In today’s competitive commercial environment, organisations across the globe understand the importance of hiring, developing and retaining the talent within their organisation. As CEOs and HR directors grapple with this challenge, they are increasingly investing in modern intranets to create positive employee experiences that streamline workflows and increase productivity and autonomy in their workforce.

By using a modern intranet, companies can now connect better with their employees through a digital environment that is personalised to the individual users’ needs. In addition to streamlining workforce-related communications to make internal collaboration more effective, forward-thinking organisations are unifying disparate systems and integrating other third party tools into their intranet to create a holistic employee experience.

When this capability is then augmented with the power of analytics, it further enhances the ability of the organisation to deliver relevant and personalised access to information and experiences that achieve a highly valued employee experience. Therefore, when an organisation is considering their intranet requirements, they should give equal weighting to the ability to leverage analytics within the platform to create a truly all-round digital employee experience.

With the use of analytics within their intranet, an organisation is capable of developing a digital workforce that is more engaged and productive. Beyond providing a feel good factor, a more engaged workforce drives real business value and a return on investment for organisations. According to a study by Gallup, highly engaged employees are 17% more productive and highly engaged business units can see up to a 59% decrease in employee absenteeism. (Source)

Applying Analytics To A Modern Intranet

By applying analytics to a modern intranet, an organisation is able to get real-time, company-specific insights to help them grow and improve the employee experience. This iterative process allows an organisation to continually refine their intranet experience and the content and services that are made available to their employees.

Understanding the impact of employee engagement with content and the third party tools or services made available within the intranet is the foundation of calculating the return on investment from a modern digital workplace initiative. Not only can analytics help inform the decision process of internal communications teams, but it can track and monitor engagement with third party tools and services made available to employees allowing an organisation to make informed decisions on whether to continue to invest or reallocate funds to other initiatives.

For Human Resource Directors, having the ability to tie a return on investment to your intranet is critical as it allows them to articulate the real business value that is achieved through increasing productivity, driving down employee turnover and reducing time lost to searching for content or thought leaders within an organisation.

To reduce the burden on CxOs, VPs, managers, and other senior management leaders tasked with tracking and monitoring KPIs associated with an intranet initiative, analytics must be easily consumed and readily available. Dashboards and reports in turn allow business leaders to gain actionable insights into employee behaviours that can help:

• Improve employee engagement by understanding employees’ preferences and personalising access to content and services
• Increase productivity by decreasing the time to find critical information across the organisation
• Improve user adoption by measuring and tracking company-specific trends and then iterating on and improving the employee experience in line with these findings
• Make more data-backed decisions when curating intranet content
• Deliver strategic internal communication to employees to align your workforce in a targeted manner
• Increase collaboration and knowledge management processes

Why You Should Measure The Value Of An Intranet With Analytics

We have briefly mentioned the importance of Human Resource Directors having the ability to articulate the business value of an intranet to the organisation. However, to expand on this point, for many organisations implementing the right intranet platform, collecting valuable insights is a challenge that is not easily understood due to the traditional reliance on IT to facilitate and manage these environments.

In a modern intranet experience, consideration must be given to the ability of Human Resource teams, and even employees across the organisation, to easily create, manage and share content without the need to engage IT. By empowering employees to be actively involved with the intranet, knowledge sharing and collaboration, more value can be obtained and shared across the organisation. But facilitating this process in and of itself is not enough, analytics provides the missing piece of the puzzle that helps guide the ongoing success of your intranet strategy.

By measuring the effectiveness or value of your intranet, your organisation will be in a position to:

• Enhance personalisation by leveraging the insights provided through analytics to create and provide more relevant information and services
• Make informed decisions based on the insights you gather and the analytics you've implemented, rather than rely on gut feel or misguided intuition
• Ensure the intranet is working for your employees and leveraging the feedback provided by analytics to iterate on the content, tools and services provided to staff
• Develop factual business case advancements that reflect optimal ROI
• Drive a solid culture of innovation that enhances the adoption of your intranet
• Gain a profound understanding of your organisation's operations by incorporating analytics into workflows and critical business functions

Leveraging Analytics Insights From Your Intranet

Gaining insight from analytics is only the start of the process. An organisation that has invested in analytics should also understand the importance of taking those analytical insights and applying them into improved processes and programs.

With analytics, organisations can now leverage insights from their intranet and employee engagement to improve organisational performance across the board. Acting on data empowers managers to make more informed business decisions impacting the company’s culture, processes, and investment in people and technology.

Here are some of the ways you can leverage the insights gained from an intranet solution enhanced with analytics.

1. Create a clear, single employee view

The information you gather and analyse through analytics will help you get a clearer understanding of your employees' profiles, behavioural patterns, and interaction with content and services.

This feedback can then be utilised to optimise the employee experience at different stages of one's career within the organisation. For example, with appropriate insight an organisation could optimise the employee onboarding process, reducing the time it takes for employees to learn about a company’s internal tools, policies and services. 

2. Segment and understand critical data

Taking advantage of the information you gather from various employee touchpoints can be complicated if you don't have the right analytics tool. However, with a natively integrated analytics tool, you can segment and envision the data you collect from all these touchpoints to identify trends that you would otherwise miss.

For example, a sales organisation may identify that content around a particular industry vertical or solution they offer does not get as much engagement as other content. This could provoke a conversation with sales teams that could uncover additional insight they are hearing from prospects and customers on the ground, ultimately helping shift or improve the way a company goes after a particular market.

3. Reduce lost productivity and duplication of effort

By combining analytics with personalisation, you increase your organisation’s ability to understand the true interests of your employee base. Surfacing content in this way reduces time lost by employees searching for information that is relevant to them.

A centralised and modern intranet also reduces the opportunity for duplication of effort. With robust search functionality, a modern intranet makes it easy to surface content and insight to your employees in one central system. This contrasts to the situation in many organisations today where employees often have to navigate multiple systems to see if what they are looking for already exists.

4. Create more engaging content

Not all marketing messages or social media conversations you invest in will be engaging or converting! Therefore, internal content and communication teams should employ intranet analytics when trying to identify the best performing content ideas at the content ideation phase. Just like a customer facing organisation is trying to figure out what content converts best, the same needs to be done within an organisation.

Ensuring that internal communications teams have the ability to create relevant and engaging content can aid in promoting the workplace culture, making sure employees are aware of the policies, procedures and services available to them and assist individual departments such as sales or product management in highlighting the value of the products and services your organisation sells.

Delivering A Modern Intranet Experience With Analytics

Delivering a modern intranet experience requires a platform that can facilitate an organisation's internal communications, knowledge sharing and collaboration, while having the flexibility to integrate with third party applications and systems to create a truly unified employee experience.

As a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms, Liferay specialises in Business to Employee (B2E) and Business to Business (B2B) experiences, including the provision of modern intranets and digital workplace experiences. By leveraging Liferay DXP’s out of the box functionality, tier one brands across the globe achieve a faster time to market and lower total cost of ownership without limiting their ability to extend or customise their intranets functionality if required.

Liferay’s Digital Experience Platform natively integrates with Liferay Analytics Cloud, allowing you to surface insights gained from employee engagement with your intranet and the documents, media and services provided within it, without the need for custom tags or complex integration.

Want to learn more? See how companies like Domino's, Coach and Aptiv are benefiting from a modern internet solution.