When Alanis Morissette (a fellow Canadian icon of the 90s) sang “Deadlines and meetings and contracts all breached. D-days and structure, responsibility. Have to’s and need to’s, get to’s by three. Eleventh hours and upset employees” we are 90% sure she was referring to her company’s lack of an intranet. Okay maybe 80%… But the point is, your intranet is so much more than just a place to share fun pics and recipes (although we highly encourage that aspect too). When you buy true, purpose-built intranet software, you are buying a platform that will help you with efficiency, security, and compliance.
Intranet Connections’ intranet software has a powerful feature called “Forms”, which is a powerhouse feature amalgamating efficiency, security, and compliance into a simple out-of-the-box solution to your organization’s biggest headaches. When coupling a form with an automated workflow, you can also automate approvals on multiple levels on submissions before they are approved. Let’s break each three of these “headaches” down and look at how the power of intranet forms aids them.
Increased efficiency with forms approvals
The headache: From the onboarding process, promotions, contracts renewals, to new corporate policies and procedures—you need to make sure your workforce is on the same page and complying with the rules of regulations applicable to your organization. Constantly having to manually chase employees down to get them to fill out a form can be exhausting for HR or your office manager. If your organization has around 100 employees, and there are 5 individual guidelines that they need to comply to, that can be over 500 signatures to get in an efficient manner!
The solution: When you have an intranet solution, like the out-of-the-box one that IC provides, your forms start to live in one, easily accessible place. And with forms on your intranet, you can automate the process of having employees fill them out. Our software doesn’t need IT knowledge, and anyone can create simple and easy to read forms with our drag-and-drop forms builder, speeding up your HR procedures and ensuring that forms are quickly made and filled.
Get secure with intranet forms
The headache: Paper forms will never be as secure as online forms. How do you keep your paper documents secured? You can put them in a filing cabinet and try and make sure the key is kept safe, but there is a large amount of risk; of break-ins, of lockpicking, and even of fires and floods. In the blink of an eye, your paper documents can be destroyed without a trace, and all your records become heresy.
The solution: Forms that are stored on the intranet not only have the added security of living in the cloud (or on your own private servers), making them fire/earthquake/flood proof, but with IC’s solution, you can also set up who can view forms, who can build them, and who can see submitted responses. With the workflow feature, you can also keep track of submissions throughout the course of approval, from first submission all the way through final sign-off from your executive team.
Compliance management: you have everything to lose
The headache: audits, internal and external. Regulatory changes. The policy lifecycle. Do these words send a shiver down your spine like they do ours? Being audit-proof is hard. A mess of paper forms only makes that harder. Imagine sorting through infinite paper expense requests and receipts, infinite signed policy agreements, trying to prove that the executive team did in fact see the final forms… it is near impossible. We know what a headache it can be to keep compliant; in fact, that’s one of the reasons we exist!
The solution: online automation workflows make it clear the cycle of approval a form went through, and who’s eyes have been on it. You can also quickly set up an automated workflow that triggers the appropriate actions to occur whenever someone fills out a certain form. For example, you can create a workflow so that whenever an employee fills out an expense form, it automatically gets sent to their manager and HR to approve, and follow-up reminders can be sent so that the employee is reimbursed promptly. Intranet expense forms provide a simple solution where employees can submit their expenses, with receipts, into one single source of truth, that goes through all the steps automatically and effortlessly. See? It is as easy as spelling IRS.
IC: the solution to your biggest headaches
If you suffer from these headaches, IC’s intranet solution may be exactly the cure you need. From efficiency to security to compliance, we have you covered. Our team of experts has ample experience in the internal comms space and can help you set up your intranet with all these key points in mind. Interested in learning more about how your procedures can be streamlined with intranet technology? Book a free demo today!
