Employee onboarding is your chance to immerse new hires in the company culture and equip them with the knowledge they need to hit the ground running. Unfortunately, employee onboarding often feels fragmented, with scattered tools and manual tasks.
Adopting better employee onboarding tools helps you leave a great first impression on your staff. But tools alone won’t optimize onboarding. Building a nimble, modern, and user-friendly intranet environment is the first step toward creating a connected onboarding experience.
Here’s everything you need to know, including how an onboarding intranet can set your new hires up for success.
Why Building an Intranet Matters for Employees’ Onboarding Success
An intranet solves some of the biggest challenges that employees face during onboarding, including the following:
- Information overload
- Lack of access to documents and information
- Slow ramp-up
Intranet-based employee onboarding tools help you overcome these problems via automation, accessibility features, and engagement. A great intranet is also vital for your employees' long-term success. It will help you create a better employee experience and promote retention.
That’s the beauty of centralized employee onboarding tools. You’ll empower new hires to meet the company’s immediate talent needs sooner and set them up for long-term success within the organization.
Key Steps in Creating an Intranet for Employee Onboarding
Creating an intranet may seem daunting. The good news is that the path forward is clearer than you might expect. Here’s how to build an intranet that doubles as a dynamic employee onboarding tool:
Step 1: Define Goals and Stakeholders
Before you invest in an intranet employee onboarding tool, you need to get everyone on the same page, including:
- HR
- IT
- Department leads
Get everyone together to discuss what content the platform needs and how the intranet will be integrated into your existing processes. Be flexible and give leadership members from each department a chance to voice their concerns.
Remember, each department views the onboarding problem through a different lens. Every department has a part of the puzzle.
Work together to set clear goals for the initiative. Identify what you hope to achieve, such as a higher retention rate or a shorter onboarding process. Make sure each objective is measurable and realistic.
Step 2: Choose the Right Platform
Once you know what you are trying to achieve, it’s time to find employee onboarding tools that can get the job done. While there are many options out there, a Microsoft SharePoint-based intranet like hubley provides scalability and governance like never before.
You are in control of the employee experience and can set custom governance rules to protect your business's integrity. Ensure your policies are followed company-wide through automated enforcement.
hubley also integrates with the entire Microsoft 365 productivity ecosystem, meaning your team members can continue using tools they are already familiar with.
Step 3: Design Employee-Centric Pages and Navigation
Now that you’ve chosen a platform, it’s time to create an environment that helps new hires and existing employees thrive. Every page should be easy to navigate so users can find the information they are looking for.
hubley includes templates to help you create usable pages and resources faster. Our platform includes templates for:
- Onboarding checklists
- Welcome pages
- FAQs
- Policies
What used to take days and an entire IT team can be handled in a few hours by one or two employees. Our drag-and-drop templates make it easy to build an environment that will resonate with your employees. From day one, they will be immersed in your company’s culture, thanks to your intranet.
Step 4: Integrate With Existing Tools
Since hubley is built on the SharePoint platform, it easily integrates with all of the Microsoft productivity tools you are already using. It connects with Outlook, Teams, and HR systems to eliminate silos and provide a centralized resource for all of your content.
Providing your team with an integrated ecosystem reduces the need to hop from app to app. They can work within your environment and focus on completing their daily tasks on time.
The result? Fewer errors and a more efficient workday benefit everyone.
Step 5: Automate and Personalize With AI
Use Copilot to create personalized onboarding tasks for each new hire. You can track their progress and set up automated alerts to remind them to get their mandatory tasks completed on time.
Copilot delivers the power of artificial intelligence, enabling your team members to work smarter and more efficiently. AI can elevate the employee experience, especially during onboarding when team members are still learning their way around your technology stack.
Combining Copilot with hubley adds important layers of safety and redundancy to your tech stack, allowing you to adopt AI without fear.
Step 6: Launch, Train, and Measure Success
Be transparent about your decision to adopt an intranet employee onboarding tool from the very beginning. As the go-live date draws closer, ramp up your communications with your staff. Let them know what features you included, when you are going live, and anything else they need to know.
Invite feedback and questions. Your employees will have many questions about the new platform and how it will affect them. Face these concerns head-on to reduce change resistance. Use what you learn to make the environment frictionless and more engaging for your staff.
Features to Include When Creating an Intranet for Onboarding
When building an intranet for onboarding, make sure that your platform includes these key features:
- Personalized new hire dashboards
- Automated onboarding workflows
- Employee directory and org charts
- Policy library and training resources
- Feedback forms and surveys for continuous improvement
These are just a few elements to include as a starting point. Customize your intranet to suit your business's needs and the challenges of your industry.
The Role of AI in Building an Intranet
Artificial intelligence, such as that delivered via Microsoft Copilot, helps automate content recommendations and task completion. Copilot’s predictive search capabilities will populate content that is likely to be relevant to a user based on their recent activity. Contextual help queues up documents or knowledge-base resources your employees need.
AI also delivers actionable data insights to identify bottlenecks in your onboarding processes. Once you know what these bottlenecks are and why they exist, you can eliminate them to create a better experience for new hires.
Benefits of Building an Intranet for Onboarding
Investing in an intranet with onboarding capabilities is a wise move for just about any business. By adopting an intranet for onboarding, you can unlock the following benefits:
- Consistent, centralized information delivery
- Faster new hire ramp-up
- Enhanced engagement and communication
- Reduced administrative load for HR and IT
The bottom line is that a great intranet platform benefits everyone in your organization. When new hires have excellent experiences and managers have a clear view into each employee’s journey, the whole team wins.
Why Choose hubley to Create Your Microsoft Intranet?
hubley is built on SharePoint and integrated with Microsoft 365. That combination sets the stage for a seamless implementation process with virtually no disruptions to your day-to-day operations. hubley’s pre-built onboarding templates and automation tools will save your team time and help them scale content production.
Since our platform is scalable, you can adapt it to your business's changing needs. hubley is AI-ready, allowing you to tap into the latest technologies for onboarding and employee engagement.
Explore the hubley onboarding hub today.
