HR Website Design

In a major corporate Human Resources department we were asked to design an employee human resources self-service website for all employees. There were multiple tasks that employees required human resources assistance for from benefits, updating next of kin, pension plans etc. We were determined to look at each of these processes and determine if they could be placed on the website so that the employees could update them on their own without human resource assistance.

We used a large conference room to do the process mapping of the As Is process for many human resources tasks. We literally papered the walls with the forms required in order to make sure that we all understood all the steps. From employee surveys we knew that employees wanted speed and accuracy of service when updating the tasks. We identify eight tasks that could be easily updated by employees on the new website. We were eager to put these on the website, but I insisted that we do a To Be first for each tasks to make sure that we had simplified them as much as possible.

Once the To Be was established we constructed a preliminary website but did not roll it out immediately. We ran a pilot or a focus group with about twenty employees with the new website. We were relieved that it was well accepted and the focus group made some more suggestions that simplified each task.

We then rolled out the website for the entire company. Human Resources departments reported a big drop in employee walk-in traffic. We gradually added more tasks to the site but not without a focus group pilot first.