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Bet Ya Didn’t Know We Build Intranet Sites to Solve Your Internal Communications Problems

The next stop in our series of blog posts on Cross & Crown services we “Bet Ya Didn’t Know” we offer is company intranet sites or employee portals. These web-based, password-protected websites are often used to keep employees or organization members connected with important internal messages. However, in some spaces intranet sites are losing their clout as mismanaged information and poorly executed processes leave many intranets sites a virtual ghost town. 

While some speculate that intranets have outlasted their shelf life, we think that intranet sites done right can be a powerful tool in the corporate toolbox. We build custom intranet or portal sites for businesses and nonprofits. Over the years, we’ve seen our clients experience great success using this tech to communicate effectively with their people.

Some benefits of intranet sites include:

• Immersing teams in organizational culture
• Engaging employees in the mission and vision of the company
• Easing organizational communication burdens
• Boosting workflow and output 
• Keeping important messages from falling off of people’s radar

A key differentiator for the intranet sites we build is that they are fully customizable to mirror the client’s in-real-life culture, fully responsive and completely functional on smartphones and tablets, and secure through password-protected access from anywhere with an internet connection. Cross & Crown custom intranet sites are designed to give your teams a collaborative space to work together, share files and documents, get answers to frequently asked questions, and strengthen corporate culture. 

Here are two examples of clients who are using intranet sites with great success.  

North American Properties 

Headquartered in Cincinnati, with offices in Atlanta, Dallas and Fort Myers, North American Properties has developed 22 million square feet of commercial space and 19,000 residential units in 15 states and 67 cities. They came to us for help keeping their employees connected and well-informed across multiple functions and job types. Off-the-shelf solutions weren’t fitting the bill and they didn’t want to waste their people’s time on a site that could cause frustration. So we worked together to create an intranet site that turned out to be a perfect fit. 

We started with a day-long discovery meeting where our team met with executives and department heads to capture the individual needs and anticipated outcomes of the intranet site. Then we created unique employee personas to capture the diversity and varying roles of staff and project how they would likely interact with the intranet site content. These exercises helped us understand the people who would actually be using the intranet site and ensure that our solution would make sense to the end user. 

One of the most helpful features of the intranet sites we build is the ability for users to customize their experience and select which kinds of news they want to see first. This keeps the content both current and easy to navigate for the user. Further, menu options such as an employee directory, human resources, marketing, and new hires give employees access to the content they need to perform their work with excellence. 

Menno Haven Residential Portal 

Menno Haven is a retirement community in south central Pennsylvania serving residents in three campuses. This example is a bit different from the traditional corporate intranet because Menno Haven was looking for an effective way to communicate with their residents. They needed a central location for important information such as news and events, current menus, maintenance requests, and general community announcements.  

Menno Haven is a long-time client of ours, so we worked together seamlessly to build an intranet portal that is password-protected and easily accessed by the community they serve. In this case, there were several third-party apps that we leveraged to help the community function smoothly. For example, a resident can log into the portal to submit a maintenance request that is sent directly to the ticketing system Menno Haven uses to manage this process. 

Residents have enjoyed easy access to the information they need. One feature that has uniquely benefited residents is the employee directory as this functionality helps users easily put faces with names and identify staff members they may have not yet met in person. As with the corporate intranet sites we create, the Menno Haven portal included the ability to customize content and sort activities based on resident type, from independent living to managed care. 

Is an Intranet Site Right For Your Business? 

When populated with current and useful information that people need to get work done, intranet sites can become the go-to destination for organizational communications. Businesses often don’t have a central place for their staff to find information and rely on sites like Dropbox or Google Docs to share important documents but these sites offer little to no functionality for communications and can’t help build a corporate culture. Creating a custom site for your people is worth the investment because you’ll get exactly what you want, built on a robust platform with a clean layout that is easy to navigate and sort based on the user’s preferences. Furthermore, we can help you create roll-out strategies that encourage your people to adopt and assimilate the new site into their own day-to-day workflows and processes. 

We would love to meet with you to learn more about your company and discover how an intranet site could be the solution you’ve been missing in your internal communications strategy. Drop us a line and we can get started today. No matter your organization function or size, I know we can find ways to make work-life run smoother with a custom-built intranet site that makes sense for your people.