Intranet as a Support for the Human Resources Department

Intranet system is a brilliant tool not only for the management but also for the Human Resources department to manage the documentation concerning employee issues.

HR specialists have so much on their mind that keeping track of the administrative issues of each employee is a real challenge. It is possible to help them, however, because many activities are repetitive tasks that require proper documentation. You can use intranet automation for this.

The intranet provides comprehensive tools that enable the improvement of the HR department's activities, such as the flow of proposals, inquiries, or various types of applications from employees. How else can the intranet support the HR department? Detailed description below.

Employee profile

The employee profile on the intranet is a place where the employee can edit their data by themselves. As a result, the HR department and the system administrator do not have to do this themselves, and employee satisfaction and commitment increases.

Thanks to the employees being able to edit their data, they can also better express their personality, experience, and expectations by showing other team members who they are. The employee decides what specific information they want to share with other members of the company. All rights to the information being displayed and edited by the employees can be flexibly managed by the administrator.

Vacation schedule

A portal for handling employee issues may facilitate the submission of vacation requests. This can be done directly via the intranet, and the automated process will guide the application through the approval stages, notifying the appropriate people. At the same time, the employee will be kept informed about the status of the application.

Another functionality is associated with vacations and other absences from work – the employee's absence schedule. Every time an absence occurs in the employee's calendar, the schedule will be automatically updated. Information may also be entered manually by an authorised person. Every intranet user can have access to the absence schedule. This improves the efficiency of planning joint work and events because everyone can easily check whether a given person is at work on a given day or not.

Internal recruitment

Internal recruitment becomes much easier thanks to a dedicated module in the intranet. Internal recruitment is carried out by advertising job vacancies and accepting applications via the intranet. Recruiters can also use the intranet to find suitable people to fill vacancies within the company by themselves and ask them to apply.

Communication

We are aware that the obvious task being carried out by the intranet system is communication. The HR department usually uses this function quite often, informing about changes and news. By using the intranet to disseminate information, you can significantly reduce the number of inquiries made to the human resources department, allowing the HR personnel to perform other tasks.

The intranet is also a great place to gather and answer the employee's HR-related questions. Responses are being archived for the benefit of other employees. Appropriate tagging and the use of metadata make it easier to find specific answers.

New employees onboarding

Research shows that the time it takes for new employees to become productive can be up to 12 months, which means a significant loss for the organisation. Still, companies do little to streamline the onboarding process, so that those first precious weeks are a positive experience for a new employee.

How often does it happen that during the first days of their work new employees are being shown around the office and introduced to the number of people whose names they simply cannot remember? Has it ever happened that you spent your first day going through rules and procedures that you never had the opportunity to go back to and re-read?

There are a few things you can do to make this process a lot less burdensome. The intranet is perfect for this purpose. Why? The intranet can help with employees onboarding in several ways:

1. Welcoming new employees

Make sure the new employee is comfortable and welcome. The intranet allows you to create functionality for presenting employees. Thanks to this, other employees will be able to recognise the new person and say hello to them.

2. Information page

Creating a website introducing employees to the company's operations is a great idea! Thanks to this, the new employee will find everything they need to get to know the organisation in one place. On the information page, the new employee has the opportunity to go through the introductory information step by step, at their own pace, without having to ask several people separately. This module allows you to attach introductory documents, videos, general information, pdf presentations, HR forms and much more.

3. Checklist

You can create checklists before the new employees come to work. They can cover the first days, the first few months, up to the first year of work. In the beginning, it is good to focus on the first days. It is the most urgent and limited time. What should such a checklist contain? The tasks that the employees must complete within a certain time frame and in a specific sequence, such as:

• checking the logins to make sure they have access to all systems needed to perform their work,
• the formalities, which is filling in all the required forms,
• reading the information about the company (basic values, mission, etc.) and determining if everything is clear,
• watching the training videos,
• filling in one's employee profile.

4. Feedback

After the trial period is over, meet the new employee again in order to obtain the feedback on how they thought the onboarding process was going. Obtaining such information is an important step in the process of employee onboarding and its possible improvement. Collect opinions and use them to improve onboarding within the company. A good way to do this is using a survey for the new employees that must be completed on the employee onboarding page in the intranet.

Summary

Intranet is an excellent tool for achieving the goals of the HR department. In order for the personnel administration procedures to work efficiently, it is good to examine the needs of employees and then design the intranet based on these needs.

If you plan to implement Intranet in your company, use Drupal consulting services to carry out this process in the most effective way.