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| Home » Archives » Intranet and HR #2 | Friday, July 30, 2010 |
 
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Intranet and HR #2
In early 1993, just over 8 years ago, there were approximately 50 servers on the World Wide Web (WWW). Today there are over 30,000 servers providing information to an estimated 30 million people world wide. This figure is growing by roughly 2 million new users each month. If you find this amazing, think about this: the development of new corporate intranets is growing at 4 times the rate of the above! This fact comes from a Toronto Globe and Mail article of October 16, 1996. Much has been written about the value of the internet and more recently corporate intranets. Most corporate internets and intranets evolve in a three-stage process: 1. Marketing: marketing the corporation, its products and services known to the cyber community. 2. The company starts to link legacy information systems to internal or external web servers. 3. And this is the promise of the future (but it will be here faster than you think), where applications will be built on the Web from the ground up. Today we will talk a bit about phase 1, the information first put up on the Web by a company. This phase in itself has many sub phases, or levels of evolution as an organization. Generally speaking, a company will first start off on the Web with information about its products and services. The results are often positive and this leads to adding other information about the company to the web site, including information about job opportunities for internal and external applicants. Quite often however, the addition of human resource information to the web site comes about due to the "Jones" effect, remember them, they are the folks your parents tried to keep up to in the 60's. Once a company has its product/service information up on the Web, someone asks HR, "...when are you going to put your information up?...". Now Human Resources is in a bind, they are busy just treading water, and after all, the Web is "techie" isn't it? Not really. Using the net has got to be just about the easiest tool to come along in a long time. If the company has someone qualified to put up all that information about our widgets, surely they can spend a bit of time putting up some human resource information, you say. But where to start? As in any effective Human Resources organization, careful planning should be used to develop a strategy to put information and applications on the web that will have an immediate positive effect on the organization. It may also be useful if that first application was relatively low risk and quick to implement. Who needs another 2-year implementation project! Some of the most popular early Web projects for Human Resources are: Communications
Pension Plan Information Wellness Information Job Postings One of the advantages of choosing Human Resource Policies as a first or early project is that the information is already available in automated form. Someplace in Human Resources is the latest version of the file used to print the current hard copy HR manual. One of the potential disadvantages is that if that manual was poorly designed in the first place, placing it in on the Web is not going to make it easier to read. If your Human Resource policies are considered well written, easy to follow, then the move to the Web will be an easy one. Does your HR policy manual have a clear index with the categories easy to find? Does the index quickly point you to the exact information you are looking for? Does the section your looking for give you what you need and that's it? If the answers to these questions are "Yes", then your well on your way to having an application ready to go up on your corporate server. Communications consultant Tony Kerekes of the Ashton Consulting Group works with clients to develop effective human resource policy material. He helps organizations ensure that the information needed by the employees is quick and easy to find. Tony says "...look at it from the user's perspective, understand what they are looking for; get the reader involved, moving from one point to the next with ease...". If the corporate Human Resource policies were developed with this in mind, moving from hard copy manuals to the Web will be relatively simple, and the employees will use it. Once the project is complete, the hard copy manuals will be phased out as the Web information can be updated as changes occur, and no distribution of amendments, or new manuals. Once on the Web, employees should be able to find the information the need quickly and efficiently. Some of the steps involved are: a) first off the Human Resource home page option must be easy to find on the corporate home page; a quick click of the mouse should take the visitor to the index of Human Resource options, the HR Home Page; b) The HR Home Page should clearly indicate the various options available, including the Human Resource Policy Manual. c) The HR Policy Manual should have an easy to follow index. d) Links to various policies should be quick and efficient; linking to separate links is faster, particularly when innovative smaller icons are used and not large, time consuming graphics. e) Each separate page should make it clear where the next links are to and the visitor must be able to move quickly through the system. Once the new HR Home Page is operational, seek input from your clients, the employees of the company who must use the new manual; are they satisfied with it; what can be fine tuned to improve it, etc. What have we accomplished? Well for starters: We have saved a lot of trees. We no longer have to print new manuals or even updates for insertion if the latest information is available on the Web. Recycle the old manuals!
We save time in printing distributing the manuals. Employees no longer have to amend their copy of the manual; no more inserts. The latest information is available on-line; less danger of someone looking up the wrong information from an old manual. Hopefully employees will make good use of the information, saving time and money, avoiding grievances, etc.
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