Hybrid work is here to stay, and it’s causing organizations to reevaluate how they structure their teams.
In fact, Gartner predicts that 30% of corporate teams will be without a boss due to the agile and hybrid nature of work by 2024.
With agile adoption at 30% and hybrid work at 50% of an organization, about one-third of teams can operate without a traditional manager role. The pandemic has driven increased need for organizational resilience, driving more embedded agility within businesses. By definition, agile requires an environment of trust that doesn’t lend itself to traditional hierarchies. The increase in hybrid workforces reveals that a large portion of managers lack the skill set necessary to manage employees in remote or hybrid situations, and only 47% percent of employees believe that their manager can lead the team to success in the future.
As traditional hierarchies potentially fall by the wayside, what will be more important than ever to keep the workforce updated and informed is strong internal communication and ensuring teams are fostering the right level of community and cultural experiences. With that, having powerful tools to make that communication seamless, efficient and meaningful is a must.
How to unlock the power of your intranet
A key part of building the right community and cultural experiences are company intranets.
Beyond keeping employees up to speed and informed about everything within the company, the right intranet can provide greater personalization and foster closer human connection. And as more and more teams consider shifting to more fluid organizational structures, they will need to ramp up internal communications.
There are a few specific intranet features that support organizations in 1) delivering the right content at the right time to their employees, 2) mitigating task and information overload, and 3) creating effective communication channels that foster collaboration.
How to use your intranet to improve content delivery
Hearing and understanding people’s stories is at the core of what builds company culture and ultimately connects us to one another.The Brightspot solution provides a variety of different content types for storytelling, including articles, live blogs, employee profiles and directory pages for different collections of content.
User-generated content capabilities mean more employees’ voices can be heard through content where readers have the ability to create and share directly with peers. Further, affinity settings ensure employees enjoy an intranet experience that's personalized to both their professional and personal interests, increasing the likelihood that this is where they will start and end each workday for the most up-to-date, relevant and actionable information.
Brightspot intranet features to support effective content delivery:
- Company and employee shoutouts to celebrate success and acknowledge and applaud colleagues' individual achievements and accomplishments.
- Build, publish and manage dedicated project pages to showcase company-wide project success and provide a single source of internal truth around historic and ongoing project delivery.
- Powerful search tools to organize directories around content types like people, projects, events, office locations, documents and more.
- Employee profile settings to let individual employees curate the information that is most relevant to their interests, job responsibilities and team goals.
How to use your intranet to improve employee task management
People care about and should have visibility into everything from important organizational policy updates and project action items to colleagues’ birthdays, all from one place.
The Brightspot intranet solution provides meaningful integrations so businesses can connect their community and culture experiences to the tools that employees are already using, thereby improving engagement while reduce context switching.
The platform is partner-agnostic, meaning everything from authentication managers to corporate calendars and time-tracking tools are easily integrated into one place. It also houses important tasks and alerts so employees can always stay up to date on what they owe and the latest status of projects.
Brightspot intranet features to support better task management:
- Integrate with project-management tools like Atlassian Jira directly on a user's intranet login page to highlight project status and tasks requiring immediate action.
- Create actionable notifications and alerts for time-sensitive requests like company town hall Q&A requests, year-end healthcare elections or weekly timecard submissions.
- Drive more meaningful employee engagement by incenting and rewarding behaviors like completing onboarding tasks, achieving profile completeness and actively participating in virtual (and in-person) events.
How to use your intranet to serve as an effective communications hub
The modern company intranet serves as a bridge between all levels of an organization. This is especially important if organizations start to operate without traditional manager roles, so that everyone—regardless of title—can collaborate and communicate freely in order to foster transparency and close the feedback loop.With the Brightspot solution, you can create employee profiles to help put faces to names, making remote onboarding easier and people more accessible across the organization. Foster deeper connections with the ability to comment directly on content and share feedback. There are also defined modules to help deliver content to specific groups based on their geographical location or team within the company.
Dynamic publishing tools in the CMS and on-page modules ensure that organizations can take a newsroom approach for communicating the company's most recent and relevant information.
Brightspot intranet features to support better internal and stakeholder communication:
- Reduce context switching with centralized communication around important events like company town halls, earnings calls and leadership updates.
- From individual employees to teams to projects, enable effective content discovery across an organization's entire ecosystem while providing a single source of truth that can persist beyond employee or project tenure and ensure institutional resiliency.
As organizations reevaluate how they structure their teams, they should reevaluate their current intranet capabilities as well. Internal communication and connectedness will be more important than ever, and with the right intranet, this is all possible.
Reach out today to schedule a demo and learn more about Brightspot’s intranet capabilities.
