Workscape Institute

One of the many challenges currently facing HR leaders is communicating effectively with a dispersed workforce.  Whether these are workers are in the lower 48 or offices around the world, the challenge and the need is to ensure that employees are continually connected to everything from strategic initiatives to day-to-day operations.  In an era marked by Blackberries and iPhones, where employees need – and have the capacity to both “broadcast” and receive – more information, a portal can play a vital role in ensuring connectedness and driving employee engagement.

At Workscape, we are fortunately prepared for these workforce dynamics.  As we expanded to offices in Boise, Idaho, London, UK, and Bangalore, India, we saw an opportunity to leverage our software experience and internally deploy an HR Portal.  This resulted in the rollout of H2O, the aptly named Home2Office employee portal, a platform that has transformed the way team members communicate with one another.

H2O provides a shared space for vital information and self-service applications that has empowered employees to conduct transactions independently. The result was less demand for HR staff to search for policies, procedures and files and fewer requests to perform administrative tasks, and a great boon for my HR team. Now we can focus on continually improving our pay-for-performance, talent retention, and employee development strategies.  However, our portal has yielded significant additional benefits, such as:

• Increased best practices sharing across functions and locations

  • Our portal is an aggregation point for employee benefits, self-service, learning, and functional best practice information, shared in real-time.
  • Team members also use the portal to proactively identify peers that have relevant experience for an upcoming project.

• A universal vehicle for reinforcing our values, mission, and experiences

  • Our HR team can provide announcements and resources about a range of topic in a familiar and easily accessible way to all team members around the world
  • H2O gives more internal exposure to the events and accomplishments of our team members, and to the work individuals and our company have done to give back to our community

• A seamless employee experience

  • With single sign-on (SSO) convenience, employees aren’t hindered by a series of URLs and passwords, and can reliably access the information they need.
  • Dynamic content and easy navigation make the portal very “sticky,” and users visit the site regularly to ensure that they are informed.

The success of an HR Portal implementation is largely dependent on the effectiveness of the broader HR strategy for employee communications and corporate culture.  However, the need for Web-based tools that advance such strategies is growing, and we’ve realized the benefits of supporting strategic initiatives with effective technology.  The 21st century workforce is becoming more global, more dispersed, and more specialized.  Does your HR team have the technologies in place to support this new talent landscape?  Also, do you have any positive experiences worth sharing?