Building your employee portal

A place to engage employees

An employee portal is separate from your main website. It's not unlike an intranet, where employees can find information and resources that internal departments often provide.

There's a lot you can do with an employee portal. Here are some of the types of content our clients have put on the portals Coffey's digital services team has built for them:

• Event calendars.
• Policy documents.
• Staff directories.
• Training materials.
• Cafeteria menus.
• Employee announcements and other organization news.
• Staff recognitions and awards.
• Leadership team blogs.
• Employee, corporate and patient care resources.
• Links to external platforms and websites employees may need to access.

Your employee portal can look and feel very much like your main website, but it can also have its own style to differentiate it for your employees. For example, all of the content items can be broken out into sections so that employees can easily find what they're looking for. And, just like your main website, your employee portal will have its own navigation and site search.

Did you know that in addition to all of Coffey’s other services, we build employee portals for our clients?

Secure approach restricts access outside your network

Coffey's portals are built with security in mind. Our secure approach can include IP address restriction, which limits access to just people and devices on your hospital's network. This means employees can only log on to the portal when they are at a specific location, such as at work or remotely, as defined by a specific IP address. Employee logins can also be managed through Site Assist or by integrating with third-party external login providers, such as Microsoft's Active Directory. And unlike some intranet sites, a Coffey employee portal does not support employee instant messaging apps like Slack; support task, project or workflow management; or store sensitive information, such as social security or employee ID numbers.

Easy to use with Site Assist

Coffey's employee portals work within Site Assist, our content management system made for health care organizations. You may already be using Site Assist to update content on your external website whenever something changes.

"Site Assist makes managing your employee portal simple," says Tim Miller, Coffey's lead senior developer. "The portal integrates seamlessly with your existing Site Assist instance, and permissions allow you to lock down access to editing of pages or sections for back-end users."

Employee portals also integrate seamlessly with Site Assist's modules, including a calendar, news release center and form builder. For example, one of our clients used the form builder in their portal to offer a way for employees to make work requests and contact other hospital departments. Other clients feature internal events via the calendar module.

In other words, Coffey's employee portals are very flexible. Anything you can do on your main website can be done on your portal.

Talk to your Project Coordinator if you or your HR and/or IT teams would like our help building your organization's employee portal.