Guide to Human Resource Portals

The dynamics of business and market are experiencing unprecedented change. Technology is taking over the global workspace by infusing top-notch capabilities that help drive efficiency, resiliency, and relevancy. In fact, Statista forecasts that investments made for digital transformation initiatives are going to hit $3.4 Trillion by 2026. That means technology is going to play a predominant role to thrive, scale, grow, and evolve amid the changing needs. And, to this, HR is no exception.

The human resource division works as the backbone to any growing organization. It works not just to ‘support’ business strategy but to ‘enable’ it. Thus, HR transformations with modern technology solutions play a critical role to growth for continuously evolving businesses (especially large-size companies).

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The HR landscape is witnessing a massive overhaul with more and more types of technology systems emerging in the market, changing the way the department works and manage processes. HR transformations with technology enable improve competitiveness, growth, and profitability. Therefore, its time organizations ask themselves:

• Are we able to stand by the competition in the market and meet employee expectations amid continuous shifts in needs?
• Is the organization ‘adaptive’ enough to offer employees adequate learning and development opportunities?
• How much attention do we pay to employee feedback?
• Are there fair appraisals conducted for employees across the organization?
• Have there been enough transparency to individual employee growth initiatives practiced by the company?

And probably many more questions like this.

It’s high time, organizations retrospect their actions towards growth and continuous scaling. Today, businesses are not just focused on ‘acquiring growth’, instead they are looking to achieve ‘profitable growth’. To this, HR transformations with technology plays a crucial role.

A lot of the above questions can have favorable answers, if your organization has a human resource portal in place. Human resource portals work as a central source of information for employees to access their details from onboarding to exit. Let’s get a comprehensive understanding of human resource portals from this guide – elaborating the ‘what’, ‘why’, and ‘how’.

So, what are you waiting for? Discover in detail about ‘what is an HR portal’, ‘Why you need HR portals’ or the challenges HR portals resolve, and ‘how it helps your business’ (emphasizing the benefits) from the below article.

What is HR Portal?

A Human Resources (HR) portal is a web-based platform or application that serves as a central hub for various HR-related activities within an organization. HR portals (or human resource portals) are tech-driven systems that work as an information deck or resource repository carrying employee details in a centralized form enabling easy access for everyone across the organization (whether employees or employer). The primary objective of HR portals is to streamline administrative tasks of the human resource division, and make information (whether related to the organization or employee) accessible easily through a self-service system. This portal on one side helps eliminate the manual work done by the human resource department that enable save time and drive efficiency, and on another side, it helps boost employee engagement and collaboration. Most organizations prefer HR portals to be dynamic and interactive, making one system work-out solutions to core HR challenges. But, this preference of one company often creates confusion for the rest.

Human resource portals are often confused with employee portals because both have similar functions in place. However, human resource portals are different from employee portals in distinctive ways. Let’s have a look at how:

The above comparison should be enough to get a clear insight into the ways ‘HR portals’ and ‘employee portals’ differ. Both types of HR information software systems have an immense number of similarities. However, the only distinct difference is the ‘user interaction ratio’.

Hope this clears your understanding of ‘what is HR portal’. Let’s have a quick overview of the top challenges that makes it important to have human resource portals (or HR portals).

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Five Challenges That Employee HR Portal Solve

Today’s business ecosystem revolves around digital disruptions, shifts in needs, intense market competition, and greater emphasize on profitable growth. In context to this business environment, HR management is also becoming highly challenging. Why? Because HR has now grown into an imperative part of every organization’s C-suit, focused to drive strategic growth for the business through hiring allegiant talents having top-notch skillsets, effective employee performance management, continuous upskilling of employees to latest best practices, and ensuring adequate growth of the people for higher retention.

Therefore, the rules of the game to thrive, sustain, and evolve is now changing. HR capabilities like optimal service delivery, integrated HR systems, timely access to accurate workforce data, on-time support, and employee self-serve have become important than ever before. But, what are the key pain points that boosted the importance of these HR capabilities. Why there is a need to enhance these human resource management capabilities in order to achieve higher scalability, sustainability, and growth?

Getting answer to questions like this are key to drive decisions on HRMS development with high tech investments. So, without much ado, quickly have a walk-through of the challenges that an HR employee portal solve.

#1 Challenge: Regulating Employee Onboarding

The most important KPI for your HR department is to hire or recruit new employees who match the skillsets needed by the organization to scale and grow. While the HR team works relentlessly towards this goal, the same team has to ensure that the new recruits have the best onboarding experience. However, this often becomes a great challenge for organizations. Many companies experience gaps in their onboarding system. Such gaps leave a bad impression on the employee and often leads to low referrals, and several times cause high employee churns.

In fact, as per the onboarding statistics of G2, 32% of global executives consider their onboarding experience as poor. Additionally, a study by Jobvite shows that 34% new hires left their job within the first 90 days due to some bad experience that includes an ineffective onboarding journey. This clearly reflects the need for a well-structured plan to overcome the challenge.

Solution:

Leveraging an employee HR portal has the potential to streamline the process with efficiency. Why? Because an HR portal enables easier and faster disposal of information that helps the new recruit connect with the organization better. New employees are often highly hesitant towards asking questions. An HR portal (or human resources portal) works greatly to make the answers of those unasked questions (based on common queries) easily accessible to the new recruits. It makes the delivery of information more structured and streamlined that helps enrich the experience of the new recruits with better information, outstanding guidance, and thoughtful approach to make them feel welcomed.

#2 Challenge: Company-wide Collaboration of Employees

Employees of an organization should know the latest happenings of the company. But, keeping everyone aligned in an organization is often a critical challenge for the HR team. There are many news and latest company affairs that remain unknown to the people of the company itself. That makes company-wide communication and collaboration a gap for the HR department.

Additionally, the Human resources department often find it a challenge to make employees of an organization interact with each other as a collective group representing the brand. People of the same organization work as separate entities. It’s hard for people from different departments to interact, communicate, and collaborate. Conventional HR strategies of overcoming such collaboration and communication challenges seem ineffective in the present business environment. Thus, leveraging an HR portal can help minimize this gap to a great extent.

Solution:

HR portals help boost company-wide collaboration of employees through announcements on birthdays, work anniversaries, applause on achievements, and more. The tech system makes it easier for people to connect and recognize each other as a work family. It works greatly to make cross-department communication and socializing simpler. Additionally, it works as a platform to spread awareness about the company’s latest affairs through announcements made via the portal.

#3 Challenge: Managing Employee Details with Transparency

HR departments (especially large enterprises) often face the hassle of managing employee details (includes tracking daily attendance, work performance, payroll, and more). There is a lot of redundant work that goes into the management of employee information on a day-to-day basis. Additionally, maintaining transparency about the information being stored about the employee is another challenge for the HR team.

Solution:

An employee HR portal or HCM system helps to reduce this whole lot of administrative tasks by making the processes work through the tech system. A lot of these administrative tasks are handled through automation set in the portal. It makes the information easily accessible to the employee ensuring 100% transparency. Additionally, the HR team could save an immense amount of time and effort that goes into managing the redundant administrative tasks, enabling smarter use of the existing human resources.

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#4 Challenge: Fair Performance Evaluation

There is one in every five employees with complaint of unfair appraisals and low recognition of performance in every organization. It is a hard job for the organization to ensure that their employees feel the right way about their performance evaluation. To this, a streamlined and highly transparent process needs to be in place. However, this most of the times doesn’t work out in the right way, leading more and more employees feel demotivated and ultimately impacts retention.

Solution:

An employee HR portal works to make this process fair and transparent. Since, the HR department doesn’t directly control each individual’s work, it becomes difficult for them to question the feedback of the reporting heads (RH). However, making the process work through the HR portals make the performance evaluation much streamlined, efficient, fair, and transparent. Additionally, the evaluation happens from both ends (reporting head and human resource division). The portal also makes the data visible to the employee helping them know the factors driving the appraisal decision. Therefore, this helps eliminate the job dissatisfaction and boosts productivity.

#5 Challenge: Low Employee Feedback Cycle

Often, there is a low employee feedback cycle observed in IT enterprises. It is hard for the HR team to roll-out company-wide feedback while maintaining privacy of each participant. This restricts the HR department from regulating the culture of the company and fill gaps, leading to high employee churn rate.

Solution:

HR employee portals work effectively in making these feedback cycles benefit the company. Additionally, the privacy of the participant remains anonymous ensuring complete honesty from the employees. The feedback cycles ensure that the gaps in terms of culture and work gets mitigated through effective HR strategies, helping to build a strong team and an enjoyable workplace.

Having these above set of challenges against the benefits offered by a HR management portal (or human resource portal) emphasized the need and importance of technology to take over transformation. Leveraging a tech system like HR portal helps make your organization more resilient towards the constant changes in the market and enable it to thrive even in tough times. Now, with a clear understanding of the challenges that an HR portal solves, it is time to have a quick look into the key features of an HR service portal.

Key Features of an HR Service Portal

You know what is an HR portal and what key pain points it solves. Now, it's time to have a clear outline of the features that goes into a perfect HR service portal. A thorough guide to HRIS system will help you identify the role it plays and the business benefits it offers. Let’s have a quick look-through at the top features of HR service portals.

These above are the core features that goes into an HR portal and work as an integral part of an organization’s ecosystem. These features help streamline human resource processes and makes effective collaboration possible for the fast-growing organizations.

While an HR service portal is undoubtedly a powerful tool for managing organizational information and its employees. It minimizes the burden of administrative tasks from the human resources department, and empower the team to make strategic contributions for long-term success of the organization. The tool doesn’t eliminate the human work, it actually enables it. There is more scope of improvements and better possibilities of collective growth, ultimately helping the organization scale faster.

Now, explore the best practices of HR employee portals.

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Best Practices of HR Employee Management Portal

To streamline the people-related processes and add substantial value to your overall business using an HR employee management portal, you need to follow a few guidelines or some best practices. Here are some of such best practices elaborated for you to level-up your HR transformation initiative.

1. Simple and Easy Navigation Throughout the Portal

Your HR portal system must offer a simple and easy navigation to your employees. This means you need to ensure that the portal’s design, accessibility elements, and functional structure aligns with the employee usability and navigation standpoint. Why is this a vital practice or guideline to consider? Because your employees may or may not have technology agility or system understanding. Hence, your HR portal system must offer easy navigation to them, taking them through a journey and flow that doesn’t require the individuals to put-in much thought. The tool is going to be a self-service system and so the user journey, FAQs, forms, dashboards, etc., should be created keeping the employee needs in mind, driving efficiency and better management.

The portal aims to achieve self-service efficiencies and reduce frustration among employees. Therefore, create a navigational experience that fulfills this purpose.

2. Personalize at Every Possible Points

A human resource portal is a tool that is specifically made to make collaboration and management of people streamlined, error-free, and efficient. It is not a one-size-fit-all system but rather a place where each individual gets to find their specific information (that may even involve confidential details) with action points specific to their use cases. Therefore, personalization is very important to ensure the employees get the right information and remain aligned or updated to the ongoings in the organization.

For example: There can be some employees who need constant updates on investment modules to save on taxes, while there can be a set of employees who have more curiosity on the company benefits package that involves leave structure, appraisals, and more.

The interest point of different employees differ largely and so an HR self-service system is needed to give the right information to individuals with a personalized or customized dashboard or navigational structure (wherever possible).

3. Self-service Access for Everyone with High Security and Privacy Systems

Privacy and security are vital to every employee. The confidentiality of information in an organization related to each employee works as the core. Any tool or technology system used has to ensure that employee information remains secured.

Thus, it is important that there are different portal access credentials provided to each employee with complete security and privacy in place. Employees need to change their credentials given by the HR team to secure its access.

There have to be set input points in the portal that ensures employees can access the portal from browsers of different gadgets like PCs, laptops, mobiles, and more. Additionally, an IVR (interactive voice response) system and text-only version for HR portal web might be necessary to be able to achieve secured access to the tool for all kinds of access scenarios.

4. Evaluate Processes Before Setting Automations

Automations are always aimed to reduce workloads and drive efficiency into processes, with human minds working more towards strategies while technology handling the tedious regular administrative tasks. However, automating inefficient processes can rather double down on workloads and multiply the challenges for professionals in-charge of the process. Automating HR processes is not an exception to this criteria.

HR portals deal with large amount of data inputs and involve company-wide people. Therefore, you can’t set automations without verifying the process efficiency. Every process in the system needs to be cross-verified for accuracy to ensure people don’t struggle and the automation actually reduces workloads instead of doubling it. For this, promote ownership by creating cross-functional task force with representatives managing the planning and implementation of these automations in the portal system.

Remember, your HR portal support the organization’s culture with improved processes and new technologies. Thus, it is a best practice to cross-verify and evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of every automated process to maximize the potential of the technology system in delivering the right value.

5. Regulate and Refresh Portal with Fresh Content

The HR employee management portal boosts company-wide collaboration and also is a shared point of information for people in the organization. If the employees don’t find the portal content being regularly updated, they will probably drop using the system. This may lead to calls and enquiries to HR that ultimately rounds up to the same challenges that the portal aims to solve. Thus, it is a mandatory guideline or best practice for the HR department to keep regulating and refreshing the portal’s content on an everyday basis. A better way-out is to create a well-defined process of updating the information in the HR portal to not miss-out on regulating fresh content and being able to keep up acquiring the right value from the tool.

There can be added features to the HR employee management portal that will help users receive updates when the portal content gets updated. Some of such features include an InMail message notifying users that a module has been updated, a push notification for mobile version of the portal, a text message updating users about a revision in the HR portal content, and more. There are many ways to informing the employees about the content update in the HR employee management portal. However, the first and foremost thing to consider a mandate is to refresh the content in the system without fail, ensuring the engagement as well as the right outflow of information.

These above best practices work as the core guidelines for the HR portal systems. Having these guidelines in place will help you maximize the output of the human resource portals and make your investment yield the optimal value.

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Build HR Self-Service Portal with Radixweb

Empower your employees and organization with an HR self-service portal to focus on more value-added activities and put all administrative or repetitive tasks on autopilot. HR self-service portals are powerful web-based systems that enable employees to address their HR needs independently. It is a people management tool that helps to boost overall productivity for businesses and also expedites access to significant employee-related information in a centralized place. The core benefits you get with an HR portal includes:

• Streamlined workforce management
• Regulated employee and company information at individual’s disposal
• Structured employee onboarding
• 360-degree feedback cycles
• Reduced errors and workloads
• Transparent appraisal processes
• Better management of employee learning and development or upskilling programs
• Accelerated employee recruitment through effective applicant tracking systems integrated in the HR portals and more streamlined referral programs
• Easy answering to common HR enquiries through FAQs

Adapting to a self-service HR employee management portal is a great way of introducing reforms to your business human resource operations.

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Build a business-defined and highly featured HR self-service portal with Radixweb. Our professionals will analyze and evaluate your HR self-service portal needs and architect solutions that brings real-time value to your business with streamlined and efficient HR workflows. We have helped pioneering global businesses to develop new-age and customized HR self-service web portals that simplifies complex processes of human resources department, streamlines operations, enable meet constantly changing needs of business, and helps enrich employee experience. Consult with our software experts to explore more about HR portal solutions and the ways it might benefit your business.

Final ThoughtsThe above guide has been quite self-explanatory, emphasizing the need of HR portals and the role it plays to streamline business operations. The use of technology is an effective way of eliminating the redundant work that human resources perform, saving lots of time and costs. Therefore, being ‘adaptive’ to the new evolutions in the market is the only way to thrive in adverse market conditions. Your business can have 2x ROI, improved brand impact, and 3x scaling capacity with the right use of technology throughout the operational channels. HR portals are just the right start to begin with ‘adapting to the tech evolutions for continuous growth’.As a leading firm in this niche having 25+ years of market experience for tech excellence, our experts can help you with the appropriate solutions that will drive real results and positively impact your overall business growth. Together, our HR software development professionals will design and build a human resources portal with features and functionalities that meets the needs of the business and shows real ROI vs investment.To get the right help or obtain the most appropriate consultation for your unique business type, get in touch with us today!