How to Improve Employee Engagement with a Better Intranet

Improving employee engagement is always on the mind of the HR team, but they may be overlooking one key area that will have a major impact: the intranet.

For many companies, the intranet is the place where content goes to die, a virtual graveyard visited by employees less than once per month. More innovative and forward-thinking competitors, however, are using the intranet to become the center of employee digital experience and a key player in improving employee engagement. Using every opportunity to keep employees engaged is more important than ever before; 74 percent of employees are open to a new job, even though they report being satisfied with their current one. The Center for American Progress reports that every employee  who leaves costs between 16 percent of their salary for untrained, unsalaried workers and 213 percent of the salary for a highly trained position.

Investing in the intranet solves two key issues. Engaging employees and removing the barriers to finding information increases their happiness and satisfaction at work and will possibly deter them from leaving. If they do leave, a robust and engaging intranet can help capture their knowledge and encourage other employees to access it. This issue of “knowledge rework” is a very pervasive, if unseen, issue that stems from employees not having access to information. An IDC report indicates that workers find the information they need only 56 percent of the time

The Personalized Intranet Can Improve Employee Engagement

What happens when an employee searches your intranet?

Most likely, the system performs a basic keyword match, that on average, requires about 8 searches to find the right document. Employees become frustrated or even give up on the task altogether. These employees have become accustomed to the predictive and user-friendly external search engines like Google and Amazon. A basic keyword match falls far short of their expectations.

AI-powered search uses machine learning to the search usage data to understand your employee’s context, intent and role, and then automatically provide relevant content for their search, and recommend additional content. AI-powered search can completely personalize the intranet experience for your employees, providing the exact relevant insights they need for their work and improve employee engagement.

Instead of a basic keyword match, AI-powered search is:

• Responsive; delivers consumer search-like answers from information accessed from across your organization’s disparate information silos.
• Proactive; suggests related content, products and people based on the original query, who you are and what you are working on.
• Predictive; recommends content and people that have helped others succeed who had similar queries. Predictive analytics and machine learning constantly analyze and update these recommendations in real-time for optimal success.

As employees use the intranet, it naturally upskills them with relevant content for their work.  In a 2015 survey from Chief Learning Officer, 85 percent of respondents said they use search at least once a week for workplace learning. Companies need to capitalize on the opportunity to transform search as a learning vehicle to reduce the impact of expertise loss, as well as increase engagement and retention metrics. Usage analytics also point to the queries that employees are searching for, but receive few or the wrong results, indicating a content gap and opportunity for more formal training.

To learn more about how AI-powered search can impact your workplace, we recommend:

• From Relevance Laggard to Leader: Becoming More Relevant to Your Customers, Communities and Staff, explains the stages of relevance maturity, enabling you to benchmark your current relevance efforts.
• The Impact of Sharing Employee Knowledge, outlines how and why knowledge sharing is more important than ever before for employees.
• A Cheap Information Experience is Expensive: Relevance is the Currency,our CEO, Louis Tetu, provides his opinion on why companies will fall behind without upgrading their information experience.