How to turn a corporate portal into a working asset of the company

What a corporate portal is and why it is important

When building a holistic corporate ecosystem of IT solutions that works for results, it is impossible not to take care of the clear organization of the internal information network. After all, the management of corporate knowledge and internal communications is an integral part of the management of key business processes of any modern company.

Opportunities for creating a positive employee experience are increasingly considered as a “growth zone” for increasing the level of employee engagement and motivation, which, according to most researchers, has a direct impact on business success indicators.

Thus, GALLUP studies show that increasing engagement can boost staff productivity by 20-25%. And according to Deloitte research, every fifth employee, among whom there are most millennials, leaves their place of work due to the lack of a positive employee experience.

Given this, it is important to fundamentally rethink the very vision and understanding of the essence and objectives of internal communications and the corporate portal as their integral component. The intranet can no longer be just a “storage” of regulations, instructions, rules, descriptions of procedures and processes, and a whole range of other documents that the company produces daily. It should become a single digital communication environment for corporate communication and teamwork of personnel to improve the efficiency of each individual employee and the business.

A well-designed corporate portal provides quick access to documents, tools, and information that employees need to complete tasks. This saves time, minimizes stress associated with searching for data, and prevents the employees from being stuck in a routine with subsequent burnout.

However, this is not its only purpose. An intranet that works for the company provides employees with opportunities for professional growth through access to training resources, various courses, and upskilling programs, and simplifies the adaptation of newcomers.

It is also a platform for transparent and effective internal communication, providing an opportunity for each employee to be heard and for management to receive quality feedback.

By providing employees with the opportunity to interact, exchange ideas and participate in joint projects, intranet helps to develop a sense of community and team spirit and increases the level of loyalty and involvement in the company’s activities.

Basic requirements for a modern corporate portal

Considering the above, we will outline the main criteria for a solution that can provide a business with the deployment of a flexible portal that works for the company.

Of course, the first thing to remember when choosing a software product for organizing an internal information system is that its main task is to provide each employee of the company with quick and convenient access to corporate information in the amount necessary to complete the tasks.

The solution should also provide a set of simple and effective tools for managing this information, automating its creation, monitoring, processing (approval) and storage and organizing the employee collaboration. A modern corporate portal can become a key tool for automating HR processes.

There are multiple scenarios, such as vacation and business trip management, automation of personnel performance assessment processes, recruiting, onboarding, adaptation, training and advanced training, which can be digitalized. And this not only simplifies the work of HR specialists, but also provides employees with the best employee experience at all stages of their career.

At the same time, it is equally important for the corporate portal to become a unifying platform for building effective internal communication with unique opportunities for the team to collaborate, share knowledge and always stay on the same page. Regardless of whether the company has several hundred employees or tens of thousands; whether it is multinational or has offices all over the world.

What ROI is and why this indicator is important for evaluating corporate portals

However, for a business, implementing an Intranet, like any other IT solution, is first and foremost an investment. Therefore, the approach to determining its effectiveness is in the plane of its payback. Intranet ROI (Return on Investment) is an indicator that compares the cost of benefits for the company from the implementation and use of a corporate Intranet with the funds spent on it. It shows how effectively the implementation of an intranet affects such company performance indicators as increased employee productivity, improved communication or reduced operating costs.

However, this assessment is very complicated by the so-called soft benefits, such as employee engagement, loyalty and motivation levels, and improved conditions for collaborative work on projects. Their value to a company is often underestimated, since it is difficult for a business to select relevant metrics, which means that intranet itself is underestimated.

Some managers still, instead of perceiving it as an asset that significantly contributes to increasing the level of employee engagement and satisfaction and, as a result, increasing the company’s productivity and profits, regard it exclusively as an expense item. This means that they receive less income.

And yet, according to a GALLUP study, companies with a high level of employee engagement show 14% higher productivity than the industry average, have 10% higher customer ratings, 18% higher sales, 23% higher profitability, and 13% higher employee engagement in management processes.

Quantitative and qualitative assessment of the effectiveness of a company’s corporate portal

For the Intranet to truly become an asset that works for the company’s success, it is important to find a formula for assessing ROI that is relevant specifically to your business.

It is calculated as the difference between the expense part and the total assessment of benefits. Expenses are the funds spent on implementation, maintenance, staff training, a license (if any), and the cost of administration. Everything is simple here. But when calculating the benefits, it is important to answer the question: what tasks were you trying to solve by implementing intranet?

Is it saving time and money due to better content management? Improving internal communications? Were you looking for a knowledge management tool or a platform for improving corporate culture?

And each of these points can be translated into the monetary equivalent of real benefits. Let’s consider, for example, the most common scenarios for automating processes related to HR management:

• vacation and business trip management: employees submit a vacation request, which is automatically sent to a certain circle of responsible persons, and after their approval, the system automatically updates work schedules and sends a reminder to the HR employee,
• employee performance assessment: the portal generates a notification about the recommended time for the assessment and automatically sends it to employees and their managers. The tools for receiving feedback and reports integrated into the portal allow HR and management to see progress in real time,
• onboarding and adaptation: after adding new employees to the system, instructions, links to training courses, as well as materials and tasks are automatically sent to them. Managers and HR specialists receive a notification about the completion of each stage. The portal can also automatically create adaptation plans for newcomers, sending them materials on job descriptions or company policies,
• training and upskilling: the system can integrate an LMS (Learning Management System), which provides the process of training and upskilling in the company. In this case, information about the upcoming learning programs or courses can be posted on the corporate portal. Employees will not only be able to learn about this new activity from the site, but also enroll. Thus, those wishing, say, to improve their English, will not miss the start of the course.

Such automation of processes for various HR tasks reduces the costs of administering these processes, improves control over them and increases their overall efficiency, which, of course, has a monetary equivalent. Many other benefits are also obvious and have a specific cost.

However, if cost savings due to reduced costs for purchasing paper, reducing the number of calls and business trips or reducing the costs of subscriptions to professional tools or automation of communication processes and informing personnel are obvious, soft benefits require a clear understanding.

Key characteristics of a corporate portal and how to evaluate them

How can you evaluate whether your corporate portal is doing its job? The answer to this question lies in the strategic goals of the company and how they correspond with the capabilities of the solution you have chosen to deploy the corporate portal.

What is most important to you: interface and usability? Internal communications or teamwork capabilities? The way knowledge management is organized or the ability to introduce a corporate culture? Depending on the answer to these questions, you should select a pool of metrics that will provide a relevant assessment of the solution you have chosen. Let’s consider the main ones.

Simplicity and ease of administration, integration with other systems and the availability of effective analytics tools

These are the key requirements for a corporate portal as a solution that is part of the company’s integrated IT ecosystem. It is important to evaluate how intuitive the interface is for its administrators. If they can quickly set up access rights, manage content and users without involving technical support, this indicates that it meets the company’s requirements. Let’s consider the main metrics.

• Simplicity and ease of administration, which is mainly determined by the following parameters:

1. The time required to perform administrative tasks is one of the key quantitative indicators in this context. We are talking about typical tasks, such as adding new users, editing access, and updating content. Comparing this indicator before and after the implementation of the portal will allow you to evaluate its effectiveness.
2. Frequency of requests for technical support to IT department employees.

• The presence of high-quality analytical tools improves business manageability, allowing you to track various KPIs and receive insights into the effectiveness of the company. The assessment is carried out based on the following indicators:

1. Breadth and depth of analytical tools: the more metrics are available for analysis, the more useful the portal is for making decisions based on data. These can be, for example, reports on employee activity, resource use, integration with other systems or user feedback,
2. Ability to create personalized reports: managers and administrators should be able to create personalized reports, such as analytics by departments, projects, time spent on the portal, or individual sections,
3. Speed ​​of receiving analytical data, its convenience and clarity.

• Integration capabilities: modern corporate portals should provide the ability to easily integrate with other solutions, such as ERP and CRM systems and other business tools. Portal performance indicators in this context are as follows:

1. Number of integrated systems: the more tools are successfully integrated, the better the portal supports a single ecosystem,
2. Time and effort required to implement integration: the integration process should be fast and not require involving external contractors or additional complex technical solutions,
3. Integration stability: the platform should ensure uninterrupted operation of integrated solutions without frequent failures or conflicts.

Automation of business processes and optimization of the organizational structure

A corporate portal can help optimize the organizational structure, facilitating the management of work processes, integrating communications and automating many routine tasks. We are talking about the automation of document approval processes and information exchange between structural divisions. This indicator can be assessed in the context of reducing the time required for these procedures and reducing the share of manual document processing. In particular:

• implementation of the organizational structure in different configurations: the presence of built-in organograms and up-to-date lists of employees with their job responsibilities helps all employees understand who is responsible for what. The effectiveness of this function can be assessed by the speed of access to the necessary contacts and information and a decrease in the number of requests for clarification on the company structure.

  But this functionality is not only expressed in organizational structure optimization indicators. It also has a significant impact on staff engagement and is a significant tool for solving numerous team-building tasks. Because business is about the team,

• availability of tools for personnel management or integration with an existing HCM system. Thanks to them, the management sees how tasks are distributed and can quickly respond to the lack or excess of employees in certain departments. This characteristic can be assessed by the indicators of optimization of personnel use and reduction of downtime or overload of teams.

Usability

This characteristic shows how simple and intuitive the interface of the corporate portal is. To assess this parameter, you can use, for example, a user survey on the convenience of the interface, its nativeness and how quickly it allows them to complete assigned tasks. Such surveys should be introduced immediately after the implementation of the portal and conducted regularly.

Also quite informative is the analysis of user behavior using analytical tools. It is based on information about which functions are used most often, how long it takes to search for information and which pages or processes cause difficulties (for example, many erroneous clicks or frequent exits from pages).

Another method for assessing this parameter is testing with real users. It involves users with different levels of technical training to get a complete picture. A variation of this testing is the assessment of the time spent by new employees to master the basic functions of the portal.

Analysis of the number of employee requests to the technical support department regarding the search for documents is also an indirect indicator of the level of usability of the site.

In this context, attention should also be paid to the relevance of the content both in terms of compliance with the needs of the company (its strategic goals and current tasks), and its policies and regulatory documents.

This characteristic can be assessed by analyzing the frequency of editing, adding and updating materials in the main sections of the portal, while paying attention to the extent to which the publications and resources of the portal support the main business processes, changes in strategy, innovations and new products.

Possibilities for organizing effective internal communication

This parameter is assessed by the speed and accuracy of information transfer based on an analysis of the difference in the time of sending and receiving messages and the number of views of important messages on the portal.

Informative is an assessment of the quantity and quality of interactions between employees through the portal via built-in chats or forums for exchanging opinions and ideas. This aspect can be assessed by the number of communications on the platform, the frequency of discussions in internal chats and the quality of feedback.

The use of communication tools on the portal can be assessed using such indicators as the number of communication sessions, the level of employee activity in internal social networks and the number of employees regularly using the intranet for communication (tracked through the analytical capabilities of the portal).

And, of course, a good corporate portal should easily integrate with e-mail, calendars, messengers, and provide an easy way to organize video conferences.

Project collaboration capabilities

This characteristic is quite closely related to the previous one but differs in several specific aspects.

When assessing it, you should analyze how often employees use collaboration tools (various types of task managers) in their daily work. The indicator is the number of tasks or projects that two or more users have access to.

It is also important to evaluate how quickly and successfully these projects were completed (especially if employees from different departments were involved in their implementation). If this is relevant, you should evaluate how easy it is to integrate external project management tools (with which employees are accustomed to working) with the portal.

Here, it would also be useful to conduct regular surveys on how user-friendly collaboration tools are.

How knowledge management is implemented

The simplest metric for assessing this indicator is a quantitative assessment of the content (articles, documentation, training materials) added to the portal over a certain period.

However, what really matters here is how actively employees access internal knowledge bases to search for information. It can be measured by the statistics of search queries on the portal, document views, and the number of downloaded files. A good portal should provide employees with a convenient and quick search for the information they need.

The effectiveness of a search engine can be assessed by the number of successful search queries and how quickly employees find the necessary materials. The time spent searching for information is one of the critical characteristics of the portal’s effectiveness. It can be determined both through a user survey and by analyzing their behavior on the portal.

Employee activity level

This indicator is the most general indicator of the effectiveness of a corporate portal. Most of the criteria for its assessment are quantitative.

This is, in particular, the percentage of employees who regularly use the portal to perform their daily tasks. Built-in analytics allows you to track it by the number of visits to the system, portal logins during a selected period and interactions with content.

It is also important to analyze how much time employees actively spend on the portal (create documents, share information, comment on messages, view content, participate in surveys).

Analytics tools can show not only the number of active users, but also which sections are most visited, which tools employees use most often.

Other parameters can be assessed, too. For example, the number of comments and requests from management through the portal will help to assess its role in attracting employees to processes that are important for the company.

Such analysis visualizes the growth area of ​​the corporate portal and the business.

Forming a sense of employee importance for the company and increasing loyalty

A business’s success is always about a team. And the more efforts the company makes to ensure that each employee feels like a member of a single team, the higher the employee engagement and contribution of each of them to the success of the common cause.

Successful companies with a worldwide reputation actively use intranets as one of the tools for effective team building. It is from the corporate portal that the team learns about the achievements of their colleagues and their transfer to new positions, gets to know newcomers and learns about their successful completion of the probationary period. This is a platform where each person’s achievement becomes the team’s success.

In addition, a high-quality company website provides the opportunity for employees to share their expertise with colleagues by posting their developments in the relevant sections of the corporate Knowledge Base. Colleagues who use this information will see who created it, and this works to form a sense of their own importance for the team among employees.

Effectiveness of newcomer onboarding

A high-quality corporate portal can significantly facilitate the adaptation process of new employees thanks to automated training processes and their integration into the work environment.

One of the main indicators of the effectiveness of onboarding through a corporate portal is the time it takes new employees to go through all stages of adaptation, in particular, familiarization with the corporate culture, company policies and basic work processes.

It is advisable to place training programs and instructions for newcomers on the corporate portal. And the analysis of the percentage of completion of all onboarding stages is one of the indicators of the portal’s effectiveness.

The newcomer retention percentage is also important. If it is high, then we can assume that the portal performs this function and provides positive employee experience. To assess this indicator, it is informative to conduct a survey of new employees on their experience using the portal.

Thus, we see that the effectiveness of a corporate portal can be assessed using both quantitative and qualitative indicators.

This approach allows for a comprehensive analysis of the impact of intranet on corporate culture, employee adaptation and development processes and their ability to realize themselves and feel their value for the company through access to self-expression tools, participation in projects and involvement in transparent communication.

And all this is more than about profitability. It is about a team that can lead your company to success and ensure that it can stay on the crest of this success.

You can learn more about the capabilities of a modern solution for building a corporate portal using SmartPoint Intranet and all the product capabilities here.