A modern and functional internal comms platform is essential for employee engagement, it’s no longer a ‘nice-to-have’.
We’re not just saying that because we love intranets. In fact, the UK Government requires that all companies with more than 250 UK employees must include a statement in the directors report detailing how directors have engaged with employees, taken account of their interests and the impact on the organisation.
So, aside from the regulatory requirement, how can you prove to senior stakeholders that an intranet will have a positive impact on ROI? This article provides facts on intranet ROI and will help internal comms professionals to pull together a strong intranet business case.
Creating your intranet business case
In our State of IC report, the most commonly reported blockers for internal communications were:
- Lack of awareness about the value of internal comms at executive level
- Technology not being fit for purpose
Even more shocking is that disengaged employees are costing the UK economy £257bn, and the global economy a whopping $8.9 trillion every year.
The failure of tech being fit for purpose is extremely significant, even more so in the age of remote and hybrid working environments where a functioning digital workplace hub is more important than ever.
These two factors lay the foundations for your intranet business case. Beyond the necessity to address these blockers, if you are pushing to implement a shiny new intranet platform, your senior stakeholders will want to know the impact it will have, and whether there is any link between employee engagement and ROI.
Our change report found that nearly half (43%) of employees agreed their business is not prepared to effectively manage change. One of the key benefits of an intranet is that it can be very well utilised to educate, inform and guide colleagues through processes of change, as well as becoming part of the change by bringing in new technology that is fit for purpose for modern working environments.
Tech as part of your digital workplace strategy
It is key to remember that tech can only take you so far. For true internal comms and engagement success, you’ll need clear objectives, a strategy and tactics to facilitate it.
A great example of this is a charity fundraising campaign that ScS documented on their intranet to sustain engagement throughout. Their ‘Walk for Hearts’ campaign had the highest number of sign ups to their annual team walking challenge to date, with over 400 staff taking part in a virtual expedition, covering 40,150 miles to raise money for the British Heart Foundation. Sign-ups increased an impressive 88% since 2022, clearly highlighting the success of the Oak platform to increase reach of an already successful campaign.
The campaign began with a countdown for sign-ups and an integrated JustGiving donation link on their homepage. A milestones applet enabled colleagues to track where participants were on their virtual journey through landmarks across the world. Throughout the challenge, they shared news articles and updates on their journey with push notifications to update colleagues on their progress. Every milestone was marked with a virtual postcard on their intranet social feed, with participants sharing photos from their activities or Strava stats to keep one another motivated throughout the month-long challenge.
This is an excellent example of how all features of an intranet can unite to elevate any kind of internal campaign. From multiple media to different touchpoints, employee involvement and regular updates, this campaign had it all, connecting the whole team while keeping them engaged on their intranet.
Benefits of an intranet that provide return on investment
1. Retention
Replacing people is expensive. The typical cost for back-filling a role can be up to 70% of the annual salary. Reducing turnover slashes recruitment costs and minimises the risk of knowledge loss from experienced people leaving.
This is the first area in which employee engagement ROI comes into play. A modern intranet platform creates a culture that fosters employee engagement and appreciation, offers training resources and ensures easy access to vital tools and information, increasing employee satisfaction.
Our state of IC report found that 46% of communicators believe that poor internal communications leads to staff attrition.
By overhauling your internal comms processes, strategy and platforms for delivering these comms, your people will be more engaged and feel part of the bigger picture, therefore feeling more driven to perform and work towards shared goals of their team and the company.
Digital natives have high expectations for workforce tech. With Gen Z and Millennials expected to make up almost 60% of the global workforce by 2030, organisations of all sizes need to adapt, catering to how digital natives work and communicate.
Throughout the employee journey, from onboarding to having access to all job-related information at their fingertips, as well as learning and development opportunities, each tech touchpoint helps to build a positive picture of the employer.
2. Productivity
In our recent reports, declining productivity and employee reluctance to go ‘above and beyond’ were key indicators of comms problems. 19% of people were stressed from overworking, not helped by the fact that up to 9.3 hours of an employee’s working week can be wasted just finding the resources to be able to do their jobs.
Another contributing factor is the recently coined term ‘quiet quitting’, which has a three pronged impact of reduced productivity, reduced efficiency and reduced quality of work. Disengaged workers are reported to make up to 60% more errors and the cost of quiet quitting can be almost as much as the cost of people actually leaving.
All of these factors can impact colleague, supplier and customer relationships which can have a direct impact on revenue when things go wrong.
So, how do we prove intranet ROI against productivity?
Modernising business processes to make it easier for people to do their jobs and get important messages to your people quickly, is of paramount importance. How can you expect your people to stay up to date with resources, documents, emails and more when there are multiple versions across multiple platforms? Consolidating everything into one trusted source of information will massively improve the employee experience and streamline your onboarding process, which can improve productivity by 70%.
By making a conscious effort to improve morale through social and community initiatives and connecting people with similar interests no matter where they are based, employers can help to reignite a spark in their people. This provides opportunities to engage with colleagues on non-work related matters and build good working relationships. The topic of intranet ROI comes into play here, as we can empower our people to build connections using social features and hubs for hobbies, interests and affinity groups.
3. Security
Another key benefit of an intranet is the security that it can bring for even your most sensitive documents with controlled, role-based access to data that intranet managers can set.
Organisations across a wide range of industries house sensitive data on employees and customers and need to remain compliant. This makes them prime targets for breaches which can result in hefty penalties and reputational damage. The average cost of a data breach for a business is £3.4 million, therefore protecting against this internally provides intranet ROI in itself.
Ensure that your people only have access to the areas of your intranet that they will use, keeping sensitive information for specific eyes only. Have confidence that the right people are logging in with a secure Single Sign-On.
Oak has built a robust security framework to meet the specific needs of our customers. Our ISO 27001 and Cyber Essentials Plus certifications demonstrate our ongoing commitment to implementing the highest standards of information security.
4. Decision making
Don’t make decisions based on whispers. With complete analytics of most-searched queries or most-used resources, you can identify areas of focus, whether these are to be addressed by HR, comms teams, leadership or IT.
House your employee satisfaction surveys within your intranet. This saves on the costs of using external providers, but also saves time with an extremely easy to build survey feature that you can tailor to get the actionable insights you need to improve your internal comms, initiatives or employee engagement. By seeking out specific results, your senior stakeholders can have clear insights that can back up future decisions that will impact your people. Investing time and money into providing what your people actually like, want or need, not what you assume they might, will pay off in employee engagement ROI.
5. Operational efficiency
To identify any hurdles or roadblocks with current practices or platforms, consider doing an audit of your existing comms or employee journey mapping to identify pain points through the whole cycle from recruitment to exit. You can pair these pain points with solid statistics on recruitment and retention from your HR team to back up your intranet business case.
With everything stored in one easy-to-navigate digital workplace hub, you can centralise all communications, documents and resources for your people, enabling them to find everything they need with ease. By embedding HR and IT support within your intranet with a useful ticketing system, you can help your people stay on top of queries efficiently and securely. Sevita’s ‘I have a question’ page has saved managers countless hours with their single location to ask HR and IT questions when they can’t find the answer elsewhere on the intranet.
6. Reduced costs
Maintaining multiple systems and software solutions is expensive and challenging to manage. Modern platforms can provide immediate intranet ROI results because they can integrate everything you need, reducing spend on licences for duplicate systems or updating legacy platforms.
Modern intranets are intuitive and easy for internal comms teams to use, enabling reduced developer workload and empowering individuals throughout the business to update their dedicated areas of the site.
The modern intranet’s business case
There is clearly more to internal communications than company-wide updates from the top down. By establishing a single trusted platform for internal comms, you can build trust that will encourage your people to pay attention.Enable colleagues to learn more about each other, celebrate, communicate and collaborate with people throughout the organisation, not just those in their team.
By giving your people a reason to visit your digital workplace hub, you bring them together. Empower your employees to become a community of engaged, positive thinking, driven individuals who will continue to add value to your business and drive better outputs.
You can’t expect them to do it off their own back; an intranet platform is essential in facilitating this. Invest in your people and help to simplify processes with the support of employee-focused tech and you will not only see your intranet ROI continue to climb, but you might even find out more about your people, your branches and what makes your employees so great at what they do.
We have helped big brands such as Burger King, ScS and NatWest Group to improve employee communication and the ROI is clear in their success. Ready to get buy-in from senior leaders? We’re happy to show you what we can do.
Click below to reach out for a free demo by our expert team and we will be in touch to arrange this with you.