What to include in an HR portal

Here are some elements to cover in your employee portal:

• Leave management: Let employees manage their leaves and track the status of leave requests. Managers will get visibility into their team’s availability, and the HR team can track absenteeism.
• Benefits administration: Build a self-service setup to share information about employee benefits, such as insurance, maternity leave, 401 (k) plans, wellness programs, and other perks.
• Payroll and compensation: HR teams can use this portal to create and manage the monthly or annual compensation database. Employees can also access their payslips, tax forms, and other documents.
• Learning and development: An HR portal can give employees access to online training resources. You can also add registration forms for workshops and learning-related events.
• Performance management: Add tools to help employees and managers set quarterly goals. This section can also record performance reviews and feedback reports.
• Recruitment and onboarding: HR teams can use this portal to consolidate hiring efforts. This can include tools to manage job posts, track applicants, and execute the employee onboarding flow.
• Employee engagement: An HR portal can also include polls or surveys to collect employee feedback. Features like reward points and recognition badges are great for boosting engagement.

Put simply, an HR portal centralizes company information and acts as a single source of truth for your entire organization. The result? A positive employee experience.

Build a single source of truth

Too many tools for each HR function can confuse employees and frustrate your HR team. Choosing the right technology is the top priority for 40% of HR teams. And 51% of teams find it difficult to integrate new tools into their existing HR setup.

An HR portal acts as a repository of employee and company data. It includes everything—from an employee directory and organizational documents to payroll and performance management.

This unified system can minimize discrepancies and build better alignment between different teams.

Improve team collaboration

An employee portal enables your team to communicate seamlessly, access information on demand, and collaborate on different tasks.

For example, you can check out shared calendars in your HR platform to help employees coordinate more effectively. Engagement features, like rewards and recognitions, can also create a sense of community.

Enhance employee autonomy

Autonomy is a decisive factor in employees’ success.

Research suggests that employees feel more motivated to produce results when they have more autonomy to perform their tasks. It positively impacts their performance and creates a higher sense of job satisfaction.

An HR portal can empower employees to work more autonomously since they can quickly access important information. With an employee portal, you remove all friction points and set employees up for success with more control over their work.

Plan and manage HR initiatives

A typical HR setup involves many moving parts. Handling many processes and resources can be daunting, especially when you don’t have a strong technological system.

This is where an HR portal can truly pay dividends.

An employee portal can streamline repeat workflows to eliminate confusion and minimize errors. It can also facilitate strategic planning based on people analytics. So, you’re not relying on guesswork to plan new initiatives and make informed decisions.

Such a portal supports the growing need to reduce complexity in HR processes and make services easily accessible.



Maximize efficiency with automation

Finding ways to improve efficiency is a top priority for 68% of HR executives.

Why? Because nearly three-quarters of these teams use spreadsheets and email to manage HR processes. This shows a serious lack of automation to improve HR efficiency.

With an HR portal, you can automate tasks like leave management, payroll, benefits administration, and more. Automated workflows would also free up your HR team’s time to focus on more strategic tasks. And it’ll lead to lower error rates.

Audit your existing HR management setup

Start by understanding what’s missing in your current HR setup.

Is it too many tools causing confusion and chaos? Or is it the lack of automation creating loose ends in your HR processes?

Think along these lines to list the main roadblocks that adversely impact your team’s performance. This will prepare the groundwork for your employee portal by clarifying the problem statements and what to build first.

You can also conduct employee feedback about HR processes using:

• Surveys
• 1:1 interviews
• Questionnaires
• Team discussions
• Real-time observations

For example, Alex Gilev, a product designer, explains how he spent two weeks interviewing 20+ employees at a company to understand their needs and expectations from a back-end employee portal.

He leveraged this data to find strategic opportunities for building this portal.

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Remember: the first step is simply to analyze the status quo and document all this data. You can also extract meaningful insights to discuss the big picture of your HR portal with key stakeholders.

Identify strategic goals and create a roadmap

When you know exactly what problems to solve, you can set goals for your employee portal and build an implementation roadmap.

Involve multiple stakeholders in the process of defining the goals for this portal. Here are a few objectives to set for your HR platform

• Reduce the time spent on administrative HR tasks by 30% within the first year.
• Improve employee satisfaction with HR services by 20% as measured by annual surveys.
• Ensure 100% compliance with employment laws through automated tracking and reporting.

With these goals in place, it’s time to outline a roadmap for developing the portal. This roadmap should explain the phases in which you’ll build functionalities—starting with the most high-value tasks that fix critical issues.

Here’s an example of an implementation roadmap divided into three release phases with time allocated for user research:

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Use a no-code solution to build the portal

So, you’ve identified key objectives and created a roadmap to build an employee portal. What next?

You have two options:

• Hire a team of developers to build this portal at a steep cost
• Use a no-code solution like Softr to build it on your own effectively

With a no-code platform like Softr, you have greater flexibility when designing this portal with your desired features. You can build this portal without writing a single line of code by simply using its drag-and-drop editor—sweet!

Softr lets you create the interface for an employee portal built off an external database. Connect this database from any external tool like Google Sheets, Airtable, SQL, or a custom platform.

You can choose any of Softr’s pre-built templates to start your development process. Or start from scratch and design the platform entirely on your own.

DS Automotive, an independent Jaguar Land Rover specialist, is an excellent case study of building internal employee portals using Softr.

The company’s director, Dan Smith, tried multiple platforms to create such a portal but struggled with restrictions on creating and customizing features. With Softr, it was super convenient to design the front end for his Airtable database and deliver a seamless user experience to his team.

He leveraged Softr to build an extensive and user-friendly database with crucial company information, such as vehicle data, job cards, and history.

Need more inspiration to start designing your HR portal? Check out this workshop, which will help you plan, design, and iterate an employee portal using Softr.

Conduct pilot testing and make iterations

Before a full-scale launch, conduct a round of pilot testing with a small group of users to ensure your portal has no glitches or errors.

You can run a test launch with the HR staff and a few employees from each department. Record their feedback and spend time making necessary improvements to the platform. This might require design changes, feature addition, and bug fixing.

Launch the portal with multiple rounds of training

One of the HR portal's best practices is to launch the platform with in-depth employee training.

Make it easy for users to adapt to this new portal and use it actively. You can do this with a quick help center, training videos, and product walkthroughs.

Additionally, create a support chat to answer people’s queries in real time and ensure a seamless, disruption-free transition phase.