Research shows that workplace friendships can have a powerful effect on employee performance. In this article, we explore how you can use your intranet to foster human connection in an increasingly digital workplace.
Organization. Enterprise. Multinational. Whichever term you use to describe your business, none of these really convey a sense of community. Yet, at their core, all businesses are communities built on communication and collaboration; every organization is filled with people connecting and supporting one another.
It’s no secret that good working relationships have a positive impact on an organization, especially when it comes to important objectives like retaining staff. In addition, a survey by Gallup reveals that having a best friend at work also drives employee engagement. These are both important things to keep in mind as The Great Resignation continues to make attrition and employee engagement significant challenges.
Despite the need to create environments where people can connect productively, facilitating workplace friendships isn’t easy for modern employers. Alongside the workforce turbulence caused by The Great Resignation, organizations are also dealing with the transition to hybrid working and the ways in which a dispersed working model can make it harder for friendships to be formed when some employees work remotely and others use business premises on a flexible basis.
Planning & deploying a successful intranet
How to encourage workplace friendship through technology
There are plenty of existing HR initiatives that aim to encourage the formation of friendships at work, including buddy systems that see new hires paired up with existing members of staff in the hope that they form a social bond, as well as helping to ease new starters in during their first few weeks. However, this doesn’t guarantee that the new starter and their chosen buddy will hit it off. It can also place additional pressure on the existing member of staff chosen to be the buddy.
To truly aid workplace friendships, all employees – not just new hires – should have opportunities to interact with different people across the business. There is a growing number of workplace technologies that make this possible for hybrid and dispersed organizations. First, though, let’s talk new starters.
1. Help new starters hit the ground running with a pre-boarding strategy
First impressions are everything, so no employee is going to have a positive experience if they feel isolated or believe that it is difficult to form friendships soon after joining. A lot of emphasis has been placed on the importance of the onboarding experience recently, and pre-boarding tools that help new hires feel welcome and ready to engage before day one should be an integral part of the onboarding process.
Planning & deploying a successful intranet
By giving new hires access to certain parts of your intranet before they start, you can share the information they will want to know before their first day and help them get the onboarding admin done and dusted.
This is also a great opportunity to show them how your people interact with one another through your intranet software, giving them a good feel of how they can engage with others when they get started. Providing restricted intranet access before their first day not only boosts efficiency in the enrolment process, it also helps to instill a sense of belonging and gives new starters the confidence to intermingle with their new peers virtually.
2. Encourage social interactions through your intranet
Traditional barriers to connecting and befriending colleagues, such as location, timezone, and technology, can be easily cleared using modern intranet software. It can feel awkward for colleagues to introduce and express themselves to their new co-workers on a platform that is viewed by the entire organization, but if your people are already actively posting and engaging with one another on your intranet, others can feel encouraged to do the same.
The homepage feed is perhaps one of the most useful intranet features for helping to encourage social interactions. Much like a social media feed, this is a space where employees may feel able to post about things that are important to them, whether work-related or not. Co-workers can acknowledge, celebrate, and engage with these posts by liking and commenting on them, and the ability to @mention other co-workers in posts and comments is a great way to directly invite others to join the conversation.
Planning & deploying a successful intranet
3. Create virtual communities
While your homepage is a great way to instill the feeling that your employees are part of a thriving and welcoming workplace community rather than just another organization, dedicated community spaces are also important for connecting like-minded co-workers and allowing teams to get to know each other better when they’re not in the same building, region, or time zone.
Housing a communities area on your intranet empowers people to meet colleagues they might otherwise have no interactions with. Dedicated workplace community spaces are also great for sharing knowledge and getting support, and even those work-related matters can spark engagement between employees that can lead to workplace friendships.
Discussion groups and forums are also important spaces that employees should be able to access on your intranet. Like homepage posts, each of these spaces can be work-related, or about anything that resonates with your employees.
Motivating employees to connect through your intranet
When your intranet is first launched, it can be helpful to have leaders, department heads, and line managers posting on the homepage or in forums and discussion groups. Having visible buy-in from senior staff can encourage others in the organization to follow suit, and this can pretty quickly feed in to a thriving intranet that pulls your organization together and provides more opportunities for friendships to be formed.
Many aspects of life are better with friends, and in many cases the same can be said about work. So, when it comes to workplace community building in your organization, we hope you feel inspired to use the intranet software features above to help your employees expand and enhance their networks, and build human connections that aid engagement and make each day more fulfilling.
