For all administrative environments or Organizations, a Human Resources department is the key structural element.
HR SharePoint site is especially the backbone of companies with SharePoint as their collaborative environment in one way or the other.
You can’t even imagine a company without the Human Resources department for legal reasons.
In any case, the HR department is always connected with employees and the need for sharing information, updates, and documents with employees is vital.
SharePoint Intranet is an excellent platform for Human Resources to share and circulate information.
Human Resources collaboration using the SharePoint site is a great idea to put in place the latest look and feel to a new sharing space.
SharePoint sites are simple to install and have great user adoption capabilities, thus it might help employees to go and readout latest company policy, handbook or news about onboarding new candidates.
Human Resources SharePoint Site is very easy to control, because most users can only read data and only few will be having higher permissions.
This article will be a quick guide to dictate how to create a simple and humble HR page using SharePoint Online (Office 365).
What Template?
What template is appropriate for an HR page? The basic thing you need is to choose an appropriate template for the site.
In the SharePoint Online Team Site (with or without an Office 365 Group) and a Communication Site are the two available options.
My personal suggestion is a communication site for Human Resources SharePoint sites as it fits the purpose.
HR page’s primary goal is sharing information, we do not need the team-collaboration functionalities of a Team Site.
Communication Site is excellent for building web parts, so you can pick the Communication Site as a template for your HR Employee Site.
Finding what you want to share
Finding what you want to share with your team is very important. The look, feel and productivity of your page depends purely on the features you focus on. From my experience, the essential elements that are usually a part of a typical HR Site are:
Announcements: policy updates, new employee announcements, tax, and medical insurance deadlines
Upcoming events: company holidays, events, lunch dates
Company Policies, Forms, Templates
Employee Birthdays and Anniversaries or Best Employee awards
Links to external websites: insurance providers, accounts, etc.
Employee handbook: Private folders where each employee has their own personal secure area accessible by Manager and HR
HR Knowledge Base: information detailing various HR processes inside the company.
Employee Onboarding or offboarding process
Converting Requirements to Efficient SharePoint Web Parts
Announcements: News Widget
News Web Part is a superb mechanism for this.
You can create pretty colorful and visually appealing announcements with images. All the announcements appear in sequential order on the main page.
In Hub sites, you can roll up news from the HR site and surface them abreast of the Intranet page.
Upcoming events: Calendar
For displaying the upcoming events SharePoint Calendar is used. SharePoint calendar is the best requirement for this as you can show events, holidays, lunch dates, meetings.
Events can be rolled up from multiple sources and can be displayed on the main Intranet page as well.
Company Policies/Forms/Templates: Document Library
The document library stores the documents as it is the best place that suits the purpose. Based on categories and departments you can either use many libraries to store various types of documents.
Employee Birthdays/Anniversaries/Awards: Contact Widgets
Here we can use a custom list to store employee names and birthday/anniversary dates and show it on the page.
The cool thing about this custom list is that you can use the view functionality to filter and sort it in a particular order.
Links: Link widget
The quick links widgets to handle all the links.
HR Knowledge Base: Modern Site Page
You can use Modern Pages to create a knowledge base.
An amazing knowledge base can be created by linking pages to allow users to search by keywords and tags.
Employee On-boarding/Off-boarding: Flows
Usually, On-boarding or Off-boarding involves the building of workflows because it needs approval from authorities. This is done with the help of MS Flow.
Finally Creating the Human Resources SharePoint Site
With the help of the above widgets create a communication site and arrange all the web parts in well-organized order to finally create the Human Resource site. You will be able to customize the look and feel of your site based on your preferences.