There are infinite ways to use a membership site. In previous articles, we talked about ways to externally use membership sites to make your business better. Have you thought about using one internally to improve your employees experience and productivity?

Here are a few ways that I thought of (you can probably think of many more):

Training - optional or required

When a new employee is hired, why hand them a big thick notebook on company policies and procedures. Put it into searchable documents behind a secure curtain.

Private online training courses (required or optional) speeds up the learning curve for new employees or interns. Use it for training on your IP or processes, or for something as basic as the phone system or listings of the network printers.

Certifications

Combine a learning system with your membership site and put together complete courses that lead to certifications, such as customer relations, new product expert, or maybe even a copier paper changing certificate!

Standards

Many companies, especially software and manufacturing companies, rely heavily on the standards set by the company or by the industry.

Providing secure, managed access to these standards improves productivity and compliance.

Companies such as Standards Technology Group manage secure access to standards for many global industries.

Company notifications

The home page after logins can have both human interest (Jane had her baby yesterday), and company specific (we will be closing at noon today due to the impending snow storm).

How about job postings - do you post internally before opening your search to external sources?

HR resources

Resources like health care Q&A, 401k options, sexual harassment reporting can easily be maintained and available in a centralized online secure area.

Best yet, if you have a larger organization, you can link your membership site to the HR system so that members can update their personnel records, choose a health plan, change tax status, just to name a few.

Incentive Programs

Use the membership site to help boost employee participation and morale.

Add in some fun contests, like best homemade Halloween mask, or business related like sending in nominations for best customer support person of the month.

Shout Outs

Recognition is important for employee morale and job satisfaction. Incentives and contests go hand in hand with Shout Outs like the winners of the incentives and what they were awarded.

But other Shout Outs are effective as well. Here are a few ideas: promotions, sales, goals met (personal and professional), new degrees or certifications, introducing new hires, best idea of the month.

Build a sense of community

Think of the company as its own community, then go about making it easy for the members of the community to interact. Essentially, encourage the sense of community by offering the members of your company their own private FaceBook-like social media platform.

Here is the best part! Joomla has all the tools you need to do any or all of this. There are plenty of membership extensions, LMS extensions, community extensions, available inside and outside of the JED . And with the native security of Joomla, you can feel comfortable maintaining the privacy of your staff and employees.

Originally published in Joomla Community Magazine.