5 Ways to Save Money With a SharePoint Intranet

If you’re looking at ways to save money, investing in a new intranet probably isn’t top of your list. But, a well-designed, brand aligned intranet could be the key to cutting your costs and delivering great employee engagement. Especially if you build it in SharePoint.

How?

1. Cut Your Subscription Costs

Most people with a Microsoft license aren’t using it to its full potential. If you already have access to SharePoint, you already have an intranet.

True, SharePoint might not do everything you need it to straight out of the box, but there are plenty of ways to customise it. Annual licenses for SharePoint add-ons are often far cheaper than subscriptions to third-party intranet platforms.

Investing in a one-off SharePoint build with a few select add-ons to customise it for your business needs means you can ditch the costly intranet subscriptions, saving thousands every year.

2. Keep Everything Together

People spend 36 minutes every day switching between apps. That’s 3 hours a week per employee. For every 1,000 employees you have, that’s 3,000 hours of lost time every single week.

If your intranet lives in a different space to where your employees are spending most of their working day, it could lead to one of two outcomes:

• Your intranet won’t get used if employees are actively trying to reduce the number of apps they need to use each day.
• Your employees will waste hours each week simply from switching between different apps.

The beauty of using SharePoint as your intranet is that it can be so much more than that. You can share company news, store, share and collaborate on documents, gather feedback, search for knowledge, showcase events – the list goes on. Plus, content in SharePoint can be surfaced in Teams.

The bottom line is that if your employees are already spending much of their working day in Microsoft 365 apps like SharePoint and Teams, hosting your intranet in SharePoint could save hours in productivity each week.

3. Promote your internal brand

Before hybrid working, companies would spend millions curating the perfect branded office. Logos on the wall, merch at every desk and splashes of your brand colours dotted all around. And what was all this in aid of? A feeling of purpose and connectedness.

After all, employees who feel a sense of purpose in their work are 3X more likely to stay in their job.

So now we’re all working from our unbranded home offices, how do you recreate that sense of connectedness?

Your intranet.

Creating an intranet that perfectly replicates your brand isn’t always easy, but there are tools to help. Having the right colours, fonts, imagery and a place to highlight your mission, vision and values helps employees feel like they’re a part of something bigger. And getting it right could save you thousands in recruitment and onboarding costs.

4. Make searching quicker

People spend hours each week looking for things – whether it’s documents, or people. Using your intranet as a space to effectively signpost where information can be found can save hours in productivity.

But, in order to get the best results, you need to take a people-first approach. Rather than looking at it from a purely technical perspective, considering a UX based approach will make sure your efforts don’t go to waste.

Taking this approach to searching helps answer questions like:

Who is looking for this information?

Where do they expect to find this information?

How do they go about looking for this information?

Getting this right from the outset means you won’t spend time and money overhauling how employees locate information, only to find that it’s still taking people hours to find what they need. And with a system that meets employees expectations, they can spend those hours working on tasks that really help your business.

5. Prioritise employee engagement

Highly engaged teams are 22% more profitable. But building an intranet won’t automatically improve your employee engagement. It needs to be planned and designed in a way that puts engagement first.

This can be done in so many ways – getting employees involved in the design phase, providing opportunities for employee-led content and two way comms, sharing rich media content, personalised content feeds, pulse surveys.

It requires more thought and planning but, for enterprise businesses, the potential of a 22% profit uplift far outweighs the resources spent getting it right.

Being the one tasked with saving money across your team or department is tough – we empathise with you. But short-term spends in the right areas can result in long-term savings. And for businesses looking to save money and boost employee engagement, that ‘right area’ is your intranet.