An intranet is a must-have tool for financial institutions like banks and credit unions, and for good reason! It offers a centralized location to organize internal documents, share company news, and engage your employees. It also lets your employees better connect, collaborate, and create, ultimately enabling them to perform everyday tasks with ease.
Over the past few decades, we’ve worked closely with our financial customers to deliver an employee intranet solution that works seamlessly for their industry. In doing so, we have uncovered the go-to intranet best practices for financial institutions no matter where you are in the world, and we’d like to share some of our favorites with you now:
1. Personalize your navigation
As a general rule, it’s important to keep your navigation menu labels simple and easy to maneuver in a way that is truly intuitive for your users—your employees! They shouldn’t have to struggle to locate their desired resource.
If you’re not sure whether your design is intuitive enough, ask for feedback. Meet with staff from across your organization and ask them to find different resources while you observe. If they are having a hard time, you’ll know what exactly needs improvement and how to reorganize accordingly.
IC Thrive’s intranet software lets you create seamless menus called Mega Menus. They provide quadruple the navigational space you’d find in a traditional drop-down menu and feature an interactive navigation system that lets users find links more easily on your intranet.
Related reading: 5 examples of effective financial intranet
2. Create useful financial sites
Another best practice for financial intranet sites is to create different sites for the various groups and audiences within your organization, such as individual departments, branch locations, and specific job roles. This is where our internal comms’ audience principle comes into play!
Not only do these sites help keep these internal audiences connected, but they also provide them with specific applications or forms to do their job, letting them establish their own employee identity. If you’ve perused our past blog posts, you’ll know that employee engagement is crucial to the success of any organization, no matter the industry.
Use IC Thrive’s intranet software to build out your own compliance team site, where you store various resources for your team including calendars, compliance discussions, compliance training, risk assessments, and more.
Related resource: download our free Audience Segmentation Template
3. Help employees collaborate & connect better
To add to the previous intranet best practice, financial organizations often have multiple branches across several different geographic locations. This can make communication and collaboration among staff a challenge. But this is actually a common problem many larger organizations face, and there’s a solution!
To keep your international teams connected and improve collaboration, use self-service branch sites. This will allow your teams to communicate and stay engaged from various office locations around the world.
Include a training calendar with links to upcoming events, such as lunch-and-learns or check-ins. You can also feature employees from other branches on different individual branch sites as a way for employees across various locations to get to know one another.
This is another great intranet best practice to boost the employee experience and ensure no one feels left out.
4. Educate employees on new products & offerings
You ideally want your employees to be up to date and on the same page regarding new products and offerings. But this can be tricky if your staff is larger or scattered in different geographical areas. To combat this, use your employee intranet the same way you would for onboarding, and train all employees on new products with training schedules, knowledge bases, video repositories, and online tests.
With our intranet software, conduct internal product seminars and create sites specifically for new product events. Within these sites, you can create a training calendar that lets employees register for the event they’d like to attend.
You can also conduct data analysis and keep track of who has registered and who hasn’t, and even send emails to employees who have yet to register.
Apply intranet best practices with the #1 financial intranet software
There you have it! Not only can your intranet engage and involve users, promoting your culture and company values along the way, it also gives your employees the tools they need to perform their jobs efficiently.
At IC, we’ve built multiple intranet best practices into our employee intranet software to ensure the needs of your organization are met. Our latest eBook covers the top 10 ways you can use your intranet most effectively for your organization. Download and read it for free here.
If you’d like to see the #1 financial intranet software in action (and tailored to your own requirements), book a free demo today and we’ll walk you through these best practices live.
