Using Company News & Polls
Keeping your Employees Informed
HR Partner allows Admin Users to broadcast articles to Employees via their Employee Self Service Portal. Employees can then read and comment on articles, which goes a long way to enhancing that community feel!
Types of Article
Articles distributed on the ESS can be published as either a News article or a confidential Poll.
News
Whether you want to celebrate a company milestone, shout about an outstanding achievement or simply update your team on a policy change, news articles are a great way of making sure everybody is in the loop. These are simply posts that can be anything from a punchy one liner to a plethora of paragraphs of engaging text! Authors can embed images, videos and links into their articles to help captivate their audience.
Polls
Perhaps you want to do a quick pulse check to see how people feel about a specific topic or gather ideas for the next team building exercise. Polls offer a simple and speedy way to help you gather opinions. It's worth noting that while votes are counted within Polls, nobody knows who has voted for which option(s), as it is fully confidential.
Creating an Article or Poll
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 article or poll, click on the green "+ Add A New" button on the top right. When you click this button, you will be shown a drop down menu asking you whether you want to add a news article, or a poll.
The options you have when creating each of these are outlined and explained below.
News Article
The following described the fields in the above screen shot.
| Title | This is the heading or headline of the news article |
| 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 employee's 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
Poll
A poll has most of the same pieces of information as a new article, except that it has no 'Contents' section, instead, it has an area where you can add the individual poll selections, or options.
You can add as many options as you want on each poll, but we suggest keeping it to 10 or less options in order to keep it manageable. You can even drag and drop the poll options to sort them into the order you want.
Warning
You CANNOT change a poll option description once you save the poll. The only thing you can do is to delete the option later and add another one. But bear in mind if you delete a poll option, you will lose all the votes for that option that your employees have already entered.
Note
There is an option in the polls to allow employees to select more than one option. By default, they can only vote for ONE option only, but there may be circumstances where you might want them to select more than one option.
Editing and Deleting Articles & Polls
News articles and polls can be edited or deleted from the main listing screen. Simply click on the buttons to the right of the new article list line to do so.
Note
Unless you are the main HR Partner company administrator, you can only delete articles and polls that YOU have created yourself.
About Comments
With both News Articles and Polls you can allow your employee to post comments, or not. It is entirely up to you how much discussion you wish to encourage. While this could of course help encourage a community to form amongst your team, like any social media avenue, it also opens up the platform for potential abuse and we therefore recommend some moderation of comments.
As an article author you have the ability to delete any inappropriate or unsuitable comments.