HR – one of the most essential yet underrated departments in every organization. The department that maintains the internal work environment as well as brings in the best talent from various sources to enhance it! The department that keeps up with all the small and big intra-organizational responsibilities, such as employee wellness, payroll management, grievance redressal, employee engagement, workplace-policy enforcement, day to day operational management and of course, recruitment and onboarding in order to deliver the best workplace experience to each and every employee in an organization.
What poses the greater challenge is the popular belief that an HR cannot function properly unless they are directly in contact with all the employees but the present scenario keeps all the possibilities of such real-life encounters at bay and the HR department too needs to find a digital way out to keep up their usual productivity and more during these conditions as well. Here’s where an Intranet can truly proclaim itself to be a Savior.
How an HR Intranet can Benefit your HR department
Building a sense of trust and security within the organization isn’t a task as easy as it seems. Instilling belongingness and loyalty in every employees’ mind is quite a tricky task and requires crucially extra efforts when it needs to be done remotely without having the scope for organizational intermingling for months. Here’s when harnessing the collaborative powers of an intranet comes to the rescue.
As the HR department is expected to be involved with a huge amount of data and information that needs to organized as well as be passed on to the concerned employee, department or the organization as a whole, utilizing a well-designed modern SharePoint intranet can do wonders for them.
Get to know how your HR Department can benefit from an HR Intranet
1. Information Management
The HRs can use the intranet as the one-stop-solution to all the information that might be required to be stored, searched or circulated. A number of widgets such as Announcements, Birthdays, Work Anniversaries, Leave stats, Team information, Employee Directory, Organization Chart can be put to work to keep everyone updated and acknowledged alike. Quick navigation and search features of the intranet will ensure easy access to those information which otherwise would have consumed a huge amount of time, if provided on demand-basis, thus saving the precious time of both the employees and the HRs.
2. Suggestion Corner
An HR department that aligns well with the needs and expectations of the employees it the one considered to be a successful one. An HR should regularly gather feedback and suggestions from the employees on various organizational issues be it as simple as a celebration plan, an online get together, the menu preference at the office party, etc. or as formal as the preferred employee benefits policy, leave policies, travel policies etc.
An intranet can be used to gather such feedbacks across the organization with just a few clicks with a number of interactive features like forms and polls. This will not only let the HR department take up the decisions accepted and supported by the majority of the workforce but also help them make the employees enjoy a sense of ownership over the organizational decisions.
3. Community and Network Management
Be it your personal life or professional, relationships play a crucial role in our survival and success be it the relationship between a manager and an employee, between two colleagues, between board members, with investors, clients and so on. An intranet provides a great platform to nurture these relationships with better and enhanced communication.
Human Resource is the sole in charge of enhancing the organizational community, workplace culture and formal as well as informal employee networking.
An intranet can be used to maintain a proper record of birthdays, work anniversaries, event calendars, personal feats of employees, and much more. Posting event announcements, fun office jokes and jargon, event photos and videos, or organizing fun polls on the intranet can be a great help in keeping the employees engages and building up their rapport with each other.
4. Performance Management
Intranet readily can act as a quite effective as well as transparent platform for performance management.
This particular personalized section can be added to the dashboard of each employee to include documents such as JD, KRAs, etc. that can be backed up with business apps and utilities such as Idea Board, Kanban App, Project Tracker, Timesheets etc.
This section can be accessible to the employee and their reporting manager to allow them to continuously evaluate and review the performance of the employee, leading to better productivity. Appraisals can take place on the same platform as well.
5. Recruitment
An HR intranet can be a great resource to the recruiters. It can easily be used to facilitate the internal recruitment, departmental switches and referral system by making the external as well as internal vacancies known to all on the hr intranet dashboard, thus making the recruitment process quick and transparent. Employee directory embedded in the intranet itself can establish a clear departmental clarity and connectivity among the employees.
Additionally, dedicated intranet sections within the HR intranet portal can be created for each recruitment drive to connect all the interview panelists to ease the process of centralized discussions and shortlisting.
6. Training and Feedback
The pre-joining courses that the interns and trainees might need to go through before joining or in their very initial days before starting their work under someone’s mentorship can be managed and the performance evaluation can be done on the intranet by the recruiters. It can be a very convenient platform to track and monitor their learning speed and course completion accompanied by frequent feedback from the new joinee as well.
7. Onboarding and Offboarding
The onboarding process becomes extensively easy if the HR chooses to introduce the new employees to the organization with a catchy and innovative widget on the intranet, be it a flashcard, a textual welcome, an introduction video, and so on. All the company policies can be stored in a dedicated HR portal in the intranet that can be shared with the new employees on joining and can be ever accessible to every employee while keeping the accessibility permissions intact for each job profile.
Offboarding, though underrated, is a very important step to maintain a healthy relationship with the ex-employees and should be carried out with utmost care so that those bidding adieu to the organization take only the positives to their next company. Along with the usual farewell, a virtual farewell on the company intranet portal can be a great idea to make their last moments in the organization absolutely awesome.