Using Company News Articles
HR Partner's News Articles feature is a great way to keep your employees informed (after all, communication is key to a positive employee experience!). Whether you want to highlight company achievements, shout out employees on their promotions or recent new hires to welcome them, or simply update your team on a new policy's release, news articles are a great way to keep everyone in the know.
Creating an Article
The first thing you need to do is to click on the 'News/Poll' option on the far left-hand menu in HR Partner. This will show you a list of news articles and polls already in the system.
To add a new News Article, click on the green "+ Add A New" button on the top right, and select the News Article option. On the next page, you'll go through the article's setup.
| Category | You set up different categories of News (e.g General, Urgent etc.) and you can allocate an article to any of these categories. |
| Summary | This is a short 'teaser' paragraph that will be shown to your employees on their portal. Make it something short but interesting to get their interest. |
| Content | This is where you type the actual content of the article that you want your employees to read. Don't be afraid to use the toolbar on this editor window to change fonts, add some colour or images, or even add links to other web pages. |
| Publish On | This is the date that you want the article published on. You can 'pre-load' articles in the system and then set the date at which they will appear on the employees' portals. |
| Publish Until | This is the date that the article will be automatically removed (not shown) to your employees. You can leave this field blank to make the article stay up indefinitely, or else put an end date in for articles with a designated lifespan. |
| Department Access | Normally, news articles are shown to ALL employees. Leave this field blank to keep it that way. However, if you have an article that ONLY pertains to employees within a certain department (e.g. all your sales staff), then you can enter in one or more departments who will be the only ones to see this article. |
Active |
You can nominate whether this article is active, i.e. will be shown on the employee portal. There may be occasions where you need to remove an article for a short time - instead of deleting it, you can simply make it 'not active'. Similarly, if you are typing up a long article and want to save it and come back to it later, uncheck this box so that your work in progress is not accidentally shown to your employees. |
| Highlight Article | This option allows the article to be visible to your employees from their ESS Portal Dashboard on the Highlighted News & Polls widget:
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| Allow Comments | You can opt to allow your employees to enter comments on an article, or not. It is entirely up to you as to how much discussion you wish to encourage. |
| Department Access Allowed | This allows you to restrict the article to those only within specific departments. Leave this blank to give access to ALL departments. |
| Broadcast | You can tick this box to send a broadcast email to all your employees alerting them that there is a new news article that has been published on their portals. Do this for any urgent items that you need them to look at. |
Employees can see any News Articles you post when they select the 'News' option on their lefthand menu.