5 Essential Features That Every Employee Portal Must Have

Author: Ranny Watson

The Intranet for organizations is just like a powerhouse that keeps them going. Making the operations simpler, allowing better communication, keeping the information safe are just a few common features that employee portals have. Here are five other essential features that you must consider.

Homepage

Homepage is just like the headquarters of the site. It is the first thing that an employee will see as soon as he or she signs in. Homepage in an employee portal plays a vital role as this is where each employee would go for services and resources. Great intranet portals are said to have well organized homepage that give easy access to everything that an employee needs. It keeps on updating as per the changes in the department, job function and organization.

Tools & Resources

The second most important feature that is needed in a staff portal in order to make it the best intranet platform is a variety of tools and resources. Tools make things and operations easy for employees. The intranet must allow easy access of tools to employees from a central location. There are many tools that are external but still accessible through a single click from the site. Go for a portal that has this feature.

Communication

The fact the employee intranet portal is supposed to be a central hub for collaboration and document storage, it should also offer multiple ways of communication for employees. The site should have a list of employees with their email addresses, official numbers and the details about the departments they belong to. This way the platform can be used for providing necessary notifications to the employees, communication and much more. Through such a direct integration of communication tools within the intranet, smooth communication can be allowed among employees.

Advanced Search

Next essential feature for your intranet is advanced search. The usage of intranet depends on organization to organisation. Many organisations use it for communication and collaboration purposes while others use it for storage of information. There are also so few organizations that use it for all. So depending on your use, you can ensure the content and information you put in can be easily found. And this can happen by customizing the default configuration of searchable display properties. Hence you can configure search bars in your employee portal either side wide or make it component dependent. This way you can find content quickly and easily.

News & Events

Last but not least is the display of news and information related to upcoming events. Most of the organizations use employee portals to disseminate all the internal communication like new stories. You must get an intranet that allows easy content authoring similar to what a content management system does. The key functions must include view, editing, uploading and social features like commenting, sharing and liking.

Talking about the events, the intranet keeps the employees engaged by helping in easy consumption of face to face events. This helps organizations to build relationships, conduct training sessions etc.

Now that you are aware of the essential features that give rise to the best corporate intranet, it is time to make the work life easy for your employees and adapt the best intranet portal.