Top 5 Intranet Features That Help HR Departments Reduce Repetition

• Provide teams with controlled access to folders
• Eliminate emails and use digital forms to capture and automate tasks
• Promote HR Initiatives and News
• Employees can personalize their profiles and more.
  

These tasks range from form creation and management, attempting to grow cross-functional and cross-generational teams, managing non-traditional working arrangements, identifying new talent, and managing performance effectively.

It’s not just HR-specific software that can help to lighten the workload with these tasks. Modern intranets are packed full of features that can help HR departments achieve more with less of their own human resources. We’ve narrowed down the list to our top 5 most beneficial intranet features for HR.

1. Provide relevant teams with controlled access to folders

Being part of the HR team, you’re not exactly in charge of user management across the organization. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t consider what HR information, forms, and assets you need to distribute to employees. Take matters into your own hands instead of leaving things up to IT administrators. By creating folders with restricted access levels inside your company Intranet, you’ll be reducing your own workload.

Manage the following:

• Provide different HR resources to full time, part time, casual, remote and contract workers
• Provide different HR resources based on site, state, or group of locations
• Provide different HR resources based on department, role, or level within the organization
• Provide Onboarding Experiences for team members who have just joined the organization
• Provide Employee exit information, for those who’ve put in their resignation, taken a redundancy, or have been terminated
• Provide Overtime/travel/expense resources specifically for employees with these job requirements/allowances

By restricting access at a group level, you’ll be able to introduce and manage the right set of resources available for each employee on a need-to-know basis, as well as reducing the need to share the same set of resources over and over again. You can also update and add new assets as needed without remembering who to share them with (added bonus - send out a targeted news blast on updates or important new information).

The CentricMinds intranet solution integrates securely with Active Directory (or any LDAP compliant data source), so if you already have defined users, groups, and roles, then this process can be expedited. If not, you can use our own security management environment to manage users. Additionally, we can help show you how to configure things for a smooth transition if needed.

2. Eliminate emails by easily creating digital forms that employees can complete securely via the Intranet

Are you buried under a mountain of emails? Or dealing with paper-based forms submitted by employees, with a challenge of how to capture the information and route through the organization for approval?

Part of the day to day struggle within HR is in the sheer volume of information that goes through various systems. While most companies will already have forms such as timesheets, leave requests, and employee contact details available through their existing intranet or via separate applications, what about everything else?

How easy is it to submit a doctor’s certificate if an employee has had sick days that require evidence? What’s the process for developing and distributing new training packages that require testing at the end of the course? How about keeping track of performance management?

And what if any of these forms or processes need updating? How easy is this to do?

With the CentricMinds intranet solution, you are able to design, publish, and edit forms at any time, all through our simple Drag and Drop Form Designer. The way we’ve created this tool is so that anyone can use it to create forms easily.

On the employee side, forms are simple and responsive, allowing employees to access them across desktop, tablet and phone to complete.

3. Promote HR Initiatives and News. Personalize content according to team interests

Personalization is the new black. We’re all used to personalization in our personal lives (via news feeds, targeted advertising, etc.), so why not extend the favor to employees in the workplace? With the right user profiles, you’re able to do just that - through the Intranet.

Ensure Homepage content is targeted at the group and role level by sectioning your employees as we mentioned earlier. Target relevant HR Initiatives and News to different audiences. It’s not difficult to do once your user management is in place.

You can even go beyond the group and role level to embrace further personalization. How? By learning how each individual interacts with your content. If an employee is clicking on more HR links about training or internal job opportunities, then you can present them with more of this content in the future. This requires a bit of heavy lifting behind the scenes, so for more info on how to configure this feature, ask us how.

4. Allow employees to personalize their profiles

Why let Facebook and Instagram be the only Social Networking  platforms your employees interact with? Enterprise Social Networking works two-fold in building an Employee Engagement Platform.

With Team Engagement built into your Intranet, this becomes a new channel to facilitate natural discussion, team collaboration, and fun conversations.

It can also be a way in which employees can find new contacts within the company - perhaps to reach out to for specific expertise, or to encourage someone to join the weekly Thursday lunchtime volleyball game.

Encourage employees to build out their user profiles, which can include:

• Areas of expertise (projects they’ve worked on, clients they’ve supported, etc.)
• Educational background
• Time spent within the organization
• Previous and current roles, projects, departments, and locations they’ve worked at
• Plus other interesting pieces of information such as languages they speak and personal interests. Anyone else watch Game of Thrones?

Employees can find help (or like-minded individuals to connect with) easily, encouraging knowledge transfer and social connections to boost employee engagement.

5. Capture employee opinion by conducting quick surveys on the Intranet

Want to gain employee feedback right now? Rather than race around the office jotting down opinions, or sending out emails that may not see a reply, you can easily send out instant surveys via your Intranet.

Make your questions short and sweet so that you’ll get the most engagement. For example:

• Which date would you prefer for our office Christmas party? Dec 6th or Dec 13th?
• Are you interested in first aid training? Yes or No?
• Do you know someone who might be interested in our Project Manager role? Share this post!
• What facilities do you want upgraded at your site?

Again, by utilizing groups and roles (and even further grouping, depending on how complete your team profiles are), you can target specific groups of people within the organization when you’re posing questions. Keep questions short and worded for maximum impact to get the most responses. Remember it’s a platform designed for encouraging employee engagement.