Honey: ‘refined’ intranet from HUGE manages employee engagement

Organizations send off important emails to their employees all the time, but they have no way to tell if they get read. They also can’t know how much employees participate in online conversations with team members about important projects — and their worst assumptions could be right.

By using private, internal communication platforms like Honey, a product that spun out of HUGE Labs, managers can measure employee interactions. Honey rolled out its new admin features in early September, with a post on their blog.

The social intranet created by Honey has a variety of features that managers may find attractive:

• Emails or posts can be prioritized by placing them at the top of a team or company’s queue or page, which may replace the need for all caps or words like URGENT and IMPORTANT in Subject lines
• Managers can know which team members read which posts
• Employees on the road can email updates into the system
• Automatically generated digests of topics of interest
• Fully searchable archive
• API’s allow developers to integrate Honey with other apps, more info on their Developers page
• Private and secure, though you can invite outsiders to join your company’s community and even limit what they see by topic

If you’ve worked anywhere with more than three computers, you’ve probably seen an intranet or two rolled out and ignored. This reporter has. In June, Wired said that Honey was inspired by successful communities like Stack Overflow, Hacker News and Reddit.

Wired wrote: “Honey doesn’t offer groundbreaking functionality, but a refined sense of design helps set it apart. Unlike many information sharing tools, Honey wasn’t designed for a ‘typical’ office drone — it was created with Huge’s large, diverse, and designer-heavy workforce in mind.”

If you want to check the system out, you can sign up for free. Pricing is based on a company’s size. Small businesses with ten or fewer employees can use the platform for free.