Improving user experience with a good profile directory on a modern intranet.

The employee directory is one of the most important and frequently visited features of every company intranet. It’s essential for organisations, connecting individuals across locations and enabling teams to work in a more integrated way.

At their most basic level, employee profiles must contain authoritative information about a person’s role, location, reporting lines and key contact details. Ideally, this information should be derived from a single source, such as how a OneSpace intranet can connect your HR system ensuring users can feel confident that the information from this active directory is current and accurate.

People are your most important asset: help them engage.

Being able to find the right experts is one of the fundamental strengths of a good intranet. Without the employee directory it can be very difficult to find that person who speaks French, or knows about the Canadian building market!

Finding the right experts is critical for answering questions, serving customer needs and building project teams.

Not only this, but an employee directory with profile photos helps put the right name to the right face, not only an immense help to new staff onboarding, but also for individuals with whom somebody has been emailing or talked to on the phone, but never met face-to-face.

One of the great things about employee profiles is that they give a more rounded view of an employee. A profile not only tells you about a person’s work background, their relative areas of expertise and what they’re involved in, but with OneSpace, it also has the potential to list hobbies, areas of interest and where else they’ve worked. It helps to promote their skills, credentials and experiences, including those gained from previous roles. As such, having a profile can help employees be appreciated on their whole range of strengths and skills, allowing them to be involved in different projects and participate on assignments they find exciting.

All of these reasons really help new employees get up to speed quickly when joining a company. They can connect to new colleagues while showing off their background and areas of expertise. 

Requiring new staff to fill out their profiles as part of the onboarding process really helps with intranet adoption as well. After all, research has demonstrated that higher levels of employee engagment and satisfaction can have a real positive impact on the bottom line by increasing productivity and reducing staff turnover.