Key Trends that Make Intranets Critical for Digital Workplaces

Key Trends that Make Intranets Critical for Digital Workplaces

We’re in the Age of the Customer, and the new expectation is that digital experiences should be seamless, smart, and personalized. Enhancing employee engagement and creating a compelling worker experience by delivering the right content, to the right person, on any device or channel is becoming a new business imperative. Thus, it probably comes as no surprise that the rise of the digital workplace has naturally put a new emphasis on the role of the intranet and the teams behind them.

Here’s three key trends being seen across the digital workplace landscape:

1) Intranets are becoming an essential anchor in the digital workforce

Some time ago the role of the intranet was often regarded as a “nice to have” rather than an essential element of employee engagement. The rise of the digital workforce has drastically changed this perception.

With employee engagement at the forefront of business priorities, the intranet has become an integral channel and gateway to the wider digital workplace. Next generation intranets are not merely a place to access HR policies and static resources, but instead a hub whereby employees can collaborate, innovate and get their jobs done more effectively.

2) Senior stakeholders are seeing the strategic importance of the intranet

The digital workplace encourages a more strategic view of technology, emphasizing its importance in digital transformation and employee engagement.With the intranet as a central part of the digital workplace, senior stakeholders are more likely to take the intranet seriously and see its true potential in helping organizations meet business strategic objectives.

3) Organizations are moving forward with the future of work

The rise of the digital workforce is creating a new generation of workers with vastly different expectations for their work life including technologies that break the traditional aspects of geographical, managerial and organizational structures.

Only organizations that adapt, meet employees where they are, and provide a digital hub of engagement will be able to survive in this digital economy.

Customer Spotlight: AstraZeneca

"Employee engagement is our number one priority and OrchestraCMS helps us achieve that. People really feel part of a global entity. It's made Salesforce come to life for us." - Philip Martucci, Global Intranet Project Lead

AstraZeneca is a global biopharmaceutical firm and spans the entire value chain of medicine from discovery, early- and late-stage development to manufacturing and distribution, and commercialization. One of the pillars of its success is to attract great people and provide a vibrant, collaborative work environment. This is no small challenge with AstraZeneca employing more than 65,000 people globally.

With OrchestraCMS, AstraZeneca is making global collaboration easy for its 65,000 employees across 30 countries; delivering personalized, multi-lingual content with an intuitive publishing model for its 275 content owners — independent of IT.

SolutionPowered by OrchestraCMS, AstraZeneca’s “Nucleus” is where employees from across the globe come together to share content and collaborate more socially. Employees now access a single intranet, from any device, where content is targeted, dynamic and personal. Instead of separate portals for each language, content is served in ten languages, driven by the profile preferences set up by users.

Nucleus is an intranet but functions more like a news site or social media outlet with frequent updates and with OrchestraCMS enabled Chatter, employees can like, share or comment on articles. Nucleus also has 275 content contributors who create, manage and publish content independently of IT.

Result?

An engaged employee community that serves 65,000 employees in 10 different languages

A mobile-first design that allows users to subscribe and manage content preferences

Employees like, comment and share with Salesforce Chatter enabled content

Salesforce Workflows provide 275 content contributors to publish approved content independently of IT

You can read the full AstraZeneca story here or download the PDF case study.

Conclusion

We’re in the Age of the Customer, and the new expectation is that digital experiences should be seamless, smart, and personalized. Enhancing employee engagement and creating an compelling worker experience by delivering the right content, to the right person, on any device or channel is becoming a new business imperative.

Fortunately, we’ve worked with organizations like yours to create seamless, omnichannel experiences from one unified digital experience platform, built 100% native on the world’s leading customer success platform — Salesforce.