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.

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