What is an Employee Intranet? UPDATED 2024 – A Complete Guide

So in a Nutshell What is an Employee Intranet?

An intranet is a computer network for sharing information, collaboration tools, operational systems, and other computing services within an organization, usually to the exclusion of access by outsiders. The term is used in contrast to public networks, such as the Internet, but uses most of the same technology based on the Internet Protocol Suite.

The way businesses are conducted has fundamentally changed as a result of digital transformation. Employees are no longer accustomed to regular 9–5 office occupations and are making big changes to where and how they work. Companies are looking for innovative ways to adapt to their employees' demands, including new ways to keep scattered workers engaged by finding inventive ways to exchange information with them.

Intranets have always played a modest part in the work experience. They were largely used for one-way management-to-employee communication. Such intranets have become outdated as a result of advanced technology, which has replaced them with dynamic internal communication platforms that can serve as a central gathering place for the entire enterprise. 

You might find this article helpful. 

The Modern Employee Intranet's Evolution: 

​The worldwide internet allows everyone to connect and share information. Modern employee intranets are based on the same idea, with one major difference: intranets are designed for internal company usage only, with no access to the public.

Intranets for employees were formerly used to hold basic company information, but today's intranets are much more sophisticated. Many firms are establishing intranets to aid in employee communication and cooperation. They can act as a central portal for employees to access company materials and tools. Solutions like SharePoint were introduced at the turn of the millennium to aid with content collaboration. Companies were beginning to use networked drives more often at the time, so these solutions effectively added an interface to these repositories, allowing organizations to put more meaning on stored content than just a file name.

Because this was before SaaS applications, the first intranets were not interconnected and required a significant amount of IT effort to set up and maintain. Employees frequently abandoned these portals and found manual workarounds due to poor user experience, costly maintenance, and struggles to keep content fresh.

As Facebook and LinkedIn began to revolutionize our personal lives in the early 2000s, a slew of social enterprise applications arose to offer the same level of social collaboration to the workplace. Many of these capabilities were truly game-changing in the industry, but while suppliers battled to discover challenges to answer, organizations suffered as a result of their inability to find a place for the technology.

They frequently devolved into yet another occasional point-tool employed throughout the enterprise. Other times, companies have attempted to integrate social collaboration tools into their corporate intranet platform only to discover that the user experience was off and that they missed several basic functionalities.

The modern intranet is undergoing a revival nowadays. We recognize that nearly all organizations with more than 500 employees need a digital workplace hub where employees can stay informed on all mandatory communications, make sense of and integrate with all of their digital productivity tools, connect with internal experts and coworkers, find fresh up-to-date information, and more.

All of these use cases were given a purpose-built solution by the modern intranet, which improved on the capabilities of earlier generations. Employee intranets, formerly seen as ineffectual and superfluous, have evolved into an essential component of digital workplace collaboration. A generational transition happened as technology progressed. Enhanced investment in social intranets for businesses of all kinds has resulted from a growing interest in the link between social networking and increased employee productivity.

Edge routers will continue to change and expand in the future. Artificial intelligence and improved APIs may result in a more participatory experience, but they are essentially the glue that ties everything together. Intranets will always rely on offering an exceptional user experience and promoting employee engagement, no matter what the future holds. They will remain an important and necessary element of the workplace as we know it. The creation of a safe, searchable, and unified knowledge base can assist even tiny businesses.

AgilityPortal's Employee Intranet Module Allows Employees to Connect and Engage and is scalable to any level. 

You might find this article helpful.

Download our eBook: How To Get Your Intranet Off The Ground