Best Practices: End User

■

As an End user of your company's Simpplr intranet, you play a huge role in building and maintaining the employee experience! Here we've put together some of our recommended best practices for End users to help their organization make the most of Simpplr.

 

Your profile

Your profile is your “glory page” where people land when they click on your name or picture. They want to know more about you. Take your time to make sure you update your profile. We know you keep your LinkedIn profile really up to date. Purpose is exactly the same here. Keeping your profile information updated helps others learning more about you and gives them an opportunity to ask for help when they really need your expertise. Endorse other people with skills/topics and get endorsements for yourself. Keep your description brief and precise, but make sure you have enough keywords in your description. With a great description, you will show in Simpplr standard search results when your colleagues are looking for something. Don’t forget to update your profile picture as well.

Tag your content

Be sure to “tag” the things you're creating in Simpplr with topics to bundle your content. Be mindful of the other tags already in the system and try to reuse existing tags if they are similar. It’s very easy to get carried away and have thousands of tags in the system that makes it really unusable. Search is often the biggest pain point for employees using intranets. Try searching for content you create and tag, and see what the experience is like. If you can't find it, no one else will.

 

Follow

Following people and content is a great way to filter down updates that are relevant to you. You like a site? Follow it. Want to hear from a colleague? Follow her. Following controls what updates and information you see in your activity stream.
 
Oh yeah, the most important thing: if someone is bombarding you with unnecessary updates, do yourself and favor and un-follow them.

 

Feed (activity stream)

This is the only place in the application where anything can be shared by anyone. Be mindful and share only things deemed appropriate for work environment. Mention other people and sites with @ so they get notified about your share. If your share is relevant to only a site, go to that site and share on its Dashboard. To learn more about the feed, check out this article!

 

Blog

Blogs as pieces of content are great for getting your voice out to your organization in your own way! It's important to note though, at times employees mix their personal blogging and corporate blogs at work. There is a fine line between the two, and it can be difficult to maintain the balance. Many of the blogging issues seem common sense, such as not working on your personal blog while at work, or taking photos of your workplace without permission, or even complaining about your annoying coworkers.
 

Here are a few pointers for you as a corporate blogger:

• In almost all the scenarios, the views expressed in the blog are yours alone and do not necessarily represent the views of your employer.
• Respect the company’s confidentiality and proprietary information.
• Ask your manager if you have any questions about what's appropriate to include in your blog.
• Be respectful to the company, employees, customers, partners and competitors.
• Understand when the company asks that topics not be discussed for confidentiality or legal compliance reasons.
• Ensure that your blogging activity does not interfere with your work commitments.

 

Write responsibly

We all want our stuff to be “consumed,” right? Then we need to make it easy to do so. There are good habits that can go a long way toward ensuring people want to read and understand what you have to share. Reading on paper is different from reading online. It’s more difficult to read text on screen. You have fewer than 10 seconds for your visitors to understand what the page is about and what they’re supposed to do next.
 
Online audiences have short attention spans, so use as few words as possible to get the point across. Make every word count and focus on the point.

 

For more articles that will help you make the most out of Simpplr, click here!