I worked at an amusement park in high school, and was told to “be patient and understanding when you get asked the same questions over and over. While you may have answered that question dozens of times already, it’s probably the first time that guest has asked that question.”

That doesn’t seem like a very efficient process, does it? Rather than pay someone to stand around answering the same question repeatedly, why not streamline and simplify to save time, labor and resources? While it may be an inevitable reality at an amusement park, most corporations operate in a similar way. Think about when your IT team sends out an email blast informing employees of a required security training. IT then spends the next several days fielding one-off questions and troubleshooting through email. What a waste of productivity and resources!

John Schneider, VP of Product Marketing here at Jive Software, an Aurea company, addresses this kind of pain point in his article, Aligning Workplace Collaboration and Communication with Your Intranet. He talks about how companies of the future are investing in digital transformation today, and explains the critical role an interactive intranet plays as a knowledge gateway for employees (rather than a tool for one-way communication). For example, rather than sending an email blast that triggers fragmented communication, an interactive intranet would eliminate this resource drain and increase productivity by allowing the sender and employees to address issues and comments all at once in a single blog with comments. This reduces the number of questions received by the sender, and helps employees easily find answers before they even need to ask!

This type of communication can only be done if everyone is in the same place, not fragmented across a variety of tools. In John’s article, he emphasizes that “people want one place to access their company’s information, people and applications” and outlines three ways an interactive intranet can bring a company together to achieve this kind of cohesiveness – through communication, collaboration and people and knowledge discovery.

Don’t set up your employees with the expectation that communication duplication and fragmentation is to be expected and accepted (like at the amusement park where I worked). Instead, empower your employees with the ability to openly communicate, collaborate and access the resources they need via an interactive intranet.

Read the article to learn more about how to grant employees unfettered access to their company’s information, people and applications.