6 Best Practices to Streamline Your Internal Communication With an Intranet

According to McKinsey, 72% of companies today use so-called “social” technologies to facilitate communication and collaboration within teams. One of them? The intranet! A real asset for internal communication, it makes it possible to facilitate information sharing, encourage exchanges, and build employee engagement.

Despite all these benefits, some organizations sometimes struggle to make the most of this tool. To help you out, we've gathered in this article 6 best practices to put in place to streamline your internal communication with an intranet.

Share information with the right people

The first thing to do to improve your internal communication? Share information with the right people! Indeed, the more personalized the communications shared on your intranet, the more added value they'll bring to your employees.

To achieve this, we recommend using one of your intranet's flagship features: the welcome portal. Some intranet solutions – including Talkspirit – let you create several home pages and personalize their content based on your users' profiles. Now it's time to take advantage of it!

In Talkspirit, for example, you can create pages by role, by city, or by country where your offices are located, using ready-to-use templates. This way, you can share the information of your choice with the people of your choice. And in a variety of formats: videos, carousels, polls, events, posts… you have all the ingredients you need to energize internal communication on your intranet.

Thanks to this feature, you save your employees time, since they no longer have to sift through information to find what's relevant to them. And of course, you also improve the relevance and visibility of your messages! In short, it's a win-win investment.

Encourage knowledge sharing

Streamlining internal communication also means encouraging knowledge sharing among the members of your organization. Our tip to develop this collective intelligence: centralize all your internal resources on the drive and/or the knowledge base built into your intranet, and organize them by role and/or by topic to make them easier to find.

Indeed, there's nothing better than easily accessible resources to facilitate knowledge sharing internally!

Read also: Improving knowledge management with Talkspirit: the Pôle emploi case study

Once your documents are well organized, you can then create communities on your intranet dedicated to sharing knowledge and best practices. These communities can correspond either to the roles in your organization (for example: “HR best practices,” “IT best practices,” etc.) or to your employees' interests and/or ways of working (“remote work best practices,” “monitoring best practices,” etc.).

For these communities to work, however, you'll need to clearly show users where and how to find information on the intranet, but also to encourage managers to lead by example.

Read also: How to involve managers in internal communication?

Create groups to facilitate exchanges

Of course, the communities created on your intranet aren't limited to knowledge sharing. To energize exchanges as much as possible, we encourage you to create other types of groups, in particular:

• role-based groups (for example, dedicated to internal communication, product, development, etc.), to simplify information sharing within a single team,
• cross-team groups (for example, Marketing/Sales), to reduce information silos between your different departments,
• project groups, to facilitate communication between all stakeholders in your projects (for example, related to setting up a new process or a new tool),
• informal groups (a “water cooler” type, for example), to strengthen team cohesion.

Also remember to appoint group managers who will be responsible for animating exchanges and sharing content with members. Thanks to this regular animation, you'll give yourself every chance to streamline internal communication on your intranet.

A group manager, what's that? 🤔

In Talkspirit, a group manager is a member who has the rights to configure a group. They can, in particular, invite or remove new members, manage their access rights, add integrations, or create a chat room dedicated to the group.

Showcase your employees' initiatives

Beyond sharing news and best practices, your intranet is also a fantastic tool for giving visibility to your employees' initiatives, and thus strengthening their sense of belonging to the company.

For a simple reason: employees who feel recognized and appreciated at their true worth are more likely to be engaged at work, and therefore to stay with the company.

We therefore recommend regularly highlighting your members' work, for example by launching the following initiatives:

• create dedicated posts to highlight successes (personal and/or team) on your newsfeed, which everyone can react to by leaving comments,
• add these posts to your welcome portal,
• congratulate the employee(s) concerned directly in a group chat, or by sending them a personalized 1:1 message,
• organize webinars to give each team the chance to present the projects they're working on, and the impact those projects can have on the organization.

Organize events

Another best practice to streamline internal communication with your intranet? Regularly offer events and activities to your employees, using the calendar built into your platform.

Here are a few examples of events to organize:

• an annual seminar (or biannual) that lets you bring all your employees together and think collectively about best practices to improve your ways of working,
• a team-building event to bring your teams closer together (for example, a sports challenge, a treasure hunt, an escape game, etc.)
• a conference highlighting testimonials from employees and/or experts on a specific topic,
• a quiz or contest to test everyone's knowledge of your company culture, your values, or your teams,
• an event to mark a milestone for your company (for example, a holiday-season party, an afterwork to celebrate a move, the signing of a major account, or your company's 10th anniversary!).

If possible, try to mix remote and in-person events, so your employees can connect “in real life” and build bonds with their colleagues.

Ask for feedback regularly

Once your initiatives are in place, don't forget to ask for feedback! It couldn't be simpler: take a look at your statistics or launch a poll on your intranet to ask your employees:

• what they think of your initiatives (are they satisfied with the content and information shared with them?)
• what they think of the intranet (are they able to use it as intended? and what benefits does it bring them?)
• and what they'd like to improve on the platform.

This way, you'll get an overview of how effective your measures are, and adjust your internal communication strategy if needed.

Talkspirit, the intranet that energizes your internal communication

There's no shortage of intranet solutions, but one thing is certain: they're not all created equal. And above all, they're not all suited to the same needs.

If you want to set up an all-in-one intranet to streamline your internal communication, look no further: Talkspirit is the platform you need! 100% made in France, our intranet combines a chat, a newsfeed, a welcome portal, a drive, a knowledge base (available very soon), a module for webinars and video conferencing, as well as many collaboration features (calendar, project management, etc.).

It's therefore the ideal tool to boost your internal communication and streamline the flow of information within your organization. Want to learn more about our platform? Schedule a personalized demo with our team!

*
* *

From sharing information on your welcome portal to creating topic-based groups, you now know all our tips for streamlining your internal communication with an intranet.

🤔 And in practice, what does it look like? Discover in this practical guide how 10 of our customers use Talkspirit to energize their internal communication: