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Breaking down Silos by pursuing Responsive Design for Your In-house Platform

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Jack Dawson

Resonsive Design
Resonsive Design
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In today's corporate environment, it is becoming increasingly evident that work culture and internal brand love is related with the technological advancements pursued in the implementation of internal communication platforms. Employees love companies that listen to them and also allow them to express their opinions. Companies that appreciate their contribution and treat them as an important stakeholder that defines its success are highly appreciated.

Perhaps you can consider the following scenario:

Albert is a manager in Company A that largely adopts a brick and mortar environment of communication -- the more traditional kind of tools that drive office productivity like email, shared Local Area Network and USB sticks. Albert has a tendency of arriving at the office very early in the morning at around 6:00am. The reason being that this is the only chance he gets to read and respond to his emails.

Since Albert is a manager, he spends primarily the rest of his day attending back-to-back meetings that generally take about two to four hours. Worse off if it is a top management meeting, which are held on a monthly basis, they usually begin at 8am and end at 3pm. Before Albert can get anything done he has to spend another four hours after work hours to handle any critical assignment that needs his attention.

When approached by the Digital project team who are conducting an assessment of the company's platforms, Albert confessed that he never knew that an intranet existed. And this was the same case as a great number of staff who works in company A.

The typical working culture in Company A is characteristic of staff, especially managerial, attending day-long meetings. In a case of a business process which interfaces with another department, people usually prefer making personal visits for consultations and clarifications. Hard copy memos are the order of the day flying from one office to another in registers.

The corporate email is utilized for disseminating on any kind of information that needs to be passed on to the employees. Furthermore, there are no feedback channels where staff can share their views. The intranet is majorly for posting information and sharing company policies.

So how do people behave in Company A? Generally, people heavily rely on the grapevine for information compared to the official channels. There is a lot of mistrust towards the management. As at the end of the previous year, 33% percent of the staff population was leaving company A. Distinctively, there is no synergy even between the customer facing touch points. People exist in silos and are only knowledgeable of their specific operational area. It has also been observed that each department has its own culture and way of doing things. People are also quite territorial!

How then can Company A begin to sort out the issues it is facing internally? Well, the first consideration is embracing technological advances in establishing platforms that can be utilized to engage staff and create a desirable working culture that enhances productivity. Company A should consider contracting a web design firm specializing in web and mobile, including responsive design, to implement an Intranet that has social and collaborative tools that can be utilized to enhance employee engagement and improve productivity.

As an executive concerned about the welfare of staff and performance of the company, it is high time that you consider the power of revamping the internal communication platforms to address some of the in-house challenges arising from a traditional set up. The notion of responsive design, creating a more user friendly and interactive Intranet can help to address the following challenges that Company A faces in the following ways:

  1. The top management will be able to connect with staff by conveying the mission and vision in a unified manner through a customized platform that conveys the brand.

  2. Timely delivery of messages by the executive that would otherwise get lost in the clutter of emails that staff receives. This means that, staffs are instantly updated and aware of what is going on within the organization. They do not have to heavily rely on the grape vine where one cannot confirm the validity of information. An intranet platform is the most ideal to reinforce this.

  3. Intranets are very powerful tools that can be utilized to connect with staff in an organization. When you consider the web design and development capabilities such as segmentation of users, creation of collaborative tools -- chats, video conferencing; these are fascinating aspects that can be introduced in a traditional set up to begin to institute a facilitative communication environment.

    Staff will start to feel that their opinions and contributions matter, especially if it is reflected in the thinking and decision-making of the top management. This is a good start to establishing brand loyalty and utilizing technology to drive the corporate strategy through employee engagement.
  1. In case you are part of a company that has branches spread out and facing the challenge of getting all staff to move in the same direction and own the vision of the company, then you urgently need to consider enhancing your Intranet to bridge the distance arising from geographical dispersion. An Intranet that's responsive gets people to collaborate and work cross-functionally regardless of distance and time. People begin to trust each other within the organization and do not have to resort to micro-managing as a measure of ensuring accountability.

  2. How about documentation? You can get tired of all that paperwork and piles of memos, letters and proposals stacked on employees' throughout the organization. It is an ugly site to bear. An ideal and well-designed Intranet gives you the option to organize, access, retrieve, publish, manipulate and version-control your documents all in one location.
Finally, an enhancement of productivity can be achieved through intranet software. This means no more spending long hours in meetings giving you time to attend to your assignments and maintain a healthy work-life balance. No more late nights!
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Jack Dawson is a web developer and UI/UX specialist at BigDropInc.com. He works at a design, branding and marketing firm, having founded the same firm 9 years ago. He likes to share knowledge and points of view with other developers and (more...)
 

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