The end of the year brings time to celebrate success and reflect on events. The beginning of the year is a great time to then build off your success and start planning for the new year. Below we review a few ideas for your intranet in 2019 and beyond!
Experiment
There may be a few Noodle features you have not explored or used yet in your site. Maybe you have your own document management tool, so you haven’t explored the possibility with Noodle Folders. Or, if you find yourself answer many questions that others may find useful, try the Questions application. If your Blogs are mainly used for sharing Company News, encourage more blogging by your employees, or give a team their own “Facebook style” wall and status feed.
Another way to incorporate even more new and fun content to your site, is using website widgets. These can be added to the text editor inside of Announcement Widgets, Blogs, Pages and more by using the “Source” view. This will allow you to dynamically offer fun things like Picture or Joke of the Day. Tools for things like weather, stock tickers or world clock. Or you can also embed scripts or widgets of Social Media and RSS feeds.
Experimenting with different tools, in Noodle, helps you get the most value out of your intranet site and promotes more engagement and interactivity from your users.
Set Year-end Goals
The start of a new year is also a good time to set out new goals for your intranet. You can break these down monthly/quarterly, but you should have a clear picture of where you want your intranet to be at years end. You can set targets such as:
- Increase overall employee engagement by 25%
- At least one or two blog posts by management, per month
- Increase average logins per user
- Build new page for Social Committee and update past events
Pre-Plan seasonal designs
Seasonal designs are certainly not necessary. But they do have the power to easily keep your intranet fresh and current and bring a celebratory mood to your employees. Setting a new banner and color scheme, based on the season or an upcoming holiday, is a quick way to show that their intranet is advancing with them.
By setting a schedule and choosing background and images ahead of time, it’s much easier for your administrators to update the theme of the site.
Improve Search/Organization
Are some Pages or Folders buried inside of other sub-content? Do teams or departments properly have their own space for their own content? This is a good time to review your structure and organization of your applications and content. Taking employee suggestions or creating polls will help you get feedback about how people feel about the structure and how it may be able to be improved.
At the same time, you may want to explore using Tags or Keywords. Above we talked about some features of Noodle you may not have explored, Tags are a powerful, easy to use way to categorize content. The value of Tags are sometimes overlooked and can be a great way to pin popular content to your main pages. Keywords can also help retrieve the most relevant search results, rather than relying on the Title of the content, or using Full-Text search.
Foster New Content Creators
If your employees have been using your intranet for at least a year, it may be a good time to encourage more content from the end-users. This could involve allowing more to post blogs (as we mentioned above) or start discussions, group chats, share photos or helpful videos and much more. This helps drive more fresh content to your site, and promotes better communication and team work amongst employees.
You can also encourage them to use their Profiles to store their own documents and events in Calendar. They can also share information about themselves, as well as follow other user’s profiles.
Remember you can always control what each group or user can see, and who is allowed to post or make changes. Auto-Notifications can also be set up if you want an admin to receive updates of employee created content.
If you would like some help implementing any of these ideas, please contact us for more assistance. If you are not using Noodle yet, sign up for a demonstration now and receive a free 30-day trial of Noodle Intranet.