How often do you find yourself getting frustrated when coworkers can't find certain documents in obvious locations?
It leaves you wondering how long that colleague has been looking and how much of their time (and the company’s) has been wasted.
This kind of inefficiency has only increased during the pandemic. While company meetings have increased by 13%, a recent Harvard Business Review study shows that company productivity has gone down, and the increasingly scattered nature of our teams is a major factor.
A customized intranet for your company could be a major contributor to increasing workplace productivity. An intranet is not just an internal website to store documents. When created using Office 365, a custom intranet is a full-fledged enterprise collaboration platform. To better understand how a custom intranet can help address some of the critical productivity challenges facing many enterprises today, let’s explore the issue of productivity further.
What Makes (or Breaks) Workplace Productivity?
While there may be some industry-specific reasons for a decrease in productivity, most business leaders face common challenges in helping team members to work smarter. The top six most frequent challenges are:
- A lack of a central hub for documents, forms, resources, etc. “Where do I find X?” is a recurrent theme across all industries. As work-from-home has grown more popular, a person’s inability to just pop their head into the office next door to ask this question has made finding the answer more difficult.
- A lack of clear task lists and assignments. “What do I do now?” Most people in the workforce want to be productive and feel valued, but they are often halted in their tracks because they’re unsure of what to do next.
- A lack of accountability. “Wait, I was supposed to do that?” When people are unclear of who is supposed to do what, those tasks often fall between the cracks. Additionally, the monotony of certain tasks can cause them to fall off a team member’s priorities.
- A lack of camaraderie, connection, and collaboration. “She’s been here six months, and I don’t even know her.” Our increasingly digital workplace has had many benefits for work-life balance, but when it comes to creating team cohesion, work-from-home is sorely lacking.
- A lack of leadership. “Who do I go to?” Again, our virtual office has its upsides, but not knowing who to consult when you need help can grind a process to a complete halt.
- A lack of focus. “I’ve got a dozen windows and apps open on my laptop!” When your team members have to look in multiple locations for their assignments, resources, and communication, they will inevitably become distracted, and productivity will decline.
The good news is that a custom intranet provides solutions to these challenges.
While ready-made intranet platforms are also available, a customized platform can be tailored to address special cases unique to your business, and branded and shaped to represent your company’s particular values and culture. Additionally, a customized intranet includes the features you need for productivity, excluding the tools or functionality you don’t need.
Six Ways a Custom Intranet Significantly Boosts Productivity
Using Office 365 tools, your custom intranet will drastically help with:
- Organizing information. No more endless email threads, pulling spreadsheets from three different databases, and deep dives into Google Drives. You’re a grown-up company and you need grown-up data solutions. SharePoint creates an Amazon-like document search engine allowing your team members to find what they need in one integrated hub.
- Clarifying tasks and assignments. Everyone will know what they need to do and when it’s due. SharePoint is a comprehensive task management system which allows administrators to give every team member a definite to-do list which can be seen across departments and teams.
- Automating workflows. Let’s face it – some tasks are just boring, and no one wants to do them. SharePoint and Microsoft 365 for Business contain mini applications which can automate some tasks that take up team members’ time. From customer response emails, signature collection, or document tracking, a customized intranet solution can take the tedium out of the workflow.
- Increasing collaboration. A centralized intranet breaks down the silos that naturally occur in business and increases as your business becomes more digital. By providing better communication and collaboration tools, team members can feel more effective in knowing each other and working together effectively. And get this—people might even have fun connecting with each other!
- Highlighting knowledge leaders. SharePoint provides opportunities to communicate beautifully. With a common communications platform, you can lift up the in-house experts whose experience and know-how are too often overlooked but should be shared across departments.
- Centralizing business processes. Perhaps the most important benefit of a customized intranet, you can house all your business processes under one digital roof. No more pulling together items from a variety of platforms and documents—it’s all right there.
Related Content: How to Improve Employee Onboarding with Power Apps
Conclusion
Most companies expend significant resources on customer acquisition, marketing, and advertising. Despite this reality, many still work with antiquated internal systems resulting in lack of productivity, inefficiencies, and weakened product delivery.
To work smarter, you need to assess the challenges your company is facing today and develop a strategy that works for you and your team. A customized intranet is a platform to address the inefficiency, lack of clarity, and monotony that might be hampering your team’s productivity.
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