Modern Intranets.
To many organisations an Intranet is merely a repository for documents and some kind of informative web interface where news can be published.
This thinking unfortunately limits how modern Intranets are being designed for the future. Despite having access to interactive tools such as comments, mentions or blogs, the teams have not realised that the modern Intranet is an incredibly powerful tool. Often there will be a decree that emanates from the IT or Financial Manager that employees will not be given their own profiles because they will waste all their time socialising. In the meantime, our employees; Knowledge workers derive much of their satisfaction from being part of a group. This enhances their productivity and commitment.
Employee Profiles
When we profile employees, we bring additional abilities to the system and enhance the value of each knowledge worker.
Employee profiling consists of attaching data to an employee profile which could include name, department, contact details, skills, experience etc. depending on your organisational strategy.
We strongly encourage that you provide a template of what will be useful on the employees’ profiles and get buy-in from letting them complete their own profiles.
These profiles then enhance the user experience of the Intranet because we can use the variables to enhance the search functionality based on where they fit in the organisation, facilitate adoption or improve collaboration by matching experiences, increase Knowledge and Change Management or improve project success rates by identifying skill sets from elsewhere in the organisation.
For example, if you are looking to a senior Microsoft developer for a project in the Telecoms industry in Gauteng, you can enter these variables into your search to find the employee who best fits your requirements, even if they are in another department, or have relocated to a different province.
Assuming your employees’ profiles are a nice-to-have is very short sighted, employee profiling is critical to the future of your organisation.
