe these types of arrangements.

Today, in the wake of COVID-19, there’s an even greater appetite for arrangements where workers don’t have to be in the same place or work at the same time. And working environments like this open up new collaboration possibilities, such as the ability to work seamlessly with people from across departments and across the world.

Benefits of a Mobile Workforce

The advantages of a mobile workforce are many.

First, it’s a draw to your workers. Millennials and Gen Z-ers are a huge part of the workforce, and it’s no secret that their view of when and where to work is more fluid than previous generations’.

Second, it offers lots of flexibility. That’s not just flexibility in the when, where and how work gets done. Embracing a mobile workforce allows organizations to draw from a much larger talent pool—theoretically, the entire world—when looking to fill roles.

In addition, a mobile workforce model can lead to happier, more productive and more engaged employees. Why? The remote work model helps workers cut commute time dramatically. It can also help them achieve a more healthy work-life balance by allowing for flexible schedules and more time with family.

How to Engage Your Mobile Workforce

One of the biggest concerns to address with the shift to the mobile workforce is how to preserve the unique office culture that comes with traditional working arrangements.

Engagement and productivity go hand-in-hand. When your employees feel satisfied with their work situation, their productivity should naturally increase, and your organization may enjoy lower turnover rates.

But when there’s no more “water cooler” for employees to gather around, and when there are no office parties or shared moments of socialization in hallways or common spaces—can your organization keep everyone feeling connected and motivated?

Interestingly, a Stanford study found that productivity generally increases in remote work arrangements in large part due to the blurring of personal and professional boundaries.

With this logic, the remote workforce could be a positive for employees and employers alike. Employees get the benefit of getting to work when and where they feel most comfortable. Meanwhile, employers get the benefit of workers who feel happier overall and who may work longer hours due to not having to commute. With the right connectivity solution, your employees won’t miss a beat even if working outside the office, as they’ll have easy access to work materials and resources around the clock.

Keeping your mobile workforce engaged is an important and worthwhile goal that requires careful planning. Check out our tips for how to promote collaboration and productivity in the new mobile workforce.

Conclusion

The growth of the mobile workforce is a trend that has been happening since before COVID-19, and it’s only picked up steam with recent events.

As organizations all around the world embrace the benefits of remote work, many are wondering how to keep engagement and productivity high. They’re also looking for the right tools that will help employees collaborate just as well remotely as they would if they were all in the same office.

With a great modern intranet and collaboration hub like Jive, your organization will be able to promote powerful corporate communication and unlock modern collaboration with a platform that’s tailor-made to meet the needs of the growing mobile workforce.

Ready to learn more? Contact us to hear more about how Jive is the perfect intranet for your mobile workforce and get your personalized demo.

Is your organization ready for the future of work? The workplace is evolving, and it’s becoming more complex every day. To keep up, organizations have to address these changes and help their employees adapt. Here’s how Jive’s PeopleGraph™ makes it possible for everyone on your team to find the information, documents and people they need to thrive in today’s work environment.

The Challenges Organizations Are Facing

Before you can make effective changes in the workplace, you have to understand the challenges your employees are up against. Here are the issues that are having the greatest impact on organizations today.

Distributed Workforce

More work than ever is happening outside of the office. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, “between 2005 and 2015, approximately 94 percent of net new employment in the United States occurred within the alternative work arrangement.”

This can be a positive change for organizations with the right tools and processes in place. However, when done incorrectly, working remotely can make it more difficult to get things done.

Communication Management

The immense value placed on workplace communication is causing many companies to overcompensate with a flood of different communication tools and channels. All of these options can distract and overwhelm employees.

Content Creation Boom

The amount of content being created and consumed by companies around the world is increasing exponentially. Each time your employees share a piece of content, your organization becomes a little more complex.

How These Issues Impact Business

Organizations can’t afford to ignore these problems. When employees can’t find the people, content, or documents they need, productivity drastically decreases. According to Interact Source, 19.8% of business time – the equivalent of one day per working week – is wasted by employees searching for information to do their job effectively.

All of that wasted time causes low engagement and leaves your team feeling frustrated. To make matters worse, these frustrations often lead employees to use their own communication channels to collaborate and share content. This only adds to the problem and creates more information silos. But here’s the good news — there’s a solution that addresses all of these challenges. PeopleGraph™ makes it easy for teams to find all the information they need.

What is PeopleGraph™?

Jive’s groundbreaking PeopleGraph™ technology takes knowledge sharing the next level. This solution delivers intuitive, AI-driven search and discovery that removes the need for governance and manual maintenance.

How PeopleGraph™ Can Help Your Team

This is how PeopleGraph™ empowers teams to find the people, content and documents they need fast.

Search

Jive’s technology brings Google-like search to your organization’s information architecture. It doesn’t just help users find what they’re searching for; it understands their search intent. This makes it possible for them to discover critical information and subject matter experts they aren’t even aware of.

Suggest

Using machine intelligence, PeopleGraph™ learns how your employees work. Then, it proactively connects them with the content and collaborators they need to get their work done faster.

Connect

Connect to all of the apps and platforms your employees love with Jive’s flexible integrations. You’ll stay organized when you’re working in external apps, thanks to continuous automated syncs.

Engage

Our analytics go beyond just page views. Jive gives you insight into how your employees are working and engaging – and how to improve organizational performance.

Bring Your Workforce Into The Modern World

Don’t leave your team struggling to find the information they need. See how Jive is driving productivity, improving collaboration and modernizing search. Experience Jive for yourself and see the future of work. Get a demo now.

The recent move to an increasingly distributed and remote workforce is presenting new challenges for organizations. While many companies have systems in place to help their teams find and share information, they aren’t always effective. The question is: How can you fix document management issues and create digital document storage that works?

The Problem With Document Management

Before you try to improve your document management, it’s important to understand the cause of this issue. Organizations are creating more content than ever, but no one can find what they need. According to a survey by IDC, document-related challenges cause over 20% of productivity loss.

With many people working at home now, having the ability to find the information you need fast is more important than ever. It empowers employees to stay on track and get work done in any environment. These positive changes are only possible when you modernize document storage.

How To Improve Your Document Storage

Effective digital document management is a key to boosting productivity and collaboration. However, all document management solutions are not created equal. The key is finding a platform with the features you actually need to share, search and collaborate from anywhere.

Making Digital Document Storage Work With Jive

Jive brings your documents together, which makes it easier for your employees to find information and collaborate. Here’s how:

Upload And Share All Files: The first step to making digital document storage work is getting all your documents in one place. With Jive, you can create content directly in your intranet, using Jive’s rich text editor; you can upload content created in other applications; or you can pull in documents directly using Jive’s integrations with Google Docs, Microsoft Office 365 and other systems. No matter where the content originated, Jive makes it all easy to find, easy to share and easy to collaborate on.
Leverage Integrations: It’s likely that your organization uses a lot of tools. One study shows that the average company uses over 100 software applications. Switching between all these apps can be overwhelming, but Jive can help. Our flexible integrations make it possible to connect the platforms your employees love.
Simple Collaboration: Empower your employees to collaborate from anywhere. Jive allows your team to jointly create, comment on and revise documents. It also keeps all drafts and authors in sync, making it easy for you to track changes.
Use Keywords And Tags: You can find documents rapidly using Jive’s powerful, precise search function. It not only recognizes words and phrases – it understands your actual intent, helping you find relevant information you didn’t even know existed. You can also assign tags to people, new content and existing content. This way, everyone can get the information they need faster, and easily navigate back to it for reference.

Supercharge Document Storage With PeopleGraph™

Jive’s groundbreaking PeopleGraph™ technology sets it apart from other document storage solutions. PeopleGraph™ analyzes who the members of your team are and how they work. This information allows Jive to deliver hyper-personalized content recommendations and search results.

Ready To Make Digital Document Storage Work For Your Organization?

Don’t let document management issues slow your team down. Jive is an intelligence-driven intranet that drives productivity, modernizes search and improves document management for companies around the globe. See what Jive’s next-generation intranet and collaboration hub can do for you. Get a demo today.

Success Strategies For Today’s Remote Workforce

As we enter another week of the COVID-19 pandemic, the initial shock of working from home is wearing off. Managers and employees alike are settling into remote work. But as everyone adjusts to this new normal, they are trying to figure out how to stay on track. Now that your team is set up to work at home, it’s time to get everyone focused on productivity. Here’s what you need to know to increase the effectiveness of your remote team.

The Connection Between Remote Work And Productivity

Working remotely can actually help your employees get more work done and meet their goals. In fact, research shows that 65% of people are more productive in their home office than in a traditional workplace. However, this is only possible when you’re transparent about your project deadlines and what you expect from your team. You also need the right tools and strategies in place to support these efforts.

Setting Your Team Up For Success

If you want to ramp up your productivity, start by laying the foundation to help employees find what they need and connect with each other. There are three key factors you should consider.

Content

In this new reality of remote work, your employees must have the ability to self-serve. This means that all the content they need has to be easily accessible. If they can’t quickly find relevant information for a meeting or the document they’re looking for, that can lead to a lot of wasted time and frustration.

Communication

When you have too many communication channels, it actually hurts your productivity. You can easily spend a lot of time trying to track down a co-worker or looking for a specific conversation you need to reference. The bigger the company, the bigger this problem can become.

Worse, this negative impact on productivity goes beyond wasted time. When employees are spending time trying, and failing, to find things, they experience frustration. All of this frustration leads to more errors, poor-quality work and disengagement.

Community & Collaboration

People are the key to your company’s success. That’s why creating opportunities to connect with human beings is important. While working remotely, it can be a challenge to create that community with your workforce. The good news is, with the right technology, it is possible.

Jive’s PeopleGraph™ makes it easy to search for and find anyone in your organization. You can find the people with the skills you need, see what they’re writing, reach out to them with questions and expand your community with these new connections.

Power Up Your Productivity

Right now, you don’t have everyone in the same office. Your team is missing all the informal channels they used to have when everyone was in the same physical space.

Finding the right technology can bridge this gap. An intranet solves this problem by making it possible for all employees to find the information they need, exactly when they need it. Jive gives you the ability to access people, documents and information in one place. Empower your employees and give them the ability to communicate and collaborate effectively with Jive.

Looking for more ways to hit your goals and be productive during this shift to remote work? Learn more about how Jive helps drive better productivity and collaboration. Get the free e-book: Collaboration For The Modern Workplace.

With the COVID-19 pandemic sickening and killing thousands across the United States, our country is having to rapidly adapt to this global health threat. As stay-at-home orders are rolling out across the country, more people are working remotely. This can be a challenge as everyone navigates a public health crisis that’s taking a toll on the economy and our personal lives.

Businesses have to adjust to this new normal and may be incorporating remote work for the first time. With this shift come fears about productivity and the ability to meet your organization’s goals. But remote working doesn’t have to have a negative impact on your team. Here’s what you need to know if you want to maximize the performance of your remote team.

The Impact On Employee Productivity

As more organizations encourage employees to work from home, they’re beginning to consider the impact this will have on productivity. Will employees be able to get work done from home?

Many people believe that working from home will cause a massive reduction in productivity. However, data shows that this isn’t the case. When done right, working remotely can actually increase productivity. In fact, 65% of workers say they’re more productive when working from home.

How To Improve Your Productivity While Working Remotely

Are you wondering what you can do to increase your productivity and that of your team while working from home? Here are some tips to boost your effectiveness.

Increase your ability to focus

Right now, we’re all very distracted, but there are measures we can take to make it easier to focus. One way to do this is to block off chunks of time on your calendar to work on specific things. Then, when those blocks start, silence your phone and turn off all notifications.

This simple tip can go a long way to help you get things done. Too often, we end up working in small bursts, switching constantly between projects. Sitting down and focusing your attention on a single task for just 30 minutes can be more effective than excessive multitasking.

If you want to take this a step further, there are free tools you can use to help manage your time. For example, you can use a tracking tool like Toggl to see what projects or teams you are spending the most time on. Then you can make adjustments to ensure that you’re spending your time on the things that matter most.

Check in with your team daily

Having a daily 15-minute check-in with your team is an extremely powerful practice. It helps you stay in touch and keep open communication about projects. That way, nothing falls through the cracks. In many cases, these check-ins are actually more efficient when done remotely. That’s because you can avoid much of the wasted time that occurs in office meetings.

Use video

Video is a critical communication tool for remote teams. It allows you to see body language and verbal cues, which has an impact on how you communicate. When people can see themselves and their behavior, they’re less likely to be rude. When your whole team can see each other, chances are they will treat each other with more kindness. This helps promote a collaborative and productive culture.

Work Better, Together

Looking for more ways to hit your goals and work more effectively during this transition to remote work? Learn more about how Jive helps empower productivity and collaboration. Read the free e-book Collaboration For The Modern Workplace.

Frequently Asked Quetions:

We’ve got your back every step of the way.

What is the benefit of an online community platform?

An online community platform is a digital space that helps organizations keep their workforce informed and engaged. Great internal communication software connects everyone in the organization and strengthens the community by helping employees interact, share knowledge and securely collaborate across various devices.

What’s the single most important factor in a company’s success? A great product? Visionary management? Customer experience? Actually, it’s none of the above. It turns out that the most overlooked success factor is building a great employee experience through engagement and collaboration. We’re going to lay out an easy-to-follow roadmap to excite, engage and motivate your employees. If you take great care of them, they’ll take great care of your customers. In turn, you’ll recruit new customers, increase the loyalty of existing ones, and retain your best talent for long-term success.

Globalization: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

Companies have expanded worldwide in an effort to gain access to new markets, reduce labor costs, get ahead of the competition or simply survive. Arguing against globalization is like arguing against the laws of nature. Staying in touch with your employees, aligning them to the overall vision and getting them to operate as a cohesive team across vast oceans and multiple time zones can certainly be a huge challenge. Companies are struggling to keep everyone on the same page and to work effectively together.

Case Study: Technology Customer Experience

When you think about it, technology is the single thread that connects all of us together and helps facilitate nearly every moment of our daily work life. Moreover, technology has has been held up as the great enabler of global expansion. Regrettably, many companies fall short of implementing technology that provides a seamless, frictionless experience and fully meets employees’ needs. There are certainly no greater areas of opportunity than improving technology support, and more specifically improving the relationship between the average employee and the IT department. Here’s an example from my own work as an IT leader tasked with improving employee technology experience at a major financial services firm.

For starters, as leaders in our technology organization, we needed to pinpoint the problem. That meant answering a few fundamental questions:

What were the biggest pain points in the IT support environment? Were we providing an exceptional level of service? Were our technology tools good?
How could we improve? What would success look like?
Following up after addressing the issue: Did we do a good job?

A few harsh realities were identified early on, tempered by the realization that we were blazing new trails. Huge opportunities were identified immediately:

We were meeting our service levels, but we were hearing complaints about the quality of our service.
We were not collaboration experts, but we knew we needed to find a better way to collect employee feedback.
We had some intuitions and a willingness to learn how to communicate in a different, more informative, less formal, but much more engaging style.
We needed a partner willing to help us launch successfully.
If we accomplished even one quarter of our goals, we would be so ahead of the game with this innovative tool we could be a huge success!

No More Surveys And Focus Groups, Please!

The problem with surveys and focus groups can be pretty much summed up as, “lots of talk, but no action.” To make matters worse, the data is often used to tell a distorted truth that things are better than they really are.

We began to realize that we could have better conversations and interactions with an on-line collaboration tool. Feedback could be gathered in real time, at a fraction of the time and effort required by surveys. The tool would make it easy to engage with others, report problems, share innovative ideas, and solve issues across reporting lines and time zones, in streamlined manner, and certainly without fear of reprisal. In fact, we could build an entirely new way of communication that didn’t rely on e-mail, conference calls or excessive and costly travel.

So what platform would we use? Many companies come to the initial conclusion that an internal website may be the right vehicle for communication and collaboration. But soon enough, the expertise and expense to hire staff to change HTML and Java content become onerous. SharePoint is a ubiquitous workgroup enterprise tool, but too often it’s utilized for roles it was never intended to perform such as collaboration. Share Point is an excellent repository for large files and generally represents a huge step up from shared Windows directories. But even in this seemingly simple function, navigation can prove tricky, as many SharePoint users can certainly attest.

Clearly, we needed a quicker, more independent method to gather and analyze feedback, especially on emerging technology issues in the environment. We eventually learned of a collaboration platform – Jive – that was easy to implement and easy to modify, and would integrate with our corporate directory to engage our entire company.

We started small by posting a very simple, “How are we doing” question and inviting a select group of 1,000 end users to respond. We gathered valuable feedback. Jive supported our continuous improvement process using Lean project management methodologies, identifying the highest-impacting, lowest-effort targets for immediate prioritization. In order to build some interest in a fun, non-threatening way we also created some simple blogs around technology topics of general interest

As we tested the quality of our message, we began to focus more specific groups:

New hires: ensuring they everything to hit the ground running on their first day of work.
Road warriors: promoting internal IT tools for our our telecommuters and frequent travelers.
Employees working in on-site environments: tailoring the types of headsets they used to their specific environments.

Building A Following

We published at least a blog a week on a variety of topics – frequently enough that we were virtually guaranteed to grab the attention of each employee. The style was informal and engaging, with catchy titles, liberal use of humor and a self-effacing approach to our challenges, but with a very serious dedication to fixing issues and telling our employees about it ASAP.

We gauged our success by the number of followers, number of blog views, discussion posts, and feedback. We used the company e-mail directory to include target audiences that were particularly receptive to the information and introduced it slowly but steadily across the globe. While we wanted all employees to take advantage of our website, we came to realize that Jive is an “opt-in” platform. As a result, we took an omni-channel approach. In this transition in the digital age, we know there are some people who prefer more traditional communication methods, while others embrace this new technology. By writing both basic and advanced blog post topics, we were able to attract a wide variety of readers.

Studying effective blogging technique, we applied some valuable lessons around writing effective titles to lure readers, using creative graphics to hold interest, empathizing with the reader to identify with their problem, and linking to related articles to build repeat viewership and new followers via shares.

Something surprising and gratifying began to happen on our Jive site. Rather than our team pushing information to the end user community, the end user community began to post original material, and they began to respond to one another. While remaining within the professional structure of the platform, this evolved to an infinitely more democratic and more proactive approach to problem resolution, dissolving all organizational and geographic barriers in the process. The criteria for membership was knowledge and insight into both the problem and potential resolution to the customer-impacting issue. In short, we had attained something incredibly valuable: CREDIBILITY.

Learn more. Get the details on how to engage your end users in authentic dialogue to improve the employee experience in your organization. Watch the webcast “How To Communicate With 100K Employees At Once.”

About the author: Robert Chamberlin is a former SVP for Employee Technology Experience at a Fortune 100 company. He is an IT leader and turnaround expert with a focus on service delivery, continuous improvement, digital transformation and M&A integration efforts.

Customer experience (CX) is one of THE hottest trends in business right now. With competitors seemingly on every street corner, consumers have countless shopping choices. As a result, companies are scrambling on a daily basis to stand out from the crowd by delivering memorable end-to-end experiences.

Ultra-modern locations, interactive experiences, innovative web store fronts, price matching, expedited shipping, perks and incentive programs are just a few of typical enticements. Nevertheless, the most overlooked success factor is building a great employee experience through employee engagement and collaboration. It couldn’t be put more simply than this:

“Take good care of your employees, and they’ll take good care of your customers, and the customers will come back. “
J.W. Marriott

All too often, companies fail to understand that driving exceptional customer experience entails far more than just outlining a “customer comes first vision” and setting employee expectations. When you think about it, it’s the responsibility of employees to create these customer experience programs, to implement these programs, to carry them out globally and to provide a consistent face-to-face experience with the customers. As leaders, our primary responsibility to provide our employees the tools they need to succeed!

We are going to focus, in particular, on the critical role that IT support, employee engagement and collaboration tools play in delivering a cohesive customer experience strategy.

More than 77% of IT decision-makers believe it’s “very or extremely important” for corporate IT to resemble consumer experiences.

Companies are more complex than ever, and today’s leaders are challenged to:

Control wage costs but retain top talent for mission-critical roles.
Outsource and offshore to stay competitive but maintain the same level of ownership mentality and service levels.
Optimize real estate, consolidate locations and simultaneously build more of a modern, collaborative workplace experience.
Communicate effectively as a CEO and ensure that the vision and strategy permeates all levels, but also empowers employees to take risks and innovate.
Reduce IT costs and optimize spend on cutting-edge, transformative tools.
Create an employee work experience that delivers legendary customer experience!

Your Employees Should Come First

Creating a supportive and effective workplace environment is not about providing espresso machines or ping-pong tables. Nor is it purely about pay raises (though that’s always nice). It’s about tapping into employees’ strong emotional need to be heard, to feel valued and to contribute in a meaningful way. It’s possible to create a truly collaborative work culture, break down silos and bridge the continental divide by tapping into that strong emotional need and by providing employees with the technology and tools that facilitate a frictionless, customer journey.

Senior Leaders Set The Example

Company communications are far more effective when they highlight employee success stories, encourage cross-functional partnerships and give credit where credit is due. Providing tangible examples that align to the company vision is an excellent way to underscore the point.

Attracting, supporting, empowering and retaining top talent can be a company’s #1 advantage over its closest competitor. Costco pays well above market rates for their store managers, and the results certainly show. Companies that succeed have employees that are highly skilled, curious, questioning, fearless, motivated and even a bit eccentric. They don’t want to wait for management to solve their problems. Giving employees significant input into how we support our external customers is a huge,untapped opportunity.

“It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”
Steve Jobs

Certainly, management reserves the right to set the tone, over-arching message and business priorities. Nevertheless, management must do the following:

Hire tech-savvy employees who are well-versed in modern collaboration tools, social media,and other engagement methods. Incentivize and re-train existing employees, if possible. All companies are tech companies now.
Delegate more, micro-manage less and champion a more progressive, healthy work culture.
Let go a bit and allow employees to drive the granular, ground-level discussions needed to deliver the larger outcomes.
Managers should resist the temptation to try to prove they are the smartest person in the room! Facilitate the discussion, but don’t provide the answer (even if you know it). A conclusion reached by an individual or team receives 10 times more buy-in when they arrive at the conclusion on their own.
Equally important, management must provide the basic technology toolset and quality of tech support for employees to work effectively together across a large global organization, making collaboration less of a slogan and more of a reality.
Empower employees to fill the procedural gaps, increase productivity and reduce the mean time to resolve escalations on behalf of customers.
Correct and fix procedures permanently via continuous improvement.

New Tools Are Needed

E-mail and instant messages are the most over-used tools for communication, collaboration and engagement. While they can reach both individuals and groups, they fail to engage, facilitate or archive efforts in a truly effective way. While neither will go away any time soon, a newer breed of collaboration tools, purpose-built for the modern workplace, is needed to drive excellence across the enterprise.

There are many collaboration tools on the market. The best will perform the following:

Provide an effective forum for companies to solicit and analyze customer feedback, to hear the good and the bad, capture what works, identify specific issues that hold companies back in their customer success mission – then share those findings transparently across the organization.
Support employees’ innate desire to love what they do, believe in the mission, to be a part of something larger and be appreciated.
Foster a culture of ownership and continuous improvement. Empower employees to take action, fix problems on the spot and implement permanent solutions. May the best idea win!
Communicate ongoing challenges and progress on resolution. Establish a place to validate success. Continue the successful cycle.

There are many ways to improve employee experience, but nothing is more important than providing employees with the right technology.

Today’s workers are more dependent on technology than ever. During a digital transformation, as we change the way customers engage us, we must provide our employees with the proper tools. Above all, companies need a centralized collaboration platform that supports a wide variety of processes, information and interactions, including:

Virtual spaces where employees can get IT support, ask questions, make suggestions and help IT work better.
Constant improvement processes, identifying the highest-impacting, lowest-effort targets for immediate prioritization.
Single-subject discussion threads (forum leader- or user-created) and polls to give employees a voice to determine the relevant areas needing improvement.
Responding on a timely basis to maintain relevancy and integrity of purpose.
Training videos, tips and tricks for a range of employee skillsets, from the most basic to the most advanced. Nobody left behind!
Engaging employees for selection and testing of IT solutions.
Providing key information on emerging IT made for more self-sufficient employees, reducing support costs.
Keeping employees informed about known service-impacting issues and efforts to resolve them.

Let go a bit. Employees, not the platform administrator, will begin facilitating some of the most important discussions, driving significant traffic and engagement levels. IT product owners will use the platform to gather direct feedback from end users. Regularly monitor new content to maintain decorum, but more importantly shape the discussion positively, define the issues and own the outcome. Employees may begin with a somewhat cynical view of corporate communications, but open, transparent communication and collaboration can lead to greater trust and buy-in in a relatively short period of time.

Human nature being what it is, people are forgiving. If they can see you earnestly trying, they will get behind your efforts. IT can be frustrating, and issues won’t get fixed overnight, But your efforts, in effect, represent a daily promise to work hard, make the place just a bit better every day, and gain everyone’s loyalty. In short, a collaboration platform (like Jive) is a powerfully simple, easy-to-use, feature-laded tool to help foster collaboration, problem-solve, and facilitate lasting trust in and outside your company.

Learn more about how the right collaboration platform can help you build a highly-engaged, customer-centric workforce. View the webcast “Why You Should Treat Employees Like Customers.”

How Intranets Drive Business Growth

How do you measure the value of an interactive intranet? For senior leadership, success is all about the bottom line, spelled out in hard numbers. And, as it turns out, an interactive intranet can have a dramatic impact on those numbers. Independently verified data on Jive customers indicates that companies that implement an interactive intranet can realize up to 2-4% increases in revenue. That’s a massive gain, demonstrating just how much the right intranet software can contribute to business growth. Below, we’ll describe some of the ways a best-of-breed intranet helps achieve those results.

More Efficient Processes and Operations

The average enterprise uses more than 300 different apps, according to one study. Another study showed that employees have to switch between those apps every two to three minutes. Just imagine the time lost ping-ponging between emails, docs, messaging channels and other systems in search of people, content, conversations and other information. By some estimates, employees spend roughly a third of their time chasing down information and trying to connect all the pieces. It’s a huge drain on productivity.

An interactive intranet eliminates much of this wasted activity by bringing people, information, content and conversations under one roof and making everything easy to find and work with. Employees have all the resources they need, in one simple-to-use environment, without having to wrangle fragmented info and juggle dozens of apps.

Information Flow

With an interactive intranet, information is no longer trapped in silos. Instead, it flows rapidly from wherever it’s produced to wherever it’s needed, keeping employees in the know and in sync – with the company, with their department and teams – at all times.

Access to People

Within an interactive intranet, employees are in constant contact. They meet, interact and form relationships in communities of interest, groups, team and departmental spaces, and comment strings. They can easily find each other using a built-in people directory, which enables them to locate experts and collaborators based on role, interests, skills and endorsements.

Just like the social channels people use in their personal lives, an interactive intranet lets employees “follow” and @mention colleagues to keep each other informed and stay abreast of important developments and activities. Networks form organically and rapidly, bringing together people across the organization to quickly solve problems and accomplish tasks. Regardless of their physical location, people are always working together side-by-side in the interactive intranet.

Collaboration

An interactive intranet makes it a breeze to find collaborators, assemble teams and work together with all the info, resources and tools required to get work done. They can discuss, coordinate, make decisions, share and work on documents together, assign tasks, track progress, ask questions, and execute actions – all within the interactive intranet.

Integrations With Other Systems

Jive’s Interactive Intranet includes pre-built integrations with key systems such as SharePoint, Office 365, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs, and more. The integrations enable the interactive intranet to pull information and activity from these and other systems into a common environment where everything is easy to find, use and work with. Employees can easily locate information, content and people – whether they’re in Jive and any system it’s integrated with – in one quick search.

With silos eliminated, information flowing freely and the ability to collaborate fluidly, companies can execute faster, with fewer mistakes and much less duplicated effort.

Knowledge Management And Innovation

To grow and innovate, companies need to get better at harnessing their collective expertise and experience. That means capturing, preserving and organizing corporate knowledge, and resurfacing and distributing it so that it can be reused in the future.

Capturing and Preserving Knowledge

An interactive intranet captures knowledge that would otherwise be lost, siloed or forgotten. As people work in the intranet, it captures and preserves conversations, decisions, content, ideas and actions. It even captures information from external systems that are integrated with the interactive intranet.

Organizing It All

All that invaluable information and knowledge is preserved and organized around projects, teams and processes. It’s no longer fragmented and scattered, difficult to find and make sense of; it’s saved in a meaningful context.

Continued Access To Information

Jive’s advanced intelligent search resurfaces relevant knowledge so anyone can access it months, even years, down the line. In addition, machine learning and graph-based intelligence recommends information and experts based on people’s roles, work patterns and relationships. Thanks to the constant access to information and knowledge, companies are no longer stuck reinventing wheels and repeating past mistakes. Instead, they can learn and build on past experience, getting faster and smarter over time.

How the Royal Bank of Canada Created a “Marketplace of Knowledge”

Tens of thousands of employees across the Royal Bank of Canada’s (RBC) many offices and operations use their Jive interactive intranet on a daily basis for a myriad of use cases, including team collaboration, expert communities, IT rollouts and support, and internal communications at bank branches. According to Aaron Kim, Senior Director of Digital Workplace Solutions at RBC, the interactive intranet has become a “marketplace of knowledge” for more than 66,000 unique monthly users in more than 3,000 active communities.

“Having a platform that allows us to move information more efficiently from where it’s created to where it’s needed goes a long way to making us more productive, more agile,” Kim says.

Improved Employee Engagement

The advantages of an intranet for employee engagement can be enormous. A thriving intranet becomes a unifying force for companies of any size, driving cultural alignment, a feeling of connectedness and investment in the company’s mission. In fact, companies using Jive Interactive Intranets reduce employee turnover by 24% on average, which can have a substantial impact on a company’s bottom line.

It’s a well-known fact that it’s less expensive to keep an existing employee than it is to hire new replacements. Estimates vary, but it costs at least 30% of an entry-level employee’s salary to replace them, according to one source. In other words, for an employee making $45,000/year, it could cost upwards of $15,000 to replace them. And the cost of replacing employees increases as you move up the ladder.

Cultural Cohesion

When employees feel cut off from the company and co-workers, morale suffers. Interactive intranets break down barriers and hierarchies, turning disconnected organizations into cohesive teams, where everyone contributes and has a voice. Interactive intranets enable corporate communications professionals to keep everyone in the organization – even remote and “deskless” workers – informed and aligned around the clock with high-impact news, announcements, leadership blogs and more.

Onboarding

Starting a new job is like drinking from a firehose; it’s a lot coming at you all at once. An interactive intranet can bring new hires up to speed much faster by immersing them in the company and giving them an overview of what’s going on from day one — in an easy-to-digest way. They can get a feel for the company and culture, meet colleagues, take part in onboarding activities, get mentoring and start contributing faster than ever before. Companies using Jive intranets report 30% speed-ups in onboarding time, on average.

Ongoing Learning

Employees thrive when they’re expanding their skill sets and acquiring knowledge that makes them more effective and advances their careers. Interactive intranets make on-the-job learning a seamless part of everyday work. Users are constantly sharing expertise, answering colleagues’ questions, mentoring and educating each other, pooling their know-how and getting smarter together. Every moment becomes a teaching moment, supplementing formal training.

Motivation

An interactive intranet nurtures a positive, high-performance culture by making feedback and encouragement a part of daily workflows. Jive’s built-in recognition and rewards system motivates desirable behaviors and activities and enables co-workers to acknowledge each other’s accomplishments with Peer Recognition Badges.

A Global Company Reinvents Work

Schaeffler Group is a global automotive and industrial supplier with more than 92,000 employees in over 50 countries. Katrin Fischer, Schaeffler’s social intranet project manager, says the company transformed communication and collaboration by replacing their 15-year-old intranet with a Jive intranet, known internally as “CONNECT.”

“We now have more than 2,000 groups in Schaeffler CONNECT, ranging from small project teams to huge cross-organizational expert communities,” Fischer explains. “In particular, I am proud of our ‘Ask the Schaeffler CONNECT Experts’ group, where we provide our users a place to raise questions, provide feedback and exchange information. A lot of their questions are answered by other interested colleagues who use Jive intensely.”

8 Ways Companies Achieve Breakthrough Results with Interactive Intranet Software

We’ve outlined some of the many advantages of intranets above. To get a better sense of how some of the world’s most successful companies use interactive intranets to drive productivity, growth and innovation, read our free whitepaper: 8 Ways Companies Achieve Breakthrough Business Results With Jive. Whether it’s faster onboarding, more effective internal communication, improved HR and IT support or full-on digital transformation, Jive Software can help you reach your loftiest business goals.

Download the Whitepaper >

Frequently Asked Questions:

We’ve got your back every step of the way!

What is an intranet?

An intranet is a private company network, typically hosted on the cloud, on-premise or in external hosting facilities. An intranet helps employees communicate and increases productivity.

What are the benefits of a company intranet portal?

Your intranet is a powerful tool to improve internal business communication. It does this by fostering open discussion and knowledge-sharing among individuals and teams.

Does the intranet need the internet?

No. An intranet functions like the internet. The intranet is hosted on a web server inside a local company network.

Is the intranet the same as the internet?

The function of the intranet is the same as the internet, with one exception. The Intranet is a local private network. Only people within a company network can access it. In comparison, the internet is a globally connected network.

Does Jive offer an intranet app?

Yes: the Jive Daily mobile intranet app. Jive Daily enables employees to access all features—anytime, anywhere.

An interactive intranet is so much more than an old-fashioned content-centric intranet. It’s a place to meet, connect, share knowledge, work together and build relationships – across locations and up and down the corporate ladder. Simply put, it’s a community, one that embodies and fosters your company culture.

Your intranet design and layout should reflect that purpose. Everything from the look and feel to the site navigation conveys your cultural values and aspirations. Here are some intranet design best practices and tips we’ve learned in the years we’ve spent helping thousands of companies around the world create vibrant digital workplaces.

1. Give Your Intranet a Unique Identity

An interactive intranet should have its own identity, distinct from your company’s public-facing properties. It’s not your official website or customer community, nor does it need to look like those external sites. And it’s often better if it doesn’t. You want employees who go there to instantly know that they’re inside company walls and among coworkers.

Your intranet should have a personality that matches your culture and brand. If your culture emphasizes things like candor and informality, your intranet should, too. Keep that in mind when crafting the design.

2. Choose a Name and Logo

Part of this distinctive identity should include a unique, catchy name. What you call the community can say a lot about its purpose and tone. Jive customers have given their intranets all sorts of creative names that signal the importance and meaning of their intranet to the company, such as Main Street, Buzz, Spark, The Hub, The Hive and The Planet.

The name should be displayed at the top of the home page as well as key intranet pages and can also be incorporated into an original logo that captures that spirit of the brand and company culture.

3. Incorporate Corporate Branding

Use a consistent color scheme and brand elements in your corporate intranet design that help establish a distinctive sense of place. These could match your company branding, but they don’t necessarily have to. Again, beware of designs that too closely resemble your company’s public, official sites. It’s important to differentiate to avoid confusing your users.

4. Plan the Global Navigation

Just as with an external-facing website, you need to put the daily needs of the users (your employees) first. The global navigation doesn’t need to match the site map. Instead, focus on the things employees are looking for most often, and do your best to incorporate familiar language. For example, instead of “HR Portal,” consider saying “Benefits Info” if that’s what users typically searching for when they browse human resources information. Instead of “IT,” you might want to label the link “Help Desk,” so users understand they can go there for assistance. For a fuller list of department portals and other official destinations, you can always use a drop-down menu, providing a complete range of navigation options without cluttering up the design.

5. Set the Tone on Your Home Page

The home page sets the tone for the rest of the community and is the jumping off point for employees, so you’ll want to put a lot of thought into the design. Design and layout elements may include:

A welcome message near the top of the page
Clear calls to action that reflect your top priorities, such as “Meet the Leadership Team” or “Get Started With The Community,” with links to the corresponding pages and spaces
Promotional call-outs for current company initiatives, featured content and trending topics
Personalized company news, with targeted information based on each user’s role, geography, department, etc.

6. Build Key Intranet Landing Pages

Beyond the home page, your interactive intranet will need landing pages for departmental storefronts, support portals, subcommunities and team and group spaces. Consider establishing some intranet layout and design guidelines that provide a consistent user experience across key pages.

For example, it’s best not to overcrowd the pages. Provide what’s needed most, but keep the design clean and intuitive. As with the home page, post clear CTAs for whatever the primary goals of the page are, such as asking questions, exploring FAQs or meeting team members.

Jive Makes Intranet Designs and Layouts Easy

All of this may sound like a lot of work, but Jive’s intranet solution makes it surprisingly straightforward. Jive’s intranet software supplies ready-made elements and page templates for many common uses, including company news, departmental landing pages, support portals, collaborative spaces, help desks, sales deal rooms, and more. From there, it’s just a simple point-and-click process to theme the pages, add colors and images (including a logo), and specify the navigation.

You can quickly customize page layouts using a wide range of easy-to-place tiles, including:

Graphical elements like banners, carousels, images and videos
Dynamic tiles for featured or popular content, action items, decisions, “Super lists” (people, content, or places filtered by attributes such as tag, creation date, activity, category, content type, skills and expertise), etc.
Curated lists of people, places, content, links, events, key dates, etc.
Interactive tiles such as “Ask a Question”
Custom HTML tiles

It’s so easy, ordinary business users can launch pages and spaces themselves without any technical expertise or IT help – in minutes. Of course, you can go farther, adding deep customizations and tailoring your Jive intranet to meet any need. The possibilities are endless.Y ou can see real-life examples of Jive-powered intranets in action here: examples of intranets.

Better yet, get a first-hand look at Jive’s intranet design capabilities with your own personalized demo. Get a demo >

Intranets contain sensitive, business-critical information—details about ongoing projects, personal information about employees, institutional knowledge, private conversations, and documents containing IP and other proprietary information. An intranet is exactly the type of system that requires robust security.

Intranet Security Best Practices

There are all sorts of internal and external threats – security breaches, unauthorized access, weak passwords – that could compromise the system. Managing and protecting intranet data is an essential step for any business, which is at risk not only from external malicious attacks but also from internal breaches by employees (whether intentional or unintentional). Any intranet software needs to have an integrated security solution to offer maximum protection.

Strong Passwords and Privacy Controls

This may seem like a no-brainer, but log-in protocols are the first line of defense for your intranet. With Jive’s out-of-the-box solution, this functionality is baked into the portal. Jive Interactive Intranet allows any company to integrate with Single Sign-On (SSO), Active Directory (AD) or Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), for a seamless and centrally managed authentication process.

The Jive intranet security system also gives you robust control over internal access, as well as access by external partners. Employees and partners can access the intranet via mobile or desktop platforms – securely – no matter where they are.

Meets Global Compliance Standards

Many industries such as healthcare, government and financial services require special security and privacy protections to meet compliance regulations. Jive’s intranet solution provides best-in-class privacy features such as:

EU-U.S. & SWISS-US PRIVACY SHIELD
GLBA Certifications
HIPAA Certifications
GDPR Compliance

Employ a Layered Security Protocol

To keep your intranet secure, your company will want to leverage multiple layers of defense to protect key information and handle all critical facets of network and application security, including authentication, authorization and assurance.

Strong intranet security should include things such as adherence to the ISO 27001 standard, regular third-party audits and consistent updating based on industry trends. This helps ensure that your security program keeps pace with a changing security landscape.

Choose A Proven Intranet Security System

Jive uses an ISMS (Information Security Management System), a framework of policies and procedures that includes all legal, physical and technical controls involved in an organization’s information risk management processes. We systematically evaluate and prioritize information security risks, taking into account the impact of company threats and vulnerabilities. This is logged in a risk register and managed as part of Jive’s industry-leading security program.

Make sure your intranet security team includes certified Information Security professionals with expertise in application, network and architecture security, who can define industry-leading security policies and security controls.

There are many intranet options out there, but there’s only one interactive intranet with best-of-breed security to protect global companies and their data. Jive has been meeting the stringent security standards of leading enterprises and government agencies for more than a decade, staying ahead of ever-evolving threats and changing regulations. Our team is composed of professionals with graduate-level degrees, 10 years industry experience and security certifications including CISSP, CISA, CRISC, ITIL v3 and ISO 27001 Lead Auditor.