Over 70% of digital employee experience initiatives will fail to deliver tangible impact this year (Orange Business).
Why?
Teams working to develop solutions, like HR portals, can’t align on common goals, and they often overlook the most critical element: the human on the other side of the screen.
A whole person with thoughts, feelings, and lived experiences who shows up to work each day and adds value to your organization.
This report delves into the dynamic intersection of AI and HR Service Delivery, unveiling five compelling use cases where AI technologies can catalyze significant improvements. Read Now.
Your employee: someone who hopes you can fulfill their basic expectations at work so their experience feels smooth and supported.
That’s why launching an HR self-service portal is a people project. It must be designed with empathy, clarity, and purpose to succeed.
This post will explore best practices to help you deliver an intuitive, engaging, and genuinely helpful employee services portal.
In their personal lives, employees are used to seamless, intuitive, and even delightful digital experiences. They’re accessible anytime, anywhere.
Whether switching on Roku, browsing Amazon, or cueing up Spotify, your people are greeted with personalized portals that anticipate their needs.
These are true portals, centralized access points to diverse content, services and tools, designed with the user in mind.
And it’s not limited to entertainment. Today, portals are everywhere:
We’re surrounded by unified digital services that make life easier.
So when employees log into a clunky, fragmented system just to check their annual leave, the contrast is jarring.
If your HR portal doesn’t meet today’s consumer-grade expectations for usability and emotional intelligence, it’s actively undermining the employee experience.
Before today’s sleek HR portals, many organizations relied on intranets or link farms. Technically, they held the information employees needed, but they were anything but intuitive or inviting.
🔍 The Author's Perspective
There, they showed me an internal system: everything seemed present, but it was cluttered, visually dull, and difficult to navigate.
Even at fourteen, seeing all these disconnected systems united only by uninspiring hyperlinks, I thought there had to be a better way.
"
And there is. But the challenge has evolved.
Today’s employees navigate many different HR systems, each with a different login, layout, and logic, without a seamless and unifying experience layer to bring it all together.
Intranets and link farms may have worked on paper, but they weren’t built with employees in mind.
They were overwhelming. Fragmented. Impersonal.
It’s easy to assume nobody paused to consider how it would feel to use them or whether anyone would want to come back.
But we know better today.
Even when well-intentioned, those experiences left employees frustrating, often avoiding HR systems altogether. That emotional disconnect drove the shift toward modern, people-first portals.
Done right, these portals treat employees as whole individuals with expectations, emotions, and unique needs.
Your HR portal must go beyond utility. It should offer essential functionality and warmth. It must be built, managed, and maintained with empathy, not just architecture.
Success lies in knowing what’s been tried, what’s failed, and what truly meets expectation. And, a unified hub of relevant, accessible services needs to be an evolving commitment.
As discussed in The Evolution of the Employee Portal, the fundamental idea hasn’t changed: it’s still a single entry point.
What’s changed is the mindset. Portals today must always be empowering, keeping pace with the people they serve and going well beyond their traditional definition.
According to Human Capital Innovations, workplace technology is advancing at a breakneck pace, but for many employees, the reality of these changes feels far less revolutionary—and far more disruptive.
In fact, it goes on to say employees want more say in the implementation of new workplace tech, with 36% saying adoption would improve if they had more input. Similarly, ease of use is just as important, with 39% believing workplace tools should be more intuitive.
This underscores the importance of starting from a point of empathy with your employees.
One of the most common pitfalls in launching self-service tools is the HR perception gap—the difference between how helpful organizations believe their tools are, and how employees actually experience them.
Without direct input, it’s easy to miss friction points and blind spots. So, listen before you build and test before you launch.
If your employees want more say, allow them that opportunity.
After all, they’re the ones who will be using your HR portal for services: accessing their most recent pay information, checking for upcoming learning, quick access to time off, or even something else.
✅ Run interviews, quick polls, or journey-mapping workshops to uncover points of friction for your employees. Uncover the services they want to use the most.
✅ Acknowledge emotions, especially stress, confusion, and disconnection.
✅ Validate assumptions with data to identify hidden friction points, and make data-driven decisions based on only real insights, with your finger firmly on the pulse of your workforce.
✅ Prioritize transparency and trust to ensure employees know why changes are coming and what they should expect. Psychological safety will improve engagement.
Working with an empathetic mindset encourages you to work based on evidence-based, people-focused priorities to give you the best chance for success.
Are you designing your HR portal for efficiency or empathy?
Employees often turn to HR portals in moments that carry urgency or uncertainty.
Imagine one of your employees needs to quickly extend a weekend trip because of transportation delays or missed connections.
Another needs to export all their recent payslips as proof of income for their mortgage application.
Ivan Harding explores the disconnect between how HR leaders perceive their organization's employee experience and how employees actually feel about it. Read Now
When we make it difficult for employees to perform what should be basic tasks, we alienate them at an already vulnerable point. We enable stressful situations.
Your HR portal must reduce stress, not emphasize it. Designing with care builds trust. It encourages repeated use, reduces emotional friction, and helps your people, not users, feel guided and understood.
In HR Case Management: Why It Matters & Key Examples, we discuss the psychological contract—unwritten expectations between employer and employee, built on trust, growth, and support. That’s what we’re aiming to achieve with a people-first HR portal.
When employees sense that the system is working with them, trust deepens. That trust is earned through thoughtful, human-centered design from the first click to resolution.
Once you’ve created a calm and functional base experience, it’s time to make it resonate.
Personalization takes your portal from useful to meaningful.
Some employees might be new starters, looking for guidance and team connections.
Others may be preparing for parental leave, or managing a return to work. Each has different needs and priorities.
Your instinct may be to pack the portal with as many services as possible. But today’s employees expect relevance, not noise.
Your portal should respond to their context—surfacing what matters most, when they need it. It tells employees: we see you.
A personalized HR portal transforms a functional tool into a relationship builder that supports each employee’s journey and encourages return visits.
When your employees first applied for positions with your organization, they were likely drawn to your culture, values, and ways of working.
An effective HR portal should rekindle that connection. It should feel like a home away from home.
The best portals reflect your company’s values and deliver the right support, content, and services at the right moment, all with purpose and empathy to encourage engagement.
“Employee engagement is all about maximizing employee productivity by creating the right conditions to motivate employees to contribute their maximum effort, skills, and knowledge.”
- Guy Ellis, Executive Coach & HR Consultant.
A people-first HR portal is never finished. It should continuously evolve based on how your employees use it, what they value, and where they face friction.
As we explored in Making the Shift: Reframing HR’s Role Through Empathy and Insight, pairing empathy with insight helps HR move beyond assumptions to genuinely understand how employees experience workplace technology.
Your portal is no exception.
This approach applies just as much after launch. With robust analytics, human-centered feedback, and HR ownership of your portal, you can shape an experience that delivers undeniably long-term value.
Blend usage trends with employee feedback to guide decisions:
Measuring Employee Experience: Tools & Metrics for Human-Centered Insights offers practical ways to surface these signals and act on them.
The best portals don’t rely on large, infrequent upgrades. Using no-code tools, HR can make fast, targeted improvements in response to evolving needs:
When HR owns HR technology, you can move faster and respond to your employees without relying on lengthy IT change processes:
With a people-first mindset and the right measurement and ownership in place, your HR portal becomes a living system that adapts with your workforce—delivering greater engagement and ensuring your employees feel seen, heard, and valued.
When your employees need to find something, they want to find it fast.
But, with so many systems that the average user has to understand and work with, how do you bring all of that together without reverting to the days of link farms?
A true central hub is where employees feel empowered, not lost: navigation is simple and thoughtfully kept to a minimum by uniting services with a people-first mindset.
The power of your portal is in how it connects everything your employees need.
The right hub brings your most essential services together. It’s vendor-agnostic to connect to hundreds of HR systems and make unified HR data a reality.
Tools, information, and insights that were once siloed, are brought together for the benefit of the employee, to create seamless, stress-free employee experiences, and you, the HR professional, save valuable time for more complex work.
A successful HR portal is a people project from start to finish.
The rollout process must centre employees and give HR full ownership to adapt and improve based on real-world experience:
Involve employees early. Build small working groups across different roles, regions, life stages, and experiences. Let employees share what they need most. Use this insight to avoid designing for an empty chair.
Bring all stakeholders into every phase. As HR, include IT, leadership, employee champions, internal communications, DEI leads, and accessibility specialists.
When everyone has a voice, you practice what you preach, representing your organization’s values and culture and uphold the people-first mindset your portal system is designed around.
Communicate well before launch. Explain the “why”, show what is coming, and build excitement. Set clear expectations on what employees will experience first, and how the portal will evolve. Early, transparent communication builds trust.
Aim for a minimum lovable product. Focus on the most essential, people-first aspects of your portal first. Resist the urge to overbuild too soon. Early wins build momentum.
Put measurement at the heart of your rollout. Track how employees use the portal, what they value, and where they get stuck. Combine usage data with human insight through surveys, feedback to let measurement guide your decisions.
Work with a partner who matches your values. Look for flexibility, speed, and a shared people-first mindset. The right partner helps you move quickly, evolve, and scale without handing ownership over to IT.
Move fast in small steps. Use short sprints to test, learn, and improve. Add, remove, and change elements based on what employees need most. A portal that evolves with its employees will keep delivering value long after launch.
A thoughtful rollout plan helps you launch with empathy, flexibility, and purpose to encourage early adoption and set a strong foundation for ongoing change.
Once your HR portal is live, the real work begins: sustaining long-term engagement.
Over time, even the most intuitive portals risk becoming underused without continued attention. To keep momentum going beyond the initial launch, shift your strategy toward active enforcement and evolution.
Change management tips
The best practices I’ve shared today aren’t theoretical. They’re embedded into how Applaud helps organizations deliver exceptional employee experiences through our Employee Portal.
Applaud brings everything your employees need into one place.
It’s a single, intelligent entry point to knowledge, support, and services: from checking time off to accessing learning and getting real-time answers with AI-powered search.
The experience feels personalized from the start, designed to reduce friction, boost confidence, and make everyday tasks faster and more intuitive.
Employees get what they need with fewer clicks, and HR gains back time for more meaningful work.
It’s a system built to empower, connect, and evolve with your people at the center.
Ready to Launch a People-First Self-Service Portal with Applaud?
Book a demo to see how our dedicated HR Portal unites systems and services with ease, working seamlessly within our employee support ecosystem to give people fast, intuitive access to what they need, when they need it - wherever they are, and always tailored to them.
Scott Oakes is a Senior Technical Communications Specialist with a background in advertising, communication, creative writing, and video production. He plays a key role in shaping Applaud's YouTube channel, combining creativity and clarity to make technical how-to videos more engaging, ensuring that complex concepts are easy to understand.