What is an employee centre?

A unified employee centre is important in that it gives employees across all departments and levels a means by which they can better understand their benefits, experience curated employee content, find solutions, request access, connect with employee communities and enjoy all the advantages of in-office support from any location and at any time. This gives modern hybrid and remote workforces the resources they need to achieve optimal performance while also freeing up IT, facilities and HR departments to move beyond traditional employee support roles.

Likewise, with full ESS options, employees have a central location to enhance understanding rather than having to jump through communication hoops to put in requests and wait for responses. Your workforce can quickly and easily resolve issues, find solutions and manage their information all at the click of a button.

Taken altogether, the importance of having a reliable employee centre comes down to improved efficiency, productivity and employee experience.

Giving your employees everything they need to perform well allows you to reduce the costs associated with hiring additional support-team members.

A working employee centre automates the approval process for requesting time off and allows managers to better track holidays and sick days and identify trends in employee absences.

Users can access and track benefits information without needing to involve HR and can update their information and request changes quickly and easily.

Bringing all resources and support options together on a central platform, your employees will be able to better collaborate to find solutions and produce higher quality results.

Usage data is automatically tracked and collected within the employee centre. Managers can then use built-in analytics tools to turn that data into actionable insights.

Correctly implemented, an employee centre functions as a single pane-of-glass for employees to quickly and easily find information across applications.

By improving the efficiency and productivity of employees at work and giving support departments more freedom to focus on strategic initiatives, an employee centre offers an improved return on investment over other, non-unified ESS solutions.

Finally, employees enjoy the autonomy and personalisation of the employee centre, creating an engaged and capable workforce that knows exactly where to go to get the resources and support it needs to do its job well.

To provide the advantages listed above, your employee centre solution will need to include certain features:

Using targeted employee communications, the employee centre must be capable of providing employee experiences and curating content based on the individuals’ needs and responsibilities. These targeted campaigns help improve the employee experience and give more personalised support and direction.

Manager Hub delivers a purpose-built destination for people leaders to stay informed and engaged with their teams by leveraging personalised resources to guide their leadership journey. Directly from the Employee Center, managers can view a summary of team insights,

stats, important dates, requests and action items for employee journeys. Notifications and alerts encourage people leaders to take quick action on the team’s most urgent needs and to stay ahead of important matters. People leaders can receive curated content via the Manager Library for company news and announcements, related knowledge articles, guides and tips, which gives them a single destination for the resources and tools needed to better lead their teams.

The employee centre should be easy to navigate and include built-in help options. Intuitive controls will help ensure that the benefits of the employee centre are not overshadowed by an overly difficult learning curve.

The days when work was confined to the office are long gone. Modern employees need to be able to access the full capabilities of their support systems from anywhere or even while on the go. The employee centre must provide full functionality on mobile devices.

One of the primary purposes of the employee centre is to function as a single set of controls for managing all relevant business applications. This means that full integration with the range of third-party apps is absolutely essential.

The employee centre’s ability to aggregate informational resources in a single location won’t provide much of an advantage without comprehensive search features. These search functions must be designed to allow your employees to find the information they need quickly, regardless of what department owns the information. Internal search functions put vast amounts of data resources at employee fingertips and ensure that finding the right information is a fast and painless process.

Relevant applications must be paired with tasks and placed in context so that employees know what software solutions are best suited for specific circumstances. Employee centre app launchers pair this information with curated experiences.

Out of the box reporting functions must allow users to see how campaigns are performing and evaluate the effectiveness of new initiatives in real time. Employee centre analytics must be comprehensive and accurate, and ready to generate reports at the push of a button.