HR Intranets ideas and examples

Most HR intranet vendors target IT specialists and engineers: they talk about servers, processors, HTML, Cloud, and other technical stuff.

Human Resources professionals, however, are looking at intranets to deliver very specific business benefits such as internal communications, improving productivity, disseminating the company culture and building a happier, better-connected workplace.

Fortunately, a new breed of HR intranet vendors have built solutions which wrest the power in the hands of the HR department.

This article is meant to help HR managers to understand the technology basics of intranets, the some common options you can leverage without having to go through the engineering department.

What is an HR Intranet?

Today, unless its the smallest of teams, people in an organization hardly get time to interface with each other in person. An Intranet is a digital hub with a collection of online tools which bring all employees of an organization together even if they don’t meet in person. While different business divisions use intranets for different purposes, an HR intranet seeks to fulfill the following objectives specific to the HR department.  The following list ties some of the common functions an HR department has with some of the common intranet tools:

  • Give employees access to common HR forms and templates like leave approval, appraisal, expenses etc, through the document management section
  • Post important company events on the company calendar for all employees
  • Manage online training events through recorded videos or even web conferencing sessions
  • Recognize achievers by posting “Employee of the month” on the intranet page
  • Disseminate important corporate messages through announcements
  • Create a virtual communication hub for all employees through group chat
  • Allow employees to view each others skills and profiles via business social networking
  • Automate common HR processes like leave request, expense management etc though database apps

HR Intranet examples

Recently, we published an article that has gotten thousands of views: 7 real intranet examples, where we share an HR Intranet that includes elements like project management, buttons, forms, important documents an links and, among other stuff, a photo of a team.

HR Intranet example

Here’s another example.

HR Intranets best practices

One of the key challenges of intranets is that they’re ignored. You’re not alone, many of your colleagues also see their efforts bearing no fruit in a sophisticated intranet that nobody uses. A few best practices may help:

  • Personalize workplaces: Don’t use generic intranet templates, but build one which reflects your company’s brand and values.
  • Be multi-media rich: There is nothing more boring than a screen with voluminous text. Add images and videos to spice up your intranet.
  • Make your intranet the HR hub. Make your intranet the go-to place for employees to access essential information – like HR forms, vacation request apps and so on.

To read more about Intranet best practices, go to the following article: Intranets best practices

How to build your own HR Intranet

Here’s something important that will save you tons of time and money: you don’t need technical nor coding skills to build your own intranet. You can create your own intranet with a simple drag and drop interface to create a highly customized intranet environment. We’ve created a step-by-step tutorial on leveraging HyperOffice to build your own intranet from scratch—with zero coding skills required.