Energize Your Employee Portal

One purpose of creating an employee portal or a corporate intranet would be simply to streamline the vast amount of information, messages, and conversations that occur in our daily work routines. Using SharePoint, we can customize a landing page on our employee portal that would focus on organizing and restructuring how we communicate. By sectioning areas of the page by function, employees can effectively and efficiently be on top of system alerts, announcements, dates and events, and social media conversations. Here are five suggestions to start and connect your workforce!

Use a colorful banner:

One of the easiest ways to introduce color and texture to your site is to use a top banner. You can capture the spirit of your organization by incorporating company logo and colors with meaningful images.

Keep it fresh by adding local scenery and meaningful tag-lines.

Try changing the colors or apply a different theme to brand your page according to your corporate guidelines by following these easy steps.

State your mission and core values:

A well stated mission statement can be inspirational. Not all does it gives purpose for the company, but also a direction for the future. For employees, seeing the company mission statement on the company portal, can be motivational and drive progress and success. A corporate mission evolves into an employee mantra.

Display the local weather:

Inserting a weather web-part is an easy win for the portal and the employees. For those of us who aren’t as fortunate to have an office with wall to wall windows, having the option to view the current weather on the portal will be our digital window to the outside forecast.

Add social media links:

Creating an employee portal means increasing connectivity, which in turn means being on top of corporate Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn feeds. Being able to quickly access social media links will empower employees to create relevant conversations, increase brand awareness, promote marketing measures and staying on trend.

List important news:

Let’s face it! We are all drowning in emails. We get bombarded with reminders, alerts, news, re-posts, and more reminders in our email daily feed. These emails can be disruptive and distracting! Creating a News web-part can consolidate numerous all-staff emails so that employees can view and review them on their own time. Employees can be in the know without having information overload.

Show upcoming dates & events:

We all manage multiple calendars at our place of work. Tracking staff meetings, department presentations, conferences and social events can lead to forgetting about other equally important dates. There are some dates that apply to all staff that might miss being added on to our department or team calendar. Consider creating a corporate calendar that will lists payroll period ending dates, monthly or bi-weekly pay-dates, annually benefit enrollment dates, corporate social benefits and special community volunteer events.

Make it fun: Show personality by uploading pictures from company events or interests.

I have found that using SharePoint to create an employee portal is a smart solution to generate, manage, circulate and archive corporate communications. These are just some features that we develop for our clients. If you are interested in creating an custom employee portal, feel free to reach out with your questions.