The Platinum winner of the 2013 Intranet Innovation Awards. Screenshots courtesy of Barclays Bank.

Employees demand mobile access when they are at work, and leading intranets are now delivering.  Going beyond just news, the world’s most effective intranets provide sophisticated functionality on mobile devices, resulting in huge business benefits.

The recently-announced winners of the 2013 Intranet Innovation Awards are demonstrating just how powerful intranet solutions accessible on employee’s own smartphones and tablets can be.

Platinum award winner Barclays Bank (shown above) has created a mobile intranet which is targeted at frontline staff in branches. MyZone’s rich mixture of content and functionality has played a major part in achieving a 50 per cent decline in customer complaints about staff’s product knowledge, as well as a 22 per cent rise in employee engagement.

Gold award winner Coca-Cola Enterprises’ mobile intranet iConnect allows employees to carry out key HR processes such as view payslips and book annual leave from a smartphone. Initial feedback has been so positive that features from the mobile version of iConnect may be incorporated into the traditional desktop version.

Two thirds of the workforce at US airline Virgin America doesn’t sit at a desk. Their new intranet “VX Connect” has been available on mobile devices from day one.  After four months a quarter of all employees access VX Connect and micro-blogging platform Chatter from smartphones, while half of all posts to Chatter also being made from mobile devices.

Obtain a copy of the Intranet Innovations 2013 report to see screenshots of what these leading intranets have delivered.

(And watch this space for more of the trends seen in this year’s stellar Awards.)