The Invisible Threads Between Employee Technology, Intranet Experience, and Business Value

Is your organization meeting the digital workplace needs of your employees?

With an abundance of intranet solutions on the market today, it’s increasingly likely that organizations have selected solutions that fail to engage employees or meet their needs. This is a growing challenge for employers, as the digital workplace often proves pivotal in creating the desired employee experience.

We found some helpful lessons in this Gartner® Report: Reset Your Intranet Strategy to Advance Digital Workplace Goals. The analyst report highlights the emerging pain points commonly found in lackluster intranet implementations and explains helpful ways organizations can create solutions that engage their employees in work and in culture.

Read on for report findings, as well as the paths forward to the engagement and productivity you hoped for in your digital workplace solution.

The link between employee needs and business outcomes

• The report mentions “A widening gap between the consumer experience and the employee experience has left employees widely dissatisfied and unengaged with intranet information and services.”[1] The disconnect often begins here.
• We see the effects of this disconnect when employees stop using their intranet as part of their normal workdays. As the report mentioned, “Employees increasingly circumvent or avoid traditional intranets in favor of other tools or engagement channels.” [2] Bad technology can often be even more harmful than no technology at all.

To be effective, your intranet technology needs to offer a single source of truth to your employees, remote and hybrid alike. This not only creates convenience, but it improves internal processes and enhances collective knowledge. It’s not just the day-to-day tasks that benefit, though.

• An interesting finding of the report is “Evolving intranets increasingly overlap with broader digital workplace initiatives, threatening to further distract employees and diminish business value.”[3]

Business value in various areas can be improved by a digital workplace solution that meets employee needs – providing them with ease of access to business applications and expertise, and the abilities to collaborate with others on projects and to keep on top of company news and events. As a superior intranet decreases time and effort while improving the

It’s clear that a better intranet will improve an organization’s outcomes when fully utilized, but what’s the secret to encouraging that utilization?

Create the engagement you need to thrive

Digital workplace solutions – intranets – have notable potential to resolve friction among frontline workers, hybrid workers, and remote workers. These work dynamics, whether novel or age-old, have the highest risk of digital friction and associated performance deficits. The key to engaging these workforces is to build a digital workplace (ideally with the help of a seasoned intranet provider) that erases these daily frustrations and friction points.

Core to the success of a modern digital workplace solution is the easy-to-use features. From file sharing and calendars to dedicated spaces and robust search capabilities, a modern intranet solution has features designed to create a digital workplace that meets the needs of everyone in your organization — end users, content creators, and administrators.

A modern intranet solution and its features should be accessible in a variety of ways to engage all employees. Some employees work best from a mobile device, some from laptops, and others from their desktop computers. A cloud-hosted, software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform can deliver all the next-generation intranet features and capabilities to enhance every employee’s experience without slowing down their workflow.

If you are already using preferred workplace apps, there are also modern intranet services that integrate with the most popular enterprise tools and leading third-party applications. From out-of-the-box integrations or new ones, these modern digital workplaces can bring all your content and conversation into a unified digital workspace. With these tools, employees are empowered with better knowledge management to foster innovation and workplace collaboration, all with less time and energy wasted.

[1]   Gartner, Inc., Jim Murphy, & Gene Phifer. (2022, February). Reset Your Intranet Strategy to Advance Digital Workplace Goals, page 2 (No. G00744534). Gartner, Inc.

[2]   Gartner, Inc., Jim Murphy, & Gene Phifer. (2022, February). Reset Your Intranet Strategy to Advance Digital Workplace Goals, page 2 (No. G00744534). Gartner, Inc.

[3]   Gartner, Inc., Jim Murphy, & Gene Phifer. (2022, February). Reset Your Intranet Strategy to Advance Digital Workplace Goals, page 2 (No. G00744534). Gartner, Inc.

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Gartner, Reset Your Intranet Strategy to Advance Digital Workplace Goals, By Jim Murphy, Gene Phifer, Published 1 February 2022