According to ENGINE INSIGHTS, from a sample of just over 1,000 adults who have been working from home, almost 80% of today’s workforce feel disconnected from what is going on in their organisations – this despite the meteoric rise of virtual meetings that remote workers now attend on an ever-increasing endless schedule.

And although we are talking more than ever online, 75% of all office workers feel less connected to their teams, with 68% saying they feel less well-informed about what’s going on at their company and 42% struggling to find the information they need to be most productive. On top of this, more than half (52%) feel that they are spending so much time on video calls that it’s hard to actually get real work done. There’s no denying, Video call technologies are great for helping teams stay in touch, however, companies need to ensure employees still have the right tools and time to keep the real work moving forward. With COVID-19 acting as a catalyst for change, now is the time to embrace new digital tools in this new digital world.

Email and Intranets – Businesses’ unnecessary evil.

A whopping 66% of office workers rely on email to receive updates, track and measure activities and communicate tasks; however, as many of those will know from their own experiences, both email and intranets have many inherent flaws. Let’s take a look at some of these:-

Email    

  • It’s not that secure – Confidential business documents sent over email are not confidential. Documents can be easily read both inside and outside of your organisation, and as many businesses operate communal PCs, everyone can see everything in their inbox.
  • It’s too open – Mailboxes fill up very quickly with clutter, and even with the best-designed email filters, the situation gets worse every month as more and more people send you endless emails and spam.
  • Email can be dangerous – Computer viruses are most commonly delivered through email because there is no certification mechanism for email senders.
  • Delivery is not guaranteed – Just like using postal services; mail may be delivered, or maybe not. And even if it is delivered, you really have no idea if it’s been read.
  • Email is not real-time – There is too much delay to have an active conversation, which is why more and more people are turning to instant messaging solutions (which also have their own security problems and are then outside of the company’s control).
  • It’s a poor way to share files – They don’t arrive in nicely organized directories that allow both parties to see identical file and directory structures.
  • It’s a chaotic workflow method – Is email really the best possible driver of corporate and organizational workflow?

Intranets

  • They’re costly – Intranets are expensive and time-consuming to implement. All employees need to understand all the features available to use it effectively, and this requires long and complex employee onboarding caused by unfriendly Intranet user interfaces.
  • They need maintenance – In fact, many companies have full-time staff taking care of Intranet updates, server upgrades, network maintenance, system improvements and modifications.
  • They’re a constant burden – Intranets have a reputation for being complex and cumbersome. Consequently, employees/users often feel overwhelmed. In addition, Intranet users often have heavy administrative burdens causing additional time waste.
  • Poor user experience – Because Intranets are not intuitive to use, user experience suffers. Consequently, employees struggle to use Intranets in a way that can really optimize their work and access to relevant information.
  • Low user adoption – Poor user experience results in low usage rates. We all know how important user experience is to keep your users engaged and active.
  • Time-consuming to use – Even though intranets are meant to make information search easier and faster, too much irrelevant information often causes problems. Additionally, if the information is not well organized and cannot be easily navigated, your employees could be missing on important information and decrease productivity.
  • Poor productivity – Poor Intranet user experience leads to lower employee productivity.
  • Hard to measure – Most Intranets don’t have robust and useful analytics modules. Therefore, internal comms professionals are unable to measure internal comms effectiveness and performance.

These are just a handful of reasons why many of our customers choose to replace email, intranets and paper-based checklists with Metro’s Unified Comms and Process modules to drive their employee engagement, task management and monitor compliance. Our cross-functional digital workplace has been designed to achieve perfect coordination, compliance and execution in multi-site environments such as Retail, Hospitality and Healthcare – it’s light, quick, easy to implement and moreover, simple to use from any device – and with SaaS-based licensing that includes unlimited users as standard, Metro is designed for use with today’s modern workforce in mind.

With solutions designed to support Operations, Compliance, HR, Buying, Project and Marketing teams, RMS are proud to be working with over 120 of the best-known Retail, Hospitality and Healthcare brands across the globe. Our mission at RMS is simple – To provide software solutions that allow you to ‘do business better’ – To find out more, why not drop us a line on chat or contact us here.

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