External communication is considered one of the most important concepts when it comes to business. How can we inform and persuade potential customers? How do we create brand awareness?
These are all factors that must attract customers to make an organization profitable. However, external communication is not the only thing that needs to be considered. Internal communication is at least as important. To achieve and maintain a company's desired image, employees must feel connected to the organization. This is proving to be increasingly important. For this reason, Entopic has conducted a survey for the sixth time among more than 400 Dutch organizations regarding the current state of the widely used internal communication tool: the intranet.
Reasons for using an intranet
91% of organizations provide access to an intranet. 70% of employees can access the organization's intranet from home. The primary reason for using an intranet is to increase engagement. This is the first reason for 79% of organizations using an intranet. In a close second place is using the intranet as a source of information at 71%. This primarily refers to sharing knowledge with colleagues. Organizations often also have an internal social media channel that is used for this reason. In addition to sharing knowledge and information, creating support is also mentioned. Due to these points, the use of (internal) social media by employees has become indispensable in the business world. 43% of respondents even indicate that if there were no internal social media, they would use it through an external channel.
Improvement
An intranet is not ideal for every purpose. In many cases, the intranet is very general; it is for everyone in the organization. Therefore, certain information may be unusable for many readers. This makes the intranet cumbersome. For this reason, it is also difficult to find the right information. Often, an intranet is set up but is not properly maintained. It contains old news items, while the latest information is shared even faster via internal social media. Another point that was mentioned (especially a few years ago) is that the intranet is primarily one-way traffic. Internal documents are released to which feedback is not possible. Nowadays, to counteract this shortcoming, there is increasing use of document sharing, text, and video communication that can be responded to. This is intended to increase interactivity, and in this way, additional information is shared.
Most used intranet components
The surveyed employees use the following components on the intranet the most:
- Internal news provision (90%)
- Internal phone directory (73%)
- Announcements (67%)
- Information about employment conditions (62%)
- Forms (58%)