090]\6 ways to engage remote employees on your intranet

Say you’re a salesman working for Land O’Lakes, out slogging through a soybean field with Farmer Brown, and he asks you about the sustainability of your products.

You can rack your brains for an answer—wasn’t there an article about that on the intranet a while back? Or you can whip out your smartphone, call up some talking points, and look informed as you spout the facts.

Reaching employees in farmyards and on factory floors has long been a challenge for internal communicators. Mobile offers new ways of connecting remote employees to the intranet.

Land O’Lakes, a Minnesota-based co-op famous for its butter, has 10,000 employees, 40 percent of whom work out of their homes or on site, among them agronomists and sales staff. The company relaunched its intranet in April on a responsive platform, so that employees who work primarily by tablet can get the information quickly.

“They primarily work mobile,” says Juliana Wallace, senior manager of internal communications. “They’re almost never in front of their computer at home. So we want to make sure we that we reach them through mobile technology where they already are.”