If yours is like most organizations, you’re probably facing challenges related to your digital workplace and employee experience.

Too many applications competing for attention. Important information trapped in silos, inaccessible to the people who need it. The constant din of pings, alerts, and notifications make it impossible for employees to focus.

Employees waste a significant portion of their day app hopping, context switching, and searching for information. These efforts reduce productivity by up to 40%.

It’s as though the pandemic propelled us forward by decades, but also complicated work so much that it’s now nearly impossible to get anything done.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Your intranet has the power to solve all these challenges in a way you might not have considered. Here's how...

Regardless of whether your intranet is built on SharePoint or Microsoft 365, or with an out-of-the-box solution, it’s the first step in establishing the foundation for an effective, engaging digital workplace experience.

It’s the ideal location to help employees feel connected to your organization and provides many key functions that are required for a successful business:

• Improves organizational communication of news, information, updates

• Streamlines the organization of information, assets, and documents

• Promotes employee engagement and collaboration with forums, polling, social features, and more

When done right, modern intranets serve as a hub for the communications and resources employees need to be effective

If it also delivers information that employees want and need, like links to benefits information, help desk resources, and travel expense documents, then you’re really ahead of the game, well-positioned to create the type of engaging, useful experience employees are looking for.

There’s just one catch.

Employees will certainly show up to visit the site that you’ve created for them. But then they’ll leave almost immediately as soon as they click through to the service they initially came to find. That’s the problem with creating an intranet that does a good job at being useful. It draws users in, only to send them right back out again.

But what if you turned that around? What if instead of linking out to the resources employees want and need, you brought those services in? That’s where a digital assistant comes in.

On its most basic level, digital assistants add functionality that complements the resources an intranet already provides.

Designed to simplify the work day, digital assistants integrate with enterprise systems to pull in the important tasks and information employees need from across the enterprise. As a result, they add value by not only driving traffic to your intranet, they also give employees a reason to keep coming back and spend more time on the site.

By providing employees with easy access to everything they need to know and do, creating a personalized experience that simplifies the work day, Workgrid transforms the intranet into an integral part of digital workplace strategy.

Digital assistants:

• Guide attention to what matters most, centralizing communications, tasks, and information from across the enterprise

• Reduce digital friction, eliminating the need to log in and out of disparate applications by enabling employees to execute tasks from a single location

• Make it easier to find information, people, and documents and get fast, personalized answers to common questions

The features of a digital assistant are effective at keeping employees engaged with the intranet because they address the challenges of today’s digital workplaces, namely digital friction and attention management.

• Missed communications due to information overload

• Lost productivity from data silos that make it hard to find needed information

• Complicated and time-consuming tasks that involve multiple steps in unfamiliar applications

So how exactly would a digital assistant work with your intranet?

By combining the power of your intranet with a digital assistant, you can go beyond having a simple site that fights for attention with all the other applications in your enterprise and create a digital workplace that’s designed to conquer the challenges of this new working age.

Many organizations have used a digital assistant to create engaging experiences that boost employee engagement and satisfaction. The benefits they achieve have transformed their digital workplace and employee experience:

• Improved employee experience – streamlining the digital work experience for employees by providing more efficient access to the tasks and information they need and care about

• Higher visibility for important information – delivering the right communications to the right employees at the right time, from a central location that’s sure to be seen

• Increased engagement – providing employees with a modern, intelligent, consumer-grade experience that aggregates information from your back-end technology stack through a single digital destination 

• Better productivity – eliminating time-wasting distractions by putting important tasks, information, and communications into the flow of work, so employees have more time to focus on what really matters

Additionally, digital assistants can be implemented to work seamlessly with your existing intranet. Workgrid, for example, works with a range of intranet platforms, whether you use a custom-built intranet on top of SharePoint, Drupal or Trianz Pulse, or if you have a common intranet-in-a-box solution, such as Igloo.

To create a modern intranet that delivers the experience your employees need, you need to think beyond simply using the site as a delivery mechanism for stylized communications. Your intranet needs to be a problem solver, a resource employees can rely on to help them work more efficiently and be more productive.

A digital assistant can help them do that, enhancing the intranet with functionality that reduces digital friction and context switching, guides attention to important tasks and information, and makes it easier to get answers to common questions.

For a full overview of how Workgrid’s digital assistant can help your intranet become a powerhouse in the digital workplace, request a demo today!