How to set up Microsoft Teams for effective HR management

Your organization is successfully riding the digital transformation wave using Microsoft Teams as a collaboration platform, enabling team members to get organized and communicate with each other through a single interface. Microsoft Teams is a great asset to transform your HR department. In a previous post we discussed some best practices as An introduction on how to use Microsoft Teams for HR Professionals. This post is intended to dig deeper and provide some tips to make Microsoft Teams work miracles for HR.

It is true that Microsoft Teams brings a new era in the facet of internal communications, going over and beyond email. But how can you ensure you make an impact on your employees through Teams? Just follow the simple steps described below.

Step1: Create an HR team for all employees

If your company does not already have an organization-wide team including all employees, speak with your IT to ensure a new team is created. You can use this team to send announcements and notifications on important company news, to all employees.

This way you can easily address all employees, who will receive a notification within Teams, where collaboration already takes place. Communication will be delivered in a swift and direct manner, ensuring it will get the attention it deserves!

Step 2: Welcome new employees

But what about new employees? As an HR manager, you can schedule activities to a) inform colleagues about the new joiners and b) welcome the new employees with a personal greeting through chat.

For announcing the new joiners and introducing them to their colleagues, you can send a post to the organization team on a regular basis, weekly or monthly, depending on your organization's hiring frequency, listing all new members. It is nice to include a short summary and a picture of the new employees, along with information about their role. This is a great opportunity to also invite team members to welcome the new employees.

A warm greeting is the best way to start a long-term collaboration. When a new member joins, you can send them a personal message from HR through chat with a welcome note, and useful information on your organization’s tools, processes and resources.

And if the above seem to be creating a lot of admin work, the great news is that you can automatically welcome new joiners, straight through Teams, by having your digital assistant, do the manual tasks for you! Helvia's Employee Experience solution provides you with all the automations you need through a centralized AI-powered chatbot inside Teams. Contact us for a demo to see this in action.

Step 3: Create a personal space for each employee

In order to ensure timely and accurate management of each employee’s needs and to be able to discuss privately all HR related issues, it is recommended to create a private space within Teams per employee. In each personal space you can add the HR manager and the direct manager of each employee, and use this as a dedicated single place for discussing HR related matters.

Depending on the size of your organization, you can follow one of the implementations described below.

For startups with up to 30 employees

You can create one private channel per employee in the HR team you have created. You can find more information on this topic in the post An introduction on how to use Microsoft Teams for HR Professionals.

Note that there is a limit of 30 private channels you can create in a team’s lifetime, including deleted ones.

For startups with more than 30 employees and SMEs

For startups with more than 30 employees and small to medium size organizations, it is best to create one private team per employee to discuss HR issues.

It is suggested that the HR manager hides these teams and asks from employees to tag the HR manager anytime they need something. This way the HR manager will receive the notification and will easily access the respective team.

Enterprises

For larger organizations it is not common for employees to have direct chat with HR. Instead, there are more structured ways to manage communication, through a ticketing service, where an employee would raise a ticket and the issue would be resolved through a group chat or through the ticketing system directly. Helvia can provide you with tailored automations for great employee experience within Teams. Contact us to discuss your custom needs.