1. Make it social.

Call it Employee Portal 2.0 or Social Employee Portal, but if you want your employees to actually use the portal, it must have built-in social features that make it easy and enjoyable for employees to interact with each other and collaborate on different projects.

2. Employee Self-Service is a must.

As the name implies, self-service in an employee portal allows your workers to file annual leaves, business trips or transfer requests, as well as request other services, without having to fill out paper forms and file them with the HR department. A good employee self-service portal can reduce your HR department workload by almost a half.

3. Make it part of the work routine.

Even though employee portals started as human resources information system (HRIS), most now include a wide set of tools that businesses typically use – Project Management, Document Collaboration, File Sharing, Videoconferencing, Knowledge Management, Shared Calendars and maybe even CRM. Everyday engagement familiarizes your employees with your portal, and what's familiar gets used.

4. Make it easily accessible.

The more ways there are to access the employee portal, the better. Having your employee portal hosted on your own server or in a cloud comes with own advantages and disadvantages, but the best case scenario is when your employees can access your employee portals via their regular browser, from mobile phones, tablets, and desktop apps.

5. Keep your finger on the pulse of your employee portal

Many portal software vendors now provide detailed analytics of portal use now (in Bitrix24 it’s called Company Pulse and is available even in the free employee portal plans). The advantage of this is that you can easily see which tools are being used and which ones aren’t, making it easy to identify bottlenecks as well as employees who are slow adopters and may need help.