Call it Employee Portal 2.0 or Social Employee Portal, but if you want your employees to actually use it, it has to have some built-in social features that will make it easy and enjoyable for employees to communicate and work together on different projects.

As the title already suggests, self-service in an employee portal allows them to request annual leave, business trips or requests for transfers, as well as requesting other services, without having to fill in paper work and physically handing them in at the HR Department. A good employee self-service portal can relieve pressure on an HR Department by almost 50%.

Even though employee portals started out as human resources information systems (HRIS), most of them now contain a large amount of tools that companies generally use nowadays – Project Management, working together on a document, File Sharing, Video conferences, Knowledge Management, shared diaries and maybe even CRM. Daily involvement makes your employees familiar with your portal – and when something is trusted, it will be used.

The more ways there are to connect with the employee portal, the better. Hosting your employee portal on your own server or in a cloud, each has its own advantages and disadvantages, but the best scenario would be when employees can reach your employee portals through their usual browser, of mobile phones, tablets and desktop apps.

Many portal software suppliers offer detailed analyses about portal usage (in Bitrix24 it is called Company Pulse and it is even available in the free employee portal plans). The benefit of this, is that you can easily see which tools are being used and which ones are not, which makes it simple to identify any bottlenecks or any employees who adjust slowly and could use some extra help.

Curious? Create a free Bitrix24 account & see it for yourself. No desire or time to look into it yourself? Please call Make interactive and make an appointment for a demo without any obligations, on +31(0) 13 76 20 150.