September 05, 2013 : New Survey Results Show Social and Mobile Intranets Can More than Double Employee Engagement and Collaboration
San Francisco, Calif. – September 5, 2013 – Appirio, a global cloud services provider, today introduced a new social intranet offering that provides enterprises with the guidance, services and technology necessary to create an employee portal more in line with what today's mobile, social and global workforce expects. The new solution brings together Appirio's expertise in Human Capital Management (HCM) and workforce experience, with Appirio's EdgeForce Social Intranet Framework. Companies get a custom cloud solution without the custom price, and employees get a modern, consumer-grade "intranet" experience that keeps them not only productive but connected and engaged as well.
According to a survey released today, commissioned by Appirio and conducted by the International Association for Human Resource Information Management (IHRIM), employee portals or intranets are widely deployed but are little more than a virtual file cabinet or a glorified home page. Specifically, survey results show:
85 percent of companies have an intranet or employee portal of some kind and 75 percent say it's important or mission-critical
While more than two thirds of respondents say their portal has reduced the administrative burden on HR, only 39 percent say it is driving employee engagement
Less than 25 percent of respondents' portals are integrated with social platforms, and only 11 percent are optimized for mobile access. However, those who do offer mobile or social capabilities saw more than twice as much engagement (77 percent versus 33 percent).
"Business pays a high price for employees that are just going through the motions, yet it's a common occurrence in today's workplace," said Jason Averbook, chief business innovation officer at Appirio. "According to Gallup, more than 70 percent of international workers consider themselves either not engaged or actively disengaged, costing businesses more than $370B annually. This needs to be addressed as we move towards Workplace 2020, where a majority of the workforce are digital natives, multigenerational, highly collaborative and more globally dispersed than ever. Employee intranets are an easy and highly impactful place to start, and when combined with today's leading cloud solutions, they give the workforce access to information like never before."
Cloud, mobile and social technologies make it possible to provide a more consumer grade experience that employees today expect; however, the vast majority of today's intranets are built using legacy technologies. Cloud technology coupled with employee-centric design enables social intranets to have both a dramatic impact on productivity and efficiency, as well as employee engagement.
Appirio recently worked with Virgin America, a unique airline with a unique brand, to rethink its employee intranet. "The majority of our employees are on-the-go and sharing information and communicating was difficult with a traditional content management-focused intranet that lacked mobile capabilities and was disconnected with our brand," said Frances Fiorillo, SVP people and in-flight services at Virgin America. "Within one month of deploying our social intranet with Appirio, 80 percent of users had shared content via Chatter, a social collaboration tool, and site time visits increased from 45 seconds to more than six minutes, contributing to increased employee engagement and social collaboration."
Appirio's social intranet brings the workforce and business applications together in one place, with an extra social layer to communicate and collaborate at a fraction of the price and deployment times of other intranet solutions. Appirio makes it easy for companies of all sizes to get started with a highly prescriptive two-day workshop, and a customized social intranet deployment. However, the strategy workshop can also be a standalone offering assessing an organization's current intranet and social collaboration environment.
The solution also includes Appirio's EdgeForce, a social intranet framework giving customers all the reliability, security and extensibility of being built entirely on the Salesforce platform. The powerful framework can integrate with other business and talent management applications such as Salesforce, Workday, Cornerstone OnDemand and Jobvite, giving employees one place to access and interact with day-to-day applications.
Other Resources:
Collected Resources: Introduction to the Social Intranet
Video: Appirio Customer Highlight Corner, Virgin America
About Appirio
Appirio is a global services provider that uses crowdsourcing and cloud, social and mobile technology to help enterprises reimagine their business and become more agile. Appirio brings together technology expertise with a deep understanding of the way people work, and the nearly limitless skills of a crowdsourcing community of 75,000 developers, to help enterprises transform relationships with their customers, partners and workforce. Appirio has worked with more than 500 enterprises, including organizations like Facebook, Intuit, Japan Post Network, L'Oreal, McGraw-Hill, NetApp, The Four Seasons, and Virgin America. The company is backed by Sequoia Capital, GGV Capital and General Atlantic.