Employee Websites

Types of Information that Employees Need to have at Work.

The days of providing employee related information on LANS and through paper materials is over. Today, most companies have employee intranets or portals. What they use these intranets for is varied, but they have enabled the employee access to a wide variety of information and tools anytime and almost anywhere (with the proper access). It takes a lot of hard work to design an intranet. What follows are some of the basic tools and types of information you should have on your intranet and some things you need to consider when supporting and maintaining it.

Human Resources (HR):

Probably one of the biggest sections of a company intranet, HR sections provide the following:

• Processes and procedures
• Career opportunities
• Vacation request forms
• Forms related to adding new family members, changes to benefits, etc..
• Employee appraisal forms and processes

Finance:

Finance covers everything from a list of pay periods to submitting expenses electronically. Tools and information can include:

• On-line Pay stubs
• List of holidays
• On-Line Expense submission

Learning and Development:

This is a very popular section with employees as well. It can have the following tools and information:

• Training policies and procedures
• Forms for submitting training requests and payment for course and other training materials
• Lists of courses (on-line and other)
• Reviews of courses
• Information on career planning and training plans

New and Events:

• News can include corporate news, industry news, local office news, etc…
• Events include social events for the company, visitors to the office, conferences coming up, etc…

Company Profile:

A company profile, mission statement, profiles of company execs and other personnel.

Product/Service Information:

All your company marketing material in one spot. This section can include details on products and services, case studies, proposals won, industry reviews, etc…

Team Collaboration:

Intranets also provide a location for teams to work together and share information related to a project they are working on. You could also have collaboration sites for Special interest groups within the company.

MySite:

It’s also becoming common place for an intranet to provide an employee with the ability to create their own site. This site is generally a combination of information and tools of interest to the employee that are already on the intranet and also a place for the employee to store their own information such as frequently accessed applications and web sites.

Things to consider:

If you intend to have your intranet be a record of source for company information or have HR/Finance and other applications hosted on it, then you need to consider the following:

• Governance – who owns the intranet and is responsible to ensure the information provided is correct and up to date and that all applications are working as expected. Consider having an editor with overall responsibility and then administrators for each section of content.
• Content Publishing/Enterprise Content Management – you will want people to be able to easily maintain the content on the site and secure the information properly
• Availability and Maintenance – your intranet is now becoming a mission critical site. You need to decide when the site can be down for maintenance, how long can it be unavailable (and this will happen), who’s supporting it and maintaining it.
• Security – who has what type of access, is information restricted to certain users in certain sections of the site, etc…