11 Compelling Ways Social Intranet Software Improves Productivity in Your Business

The goal of increasing productivity in the workplace is as old as business itself.

In today’s fast-paced world, staff productivity is more important than ever before and can mean the difference between a business that swims and one that sinks.

As most business owners know, improving productivity among employees can be an exceptional challenge. After all, it’s difficult enough to keep up with your own tasks, let alone monitor the performance of an entire team of individuals. Let productivity slide, and there’s no telling what repercussions your organization might suffer through.

As technology progresses, more and more ways to increase workplace productivity are beginning to come to light, with social intranet software currently being one of the most effective tools on the market. When properly utilized, social intranet software becomes a central hub for almost all business activity, and integrating it into your business is a simple, streamlined process when working with the right vendor. Though, you need to be careful when choosing a vendor, because many of them are leading the industry and your business into a false start.

So, how can a social intranet help improve productivity in your business?

Let’s take a look at 11 of the most important ways:

1. Less Confusion about Project Details

Keeping up with a number of projects at once can be a frustrating, often difficult process. This is especially true for those who are leading a team, as doing so requires one to be exceptionally on-point at all times. In order to ensure that your projects don’t get derailed, a system of organization is essential, and it has to actually work.

Social intranet software makes keeping track of projects a breeze. You can open cases, track progress, change statuses, and assign specific tasks to members of your team, all in one place.

If you or any of your employees get confused, questions can be asked under the umbrella of an individual project so that nothing gets lost in the mix. Once a project is completed and archived, this information never fades away and can always be retrieved in the future if need be.

With social intranet software, managing projects has never been so easy.

2. Easier Onboarding of New Employees

The challenge of bringing on new employees is something that will most likely never go away. Onboarding can take weeks, even months depending upon the circumstances, as it’s never easy to get someone up to speed with the logistics of your business without a bit of trial and error.

During this time, productivity often falls by the wayside, not only because the new employees may have a hard time getting up and running, but those who have to focus on the training process are also taking time away from their own tasks.

The best way to streamline onboarding is to have any necessary employee documentation as easily available and simple to understand as possible. When you use social intranet software as a platform for onboarding, you can post all necessary content right to community and in a specific hierarchy, which serves as a virtual training ground for your new employees.

Employees can even comment on documentation if they have any questions to ask or feedback to provide, which opens up a discussion that can only help to improve the internal logistics of your business. There’s always going to be a need for person-to-person communication with onboarding, but you can cut down on the time that you’ll have to devote by simply fleshing-out your social community with content and documentation.

3. Streamlined Collaboration

There are countless benefits that come along with collaboration in a business setting. When team members work together instead of separately, new and better ideas can be forged in a succinct manner, employee engagement increases and social isolation (a huge problem in today’s business world) disappears. Perhaps the biggest benefit of collaboration is a marked increase in productivity.

It stands to reason that your employees will get more done if they work together on projects rather than apart from one another, and social intranet software makes collaboration easier than ever. Users can log-in, create discussions that allow them to bounce ideas off of each other and expand upon ideas that will inevitably become vital to your organization. It’s the best way to improve your company’s products and services, all while saving time in the process.

4. Less Chance of Document Mismanagement

The days in which the majority of a business’s documents existed in paper form are long gone at this point. Today, files and documents are stored almost entirely in digital form, and there’s always a chance that things can get misplaced. The problems that can come along with misplacing an important file can be monumental, especially if the scenario is time-sensitive. As a result, no business can afford to go without having a well-designed document management system on their side.

Document management is one of the cornerstones of social intranet software. Software that is designed properly will allow you and your team to upload files, tag, like and comment upon them with ease. Organization into specific folders is a breeze, and you’ll never have to worry about things disappearing, as certain files can be locked so that team members cannot move or delete them.

The end result is a system that makes finding important files a simple, streamlined process, thus improving the productivity of your workforce.

5. Better Scheduling

For those who find themselves running from one meeting to another, scheduling can be one of the biggest pains associated with the workweek. Improper scheduling can easily lead to an interruption in productivity, and sometimes an entire day can be thrown off simply because someone entered in the wrong time on the calendar. More often than not, this is what happens when everyone is on a different page from one another.

Social intranet software is perfect for those who tend to run into scheduling problems, as it allows users to share their calendars as well as maintain individual private calendars. What this means for businesses with a large number of employees is far fewer chances that a scheduling conflict might get in the way of one’s workday, which means better productivity as a whole. It doesn’t matter if one is attending meetings in person or via a virtual conference — scheduling in social intranet software can be a huge help.

6. Consolidated Processes

The prominence of productivity and business applications is difficult to ignore today, as companies of all kinds are taking to technology to help make the day go by just a bit more smoothly. Typically, this requires one to log into a number of different websites or apps at once and bounce back and forth in order to get things done; calendars, file-sharing apps, and messaging software all come to mind.

While all of the above can be necessary aids to your daily routine, there’s a better way to make use of them.

A social intranet pulls together these tools and more that can help to streamline your workday processes, placing them in a single location that takes the stress and confusion of hopping around from one place to another out of the equation. As one might expect, this can have a majorly positive impact on workplace productivity.

7. More Possibilities for Remote Work

Working remotely is certainly nothing new, but the fact that it’s so common in today’s world certainly is. More and more companies are embracing remote work as a way to cut down on costs, allow more freedom to their employees and generally improve the forward-thinking nature of their business, and the benefits that can come along with doing so are clear at this point.

Running a remote company isn’t always easy, as productivity can be affected when things don’t go smoothly.

If there’s one thing that sets social intranet software apart from all the competition on the market, it’s the fact that it serves as the most ideal platform imaginable for working remotely. Users can communicate in real-time, share documents and files, create and push out content and schedule meetings and events, regardless of where they might be working from.

Your social intranet will no doubt serve as a crucial element in the future of remote business, especially as the concept of running a physical office continues to decline in popularity.

8. Increased Transparency Between Clients and Organizations

A lot of people in business don’t realize just how important their clients and customers are to the process of R&D. Your audience knows your products and services almost as well as you; perhaps even more so. Taking what they have to say into consideration can be truly helpful, especially if you’re looking to gain some insight into how things are performing.

One perk of a social intranet is that it provides you with the option of creating a space in your virtual community specifically devoted to customer support and feedback. Typically in the past these have been called extranets (read more about the differences between intranets and extranets), but most modern intranet software today will include way to bring your customers into the mix without giving control to your internal communications and collaboration.

Customers can open cases and post comments or concerns that relate to your products, all of which should be helpful in providing effective insight that can help you to determine whether or not you may need to make some changes. Plus, it allows you to take the time to personally help your clients and customers with any issues they may be facing, which is something that should never be overlooked.

9. Less IT Worries

There’s no getting around the fact that your business needs to have the assistance of technology on its side in order to thrive. When you attempt to come up with your own in-house approach, your IT department can quickly become overwhelmed. Allow this to occur, and the tasks that your staff should be working on will remain stagnant, perhaps for a longer period of time than is acceptable.

When you choose a reputable vendor to provide your business with intranet software, you can rest easy knowing that your IT department won’t have to worry about being on the front-line. Truly great vendors provide their clients with the utmost in customer service and IT support, which can make all the difference in the world when you’re on a time crunch and need things to run like a top. After all, there’s no better team of professionals to handle issues related to a piece of software than that which was behind its design and development.

10. Fast Identification of Experts and “Power Users”

For organizations that employ a large number of people, locating experts within your overall staff pool can be a tricky feat. Some managers don’t know their employees personally or well enough to determine who might be best suited to take on a specific project, even if they’ve been working together for a long time. It’s one of the biggest problems associated with large-sized businesses, and up until recently, remedying it has been next to impossible.

All of this has changed with social intranet software. Members of your organization each have their own personal profile, in which they can list their skills and expertise for the rest of the community to see. What this means, is that managerial staff can search for specific traits or skills that they need in an employee for a task or for assembling a project team, which brings them to a list of individuals that might serve as good candidates. When you have the right person spearheading a project, productivity is bound to increase, and finding them has never been easier.

11. Improved Workflow

“Workflow” is a word that can mean entirely different things to two different people. At its core, it typically refers to the ways in which you handle a specific project or task. Workflow can also be seen as how a day is run logistically, and the two concept usually go hand in hand with one another. One thing that everyone can agree on, however, is that an improved workflow leads to better productivity.

Because social intranet software makes communicating and sharing files with other members of your team so fast and easy, you can expect a dramatic increase in the quality of your workflow, as well as that of your employees. Hunting down emails, waiting for responses and digging through mountains of documents can all get in the way of productivity and workflow, and social intranet software helps to ensure that these frustrations don’t have to be a part of your day any longer.

In Conclusion

Focusing on productivity should always be viewed as essential. Even if things are going smoothly at the moment, implementing social intranet software can help to streamline productivity to a large degree in any business, which will only become more important as the future progresses.

Get started now, and you’ll be one step ahead of the curve.