SharePoint HR System and Intranet to Improve Corporate Culture and Employee Experience

Customer

Our Customer provides mortgage and investment consulting services. The company is truly committed to its clients and treats its team of 80+ employees with the same care.

Challenge

The company had a SharePoint intranet as a centralized platform for document storage and corporate information sharing with its employees. While employees were happy with what they had, the HR team lacked automation in many processes such as recruiting, onboarding, employee performance management, and more. They wanted to complement the intranet with an HR system (also SharePoint-based, if possible).

The HR team also expected that in the course of developing a system for their goals, they would need to update their existing employee intranet too. Namely, they wanted to make user profiles self-managed by employees.

So, the Customer was looking for SharePoint consultants and developers, well versed in SharePoint use cases, out-of-the-box functions and platform customization.

Solution

ScienceSoft’s portfolio of 100+ SharePoint success stories was a convincing argument for choosing our team for the project. Our consultants ensured that, if built on SharePoint, the HR system would perfectly meet all the Customer’s expectations. Additionally, it would be easy to integrate it with the intranet.

As the Customer couldn’t provide well-defined system requirements, we started by delving into each business process the company wanted to cover with the system and planning the most convenient workflows with maximum automation. We created demos for all the planned functional modules to give the Customer’s HR team a real feeling of working in the system and spot all inconveniences at the concept design stage. We worked proactively, suggested ideas and checked if they solved the required tasks optimally. This way, we planned a future system that the Customer approved.

Then our SharePoint developers implemented the functional modules of an HR system:

• Recruitment management. We created automated workflows for vacancy request submission for two types of candidates: internal (the Customer’s employees who want to change a job position) and external (candidates who fill out a vacancy form on external resources like job aggregators). In both cases, an item with a candidate’s data is created automatically in the recruiting module upon a form submission. After the candidate has been assessed and interviewed, they are informed of the result by email. If a candidate doesn’t fit the job position now (e.g., due to insufficient expertise), they can still be added to the archive for future reference. If a candidate is approved, a recruiter fills out a template, and a job offer is generated automatically. The approved candidate e-signs the job offer via DocuSign, and the item with their data is created automatically in the employee list.
• Issue reporting and tracking. We elicited what kinds of issues employees may report and created a workflow for issue submission. Employees fill out a Microsoft form in the intranet and choose one of the six issue types:
  • Customer complaint.
  • Whistleblower report.
  • Conflict of interest.
  • Health and safety issue.
  • Incident relating to business reputation, privacy or regulatory issues.
  • Technology incident.

• An item with an issue is created automatically in an HR system and routed to a responsible person.
  • Employee performance management. We implemented a self-service tool for employees to set quarterly performance objectives, outline an action plan of how they are going to achieve them, and report on the fulfillment. We created custom lists of performance objectives. Employees’ managers have access to performance reports and give their assessment of results, which impacts an employee’s payment bonus.
  • Policy management. To improve the employees’ adherence to corporate policies, our team created the following workflow. HR employees add a new policy and send it to the involved employees. After an employee confirms policy acknowledgement, the access to the policy gets closed, and the employees get a quiz to check their knowledge. If they don’t pass the quiz, the process repeats.

Alongside the HR system development, ScienceSoft’s team introduced changes to the employee intranet. We created:

• Custom design of user profiles with personal and work details. Employees can edit their profile information (e.g., update contact details) and trigger a manager’s approval mechanism.
• Financial incentive types that define how payment bonus is calculated for each employee.
• A tool to plan and inform about employees’ time off (vacations, sick leaves, days off). We integrated user profiles with iPayroll and created a custom SharePoint web part with a calendar where employees appoint their days off. Upon a manager’s approval, the record is instantly synchronized in user profiles and iPayroll for correct salary calculation.
• A page with instructions for equipment stock register and a possibility to remove the equipment employees have returned from a user’s profile.
• The view of social media feeds from corporate Instagram, Facebook and Twitter on the home page.
• Boards with employees’ birthdays and newcomer announcements.
• Groups of interests with leisure-time social and sports activities where employees can apply.

Results

With a newly created HR system and an upgraded employee intranet, the Customer streamlined its HR processes and improved overall employee experience. The Customer speaks highly of the commitment and self-management of ScienceSoft’s consultants and developers.

Technologies and Tools

SharePoint Online, React.js, Fluent.ui, Power Automate.