In many of our intranet projects, the human resources team are heavily involved and bring with them a range of interesting challenges and perspectives.
And as the employee experience becomes increasingly fundamental to the modern intranet, HR employees, engaged and invested in delivering new intranet software tools, will play a vital role in driving business operations forward.
What is a HR intranet?
A human resource intranet is the use of a company’s intranet communications platform for internal communication with its employees. It enables the company to communicate values, goals and important knowledge sharing, guidelines, and training materials in an easy and comprehensive way, not only to new employees but also to existing ones.
Adoption of the company intranet as a venue for human resources can strengthen an organisation’s goals and motivate the entire workforce via company news, and internal communication on progress.
Through management and leadership teams using this digital workspace, the company can keep both in-house and remote employees up-to-date.
What should be on a HR intranet?
A HR intranet should be used for sharing employment documents such as health insurance, scheduling HR related meetings, employee contact information, and training manuals.
In addition to this, self-service features and crucial documents should be uploaded online so that your employees can access them whenever they want. By enabling this information- sharing culture, it can lead to improved employee engagement and over the long-term, increase business efficiency.
Indeed, a new company intranet must include tools that fulfil key HR objectives, such as improving company culture, internal communications, and employee engagement. With that in mind, there are several intranet best practices that your HR intranet team should follow.
Let’s go into more detail about these below:
7 modern intranet best practices your HR team should adopt
Provide self-service tools
Employees work better and more productively when they have greater autonomy. By providing them with an intuitive and productive intranet software platform from which to work, team members can easily manage their own admin tasks and paperwork – such as submitting expense claims, booking time off, and locating information – rather than having to liaise with other team members to do it for them. This essential intranet feature can save HR managers countless business hours.
Improve compliance with dedicated policy management
mproved compliance with company policies is one of the most important HR intranet best practices to follow, and dedicated policy management software will make this process much smoother.
Additional functionality, such as “mandatory read” widgets that promote pending policies directly on your intranet homepage, will also help boost compliance rates, especially now with the rise of remote work becoming more commonplace than ever before.
Simplify vacation and absence management
Stop using spreadsheets and emails to manage employee PTO. Instead, utilise your modern intranet’s built-in holiday booking system to manage all leave request types, from annual leave and training days to sickness and emergency time off.
HR team members can also use the intranet app to set holiday quotas, approve or decline requests, and run reports to identify any unusual absence trends whether they are office based, remote, or frontline workers.
Provide multiple internal communications tools
Your HR intranet includes a variety of communication tools that make it easy to share HR-related intranet content with your staff, as well as improving cross-team communication. Make good use of social intranet software tools such as internal news channels, blogs, and communication spaces to keep internal communications flowing and provide employees with up-to-date information which is easy to access from their mobile device.
Employee recognition is also an important objective for HR teams, and your intranet includes “thank you” tools and digital rewards that allow staff to thank others for going the extra mile, as well as endorse each other for their skills.
These tools can be used on social media style integration pages, and via instant messaging applications.
Increase staff retention
Keeping top talent in a competitive workplace is always on the minds of the best HR teams. By providing staff with an intranet that’s intuitive, easy to use, and customisable, you’re providing an environment that fosters employee engagement and productivity, as well as giving employees an opportunity to learn new skills for job and career growth.
Integrate with existing HR systems
However feature-rich your intranet and extended digital work environment are, there will always be core HR data and functions that are better served by a focused HR system, such as payroll software.
Therefore, the ability of your platform to integrate with other applications and pass relevant data between the systems is critical for HR Managers.
Consider your remote workers in the digital workplace
Your HR team will understand that remote staff and frontline workers are operating under different challenges to your office-based teams. The ability to communicate and collaborate on the go, using mobile devices & digital workspaces – when continual access to a desktop is unlikely – is therefore vital for increasing intranet adoption and having an effective intranet.
Providing non-office based staff with a mobile app version of your intranet is important for long term intranet adoption and effectiveness.
Company intranet software for your human resources teams
Our HR intranet software improves information sharing, streamlines processes and helps to onboard new employees quickly and effectively. It provides self-service areas that encourage autonomy and speeds up processing time.
Try our demo today to see these features in action!
