If you're tired of writing e-mails to your employees in order to communicate with everyone, why not produce an intranet--a private, company-only Web site that can be your communications headquarters? An intranet is an internal company Web site, meant to be used by you and your company employees only-no outside visitors. It's your virtual private network.
You can either host it on your own internal server or, if you have employees in other locations, make it a browser-based intranet. Password-protect it and write the code to exclude robots so Google's crawler won't come and index your intranet into their Search Engine.
Productivity of your management team and employees increases simply because there's one place to go to get the latest and most accurate information. No more scattered documents or old e-mails to wade through. Simply log in with a password, go to the appropriate link and click on the category you need in your company archive. Search by category, department or keyword.
For instance, if your marketing department needs everyone's input on your next advertising campaign, the design team can post their creations to their department's section in your intranet. Posting documents online saves the cost of printing and mailing. Everyone can view and post their comments in a forum for all to read and post their comments, too.
This gives your people power. When everyone's opinion is allowed and in fact, encouraged, everyone feels more valued. When your people feel they are a valuable part of your company, their productivity will increase. Your company culture becomes collaborative and everyone is more willing to share ideas.
Be careful how you go about building your intranet. Just like a Web site, an intranet should have strategy laid out before any programming begins. Review what data is currently being passed, who needs it and why. Take time to interview people to get a clear picture of how information flows no--in the paper world--so that when you translate it to the digital world, the process is improved, rather than muddled.
Be sure to include "last updated" dates on pages so everyone knows how recent the data is. Make sure they know what's involved with posting the information. If they know what the process is, they'll be a little more patient if the process gets interrupted or interfered with.
Even though no one outside the company will see your intranet, it's important to design the look-and-feel to be appealing to your internal customers-your employees. Just like you make your office environment nice to work in, make your intranet nice to work in, too.
Just like the Internet has given easy and fast access to information for anyone with a connection, your company intranet can do the same for your employees. When your people have easy, quick access to vital company information, everyone feels they are truly a part of your organization and productivity goes up. More productivity means increased revenue.
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