HR Portal: What it is and 7 ideas for your SharePoint intranet

The intranet is the digital space that offers innovative tools to improve the work of all departments of the company.

This article will explain how human resources can use the platform to facilitate the processes of their daily activities, improving the employee experience of the worker.

Here are 7 ideas of what should be on a good HR platform.

What you will find in this article

How human resources can exploit the intranet
What the HR portal is and what it is for
Different ways to manage an employee’s onboarding
7 ideas to implement in your intranet

The job of the HR department - which is imbued with communication and contact - might seem to assume a limiting condition if carried out remotely behind a laptop.

Human Resources can, instead, assume a new innovative aspect. With the help of an HR platform, they will be able to improve the employee's experience in the company, transforming some fundamental elements in new, more effective, and faster processes.

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Portals and employee involvement

The HR portal is the digital meeting point between the Human Resources Department and the corporate population.

Through this web portal, a single point of access allows the entire company to reduce the time to access to specific information, simplify access to documents of interest to the employee, improve the management of HR processes, and consequently improve the corporate image.

Manuals, communications, subscriptions, content sharing - available to employees in one place - can also reduce printing costs and staff hours.

It is not surprising to know that thanks to the creation of internal HR platforms, numerous emails and calls will be limited, allowing users achieve a greater degree of autonomy in finding what they need to work and that generates satisfaction and involvement.

There are several solutions designed to create an HR Portal, but in intranet.ai, we think that the centralization of information is essential for workers, who should use a single digital interface for all processes that affect them. That means that Human Resources are directly involved.

The HR platform should be an integral part of the company's intranet.

It can be a specific section of the intranet that is administered directly by Human Resources, in which HR staff has total autonomy in updating all the contents produced for the worker.

What you can find on an HR portal

The HR portal provides employees with innovative but simple ways to keep them in touch with each other and with the organization itself.

Every important update and communication can be found together with all the basic tools useful in the routine for employees. To facilitate sharing, platforms -such as intranet.ai - often devote space to social networking, by stimulating dynamic interactions between people in different departments to improve relationships between colleagues.

In the case of big companies, or remote working, such functions are extremely important to get to know who you work with and feel an integral part of the company.

Specifically, HR portals can also be used to:

manage and automate tasks such as storing expense notes and refunds
record events and make reservations
update the staff record
book and monitor holidays, pay slips, welfare area
complete administrative tasks
train employees and review their performance
conduct surveys and open blogs to stimulate teams and leaders
foster professional development and the celebration of successes.

The goal is therefore to create a place where employees can facilitate their work by finding all the information they need and participating collaboratively. This will lead to greater productivity, increased involvement, and savings in time and money.

The two-way communication that is generated from the top to the bottom and from the bottom to the top becomes therefore fundamental for the evolution of the work of Human Resources.

Why Human Resources portals are needed

Employees with a functional HR platform can perform better in their work activities and increase the sense of belonging to the corporate community. It is proven that they are the most involved and satisfied.

Hay Group, a market company, found in a survey that the most motivated people had a 43% higher productivity than those who were not. In addition, a turnover of 43% more generated in the offices of satisfied employees was demonstrated.

Several other analyses demonstrate the importance of user involvement.

A study conducted by the Harvard Business Review concluded that absenteeism and turnover in companies, in which a positive business climate is maintained, and employees were engaged, was less than 25% compared to less active companies in this regard.

Satisfied people also imply fewer accidents at work, precisely 48% less in safety and 41% less in quality.

Here are 7 ideas that every good HR platform should implement.

1) Welcome Portal for the arrival of a new colleague

A new and functional aspect is the presentation of newcomers in different interactive and engaging modes.

The simplest case is the publication of a news presentation of the person within the intranet. Some companies put a photo of the person, the role, and an abstract to tell where he comes from and what his skills are.

Others, on the other hand, take more advantage of this medium by inserting in the press release an interview with the new entry reported in textual form and accompanied by his photo.

This will make it easier for colleagues to be recognized both physically and in online meetings by the rest of the corporate population.

2) Integrating a company social network: Yammer

This mode allows you to enjoy Yammer, the company's social network.

Microsoft Yammer is a company bulletin board where you can interact with all employees in your company, ask and answer questions in real-time without having to resort to an endless sequence of emails.

When a new employee enters the company, one of the things we propose is to create a post in Yammer, which introduces the new colleague within the corporate community.

The post can mention the person, report his experience, and introduce it to those groups of interest that he will find within the social network.

3) Using live events

With the spread of digitization and of remote working, live events can be an extremely advantageous tool to cover the distances between workers and maintain fluid and instantaneous communication.

For a new worker entering the company, it is possible to create a live event in which a member of HR or his future supervisor interviews the new person in a double interview.

What is intranet.ai?

intranet.ai is the ready-to-use corporate intranet, designed to reduce costs and implementation times, thus creating a collaborative and modern digital work environment:

Initial price of 3,650 €/year for a complete intranet
50+ applications, including advanced search, document management system, push notifications via Teams, personal profile, and FAQ pages
100% integrated with SharePoint Online and Microsoft 365

Schedule a Demo

4) Self-reviews with the HR portal

Through the intranet, Human Resources can monitor the well-being of employees, automatically asking them for a self-assessment, on a quarterly or half-yearly basis.

These reviews are used to recover feedback from the employee through percentages of progress or stars of satisfaction, to facilitate the compilation of the feedback form and, consequently, avoiding personal discontent. In addition, within the intranet that becomes a real HR portal, Human Resources can not only ask for feedback on colleagues and bosses but also allow users to make anonymous reports in the company through a special form. This is the "whistleblowing" argument, which is mandatory in certain companies.

Constantly monitoring the feedback of those who work in the organization allows you to have a complete picture of the dynamics within it.

5) Job posting

Within the intranet, all open positions within the company can be published on the HR platform. This is a very useful practice in large companies, which allows you to check for internal availability, before starting a search for new candidates outside the organization.

Each employee always has access, on the HR portal, to a list of the possibilities of upgrading his job, the relative deadlines to present himself, and the requirements of the new role.

In turn, HR can have an application management area in which receive the profiles of all colleagues who have decided to propose for specific open positions.

They can directly access the personal area of all employees, to evaluate the application through the digital curriculum that colleagues keep updated.

Discover our job posting system

Post open positions on your intranet and make them visible to all departments. Employees will be informed automatically.
HR can view candidates for each open position, evaluate people who access information and monitor engagement.
Filter the results of intranet.ai My profile according to your needs, find the perfect candidate in your company, and directly check the candidate's profile from his page.

Discover our job posting system

6) Display annual objectives on the intranet

The intranet - through the personal area for the user - can help to monitor corporate and personal objectives from year to year.

Whether they are qualitative or quantitative, once awarded by superiors and confirmed by Human Resources, they can appear in each employee's area, to have clear points on which to focus during the year and determine the terms of growth.

The employee's paths to certain goals can be carefully followed by adding in the personal area information or activities preparatory to these achievements, to offer their direct boss and Human Resources a constantly updated vision.

In addition, it may be useful to have people include information on the activities that are being developed or already carried out in the HR portal, to offer their boss and Human Resources a clearer and more up-to-date view of the progress of the objectives.

It is true that there are many performance management platforms on the market but having a single point for the worker in which to get information from the company, taking advantage of the services that the company provides, and keeping an eye on the performance of his annual objectives is a plus.

If you use an external tool to manage the goals of your colleagues in the company, we recommend that you evaluate an integration with the intranet, intending to give the employee a point where to find communications, working documents, and quick access to their annual targets.

7) Engaging training in the intranet

Training through the intranet can be made more engaging.

Human Resources can stimulate the dissemination of training in business life through innovative methodologies on the platform.

Employee demand for training content, achievement of qualifications, training courses, any feedback that improves the training services, can be rewarded by starting on the intranet a collection points for the achievement of objectives, such as the granting of a virtual badge.

Any success of this kind can be seen in the "My Profile" area of the user or made public also in the company section.

In this way, once stimulated by these initiatives, HR can actively listen to the training needs of employees, thus ensuring a professional growth of their interest but always in line with company needs.

Discover our Digital Learning feature

Giuseppe Marchi

Microsoft MVP for SharePoint and Microsoft 365 since 2010.

Giuseppe is the founder of intranet.ai and one of the leading experts in Italy in all matters related to Microsoft 365. For years, he has been assisting companies in creating their digital workplace environment on the Microsoft cloud, focusing on people's experience.