Get out your binoculars folks. Beyond the hills is a massive group of young and talented misfits that have learnt to value the meaning of cool. Many organizations today are faced with a Baby Boomer generation approaching retirement and now is a critical time more than ever for organizations to start attracting Millennials to their workplace.

Beat your competitors by getting a head start on the development of your future assets. Build a talent pool that encourages future innovation, creativity, technical adeptness, cultural understanding and competitive advantage. With an increasingly rampant competitive business sphere, great young minds have a long list of career destinations to consider (spoiler: they’re an incredibly picky group).

Faced with a new generation of great minds valuing cool careers and workplaces, organizations will need to start leaving space for the integration of cool in day-to-day decision making and, the technologies your staff will be relying on.

What is Cool?

The difficulty surrounding cool is that it’s subjective. Actually, ironically, I’m fairly certain that defining cool is something that most cool people would classify as an action that is uncool. As it relates to our discussion, Google defines cool as being fashionably attractive or impressive, calmness or composure. My definition for cool is anything that is considered to be unconventional, creative, attractive, nice and culturally relevant. Use the comments below to leave your definition / understanding of cool – I’d love to hear your thoughts.

How do I Integrate Cool with Intranet Connections?

As a team, we have been working to perfect the art of out-of-the-box intranet deployment for well over 15 years. Intranet Connections has an awesome toolkit, full of ways to solve business problems as they relate to intranet solutions. Key aspects that will help your colleagues welcome your intranet solution as the new cool kid on the block are as follows:

A Fresh, Modern Intranet Design

First impressions are everything! Make it count with the design and navigation structure you incorporated in to your intranet solution. The emerging workforce has extremely high expectations for clean, slick and modern design due to the surge of mobile technology start-ups and their huge on good design. Your intranet solution should accommodate these expectations.

With Intranet Connections, you may achieve a modern intranet solution design using a number of different tools. For example, using the Simple Theme Editor, you have the ability to introduce fixed width for your site, transparent header color and a repeating background image that will provide your visitors with a modern header.

Use Intranet Connections’ Image Feed or Photo Album Feed to display eye-catching imagery (i.e. promotional material surrounding popular areas of your intranet solution). Included below, you’ll find a screenshot of an Intranet Connections intranet solution that has incorporated the aforementioned suggestions.

Mega Menus for Your Intranet Solution

Use Mega Menus Navigation  to offer quick access to a variety of popular areas and popular resources. Additionally, incorporating widgets in to your mega menu will allow you to peak visual intrigue for individuals visiting your intranet solution. Included below, you’ll find a screenshot displaying the Intranet Connections’ Mega Menus Navigation.

Valuable Intranet Content & Collaboration Channels

Beyond looking cool, your intranet has to be cool! As it relates to your intranet solution, being cool translates directly to offering quick access to required information.

Achieving success in this area will be largely credited to a navigation architecture that works with your colleagues, not against them. Let your navigational menu items speak to your employees in a language they understand. Task-centric menus are one method of creating navigation that works with / speaks to your fellow staff members. Illustrated in the screenshot below, you’ll find a task-centric menu example.

Regular content audits and avoiding Intranet Hoarding Syndrome (IHS) is a key attribute of any cool intranet.

Your intranet should enable a two-way communication channel between the many groups and employees within your organization. Gauge employees with Quick Polls, Online Surveys, Idea Share Exchange, and Discussion Forums. All of these features (and much more) are packaged with the Intranet Connections intranet solution and help enable collaboration among your many employees.

Beyond that, using our many tools (e.g. Intranet Applications Builder, Online Forms, Blogging, etc.) to introduce unexpected creative solutions that help make the life of an employee, team, department and/or your entire organization will yield extra brownie points and even make you an organizational hero.

Placing a strong focus on both the design, navigation architecture, offering valuable content and collaboration channels will enable your intranet to better serve the young talented minds that your organization will be looking to hire.

Be cool. Leave us your comments below!