The HR Intranet

In one way or another, every department in a company serves employees to some extent and needs to be represented on a company intranet.

And yet surprisingly HR’s presence on the intranet is often understated despite the fact that HR’s core business function is to serve the employee!


HR certainly should be one of the driving forces behind a social intranet.

HR should be a critical decision maker in selecting and implementing intranet software, and HR certainly should be one of the driving forces behind a social intranet. We could list 100 ways in which a social intranet benefits the business, and we did with our 101 Intranet Ideas eBook, but to condense it down, here are three common goals for the intranet:

1. To support the company culture and collaboration

2. To improve and streamlines communication

3. To offers tasks, education and knowledge to employees.

HR is tied into all three. HR can prove value through the intranet by streamlining employee tasks and offering employee growth opportunities. Top of mind is vacation requests, benefits, retirement, career growth, workplace compensation, recruiting, safety, health & wellness, HR policies, grievances and conflict resolution.

Build an HR Intranet that will help employees, and big bonus! - help HR too!

One huge advantage of an HR intranet is the ability to tap into your existing talent pool of employees and reduce the cost of staff turnover.

For those of you in IT managing your intranet sites: turn off your computer monitor off, get up, stretch your legs and take a walk - to the HR department. Ask HR pertinent questions. Where do they get bottlenecked? How can they better reach out to employees and educate them? What pain points do they have in getting information out to employees? Discuss ways that the intranet and its many tools and functions can be leveraged to improve this bottleneck.

One huge advantage of an HR intranet is the ability to tap into your existing talent pool of employees and reduce the cost of staff turnover. When you do recruit, start the search internally with your intranet. This gives employees the growth opportunities within and lessons lessens the burden and financial toll with the recruitment and on-boarding process.

Here’s how you can do it:

1. Employees are collaborating online through their social intranets – listen in.

2. Employees are receiving gamification rewards and public intranet kudos for deliverables.

3. Robust social directories include employee skills, passions, proficiencies, expertise, training background, contributions and intranet content authored.

4. Witness employees who mentor their coworkers and show team leadership.

5. Look for those key individuals with outstanding performance, attitude and personality traits.

6. The intranet will show you the employees who are truly engaged.

Think about it. How powerful is that? Your social intranet can show you the talent pool that is already within the walls of your company, and who could be considered for promotion.

The intranet can also be used heavily during new employee on-boarding processes. Encourage the “people helping people” nature of a social intranet. Create an employee wall or social networking space where newbies can ask questions and employees of the company can give advice, provide a warm welcome, help them get acclimatised, speak to the culture, and smooth out the on-boarding, thereby taking the burden off HR.

Create task-based lists for new employees through a “new employee site” on the intranet.

This site can address key areas and documents that they need to read and tasks to perform as part of their first week:
1. Read the company brand promise.

2. Read the customer service delivery statement.

3. Go through the posted annual or quarterly goals on their department site.

4. List online forms to fill out, and then route the forms to supervisors / managers for approval.

5. Link to online learning videos about the company or your products.

6. Create quizzes and tests as part of the on-boarding process.

HR offers task-based needs and immediate value for employees. This in turn creates immediate value for the intranet.

Ask HR their opinion on how the intranet is growing, how it is it resonating and how it could it offer more value to the employees. What initiative does HR have, on the go, and how could the intranet support those initiatives?

Get HR involved and invested in your intranet. You can’t afford not to. 

CONVERSATION

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