HR intranet: what it is and
what belongs on one

An HR intranet is the part of your intranet that holds everything employees need from HR: the staff handbook and policies, onboarding, benefits, absence guidance, forms, and the people directory. It can be a dedicated HR site or an HR hub inside a wider company intranet.

It exists to do one thing above all others - let employees answer their own HR questions, so HR gets its week back.

If your organisation already runs Microsoft 365, you can build one on SharePoint without buying another platform.

An HR intranet is a dedicated space for HR and people content, either as a standalone site or as a hub within a wider intranet. It sits between your employees and your HR team, and its job is to answer the routine questions before they reach anyone's inbox.

That makes it different from an HR system, which we come back to below. Put simply: an HR system is where HR data lives. An HR intranet is where HR knowledge lives.

People arrive at the HR intranet at particular moments with a particular question, and content built around those moments gets found.

You do not need all of this on day one. The fastest route to a useful HR intranet is to start with the ten questions your team answers most often and build outwards from there.

This is the question that stalls most HR intranet projects. You already have an HR system - Workday, SuccessFactors, BambooHR, Sage, or something similar. Do you genuinely need something else?

They do different jobs, and the difference becomes obvious once you look at what the employee is actually trying to do.

The pattern is consistent. Employees go to the HR system to complete a transaction. They go to the HR intranet to work out what to do, before and after.

There is a second difference that matters more than most HR teams expect. HR system licences are usually bought per user, and in many organisations that means the frontline never gets one. A store colleague, a driver, a ward nurse may have no HR system login at all. The intranet is frequently the only channel that reaches everybody.

If your business already runs Microsoft 365, the question stops being whether to buy a second platform and becomes whether to use what you already have.

SharePoint is included in your Microsoft 365 licensing and it is a capable intranet platform. It reaches every employee with a Microsoft account, including on a phone through Teams. Whether you build on it directly or use a product that sits on top of it, you are not adding a third system for IT to run or a second login for employees to forget.

The comparison above assumes the employee moves between two places. In practice they do not have to.

Booking annual leave still happens in the HR system - that is where the entitlement and the approval workflow live. But the employee does not need to know that. They can start in the intranet, where they already are, and finish the task without hunting for a URL or remembering which system holds what.

How far you take that depends on how much you want to build.

On the password problem specifically: the fix is single sign-on through Entra ID rather than the integration itself. Most major HR systems support it. Once configured, the employee is already authenticated when they arrive, so there is no second login to forget.

Two notes on Viva Connections, since it comes up in most of these conversations. It is included in Microsoft 365 licensing at no extra cost, so it is not a new purchase. But creating multiple targeted dashboards for different regions or job roles does require Viva Suite licensing. If targeting matters to you - and for a multi-country or frontline workforce it usually does - it is generally better handled in the intranet itself through audience targeting, which is included.

HR intranet projects rarely fail for technical reasons. They fail for four reasons, and all four are predictable.

HR owns the content but not the platform. HR is accountable for the maternity policy being current. But changing it means raising a request with IT or comms and waiting. So it does not get changed, and employees learn not to trust what they read. The strongest predictor of a successful HR intranet is whether the HR team can publish without asking permission.

This is worth testing before you commit to any platform. The question to ask is not whether the intranet can be edited, but who can edit it. If the answer involves a developer, a release cycle, or a ticket, the maternity policy will be out of date within a year. What you want is an HR manager updating a policy, targeting it to the employees it applies to, and publishing it the same morning.

Nothing prompts a review. Policies do not expire loudly. They quietly stop being accurate. Without a named owner and a review date for every policy, and something that chases both, drift is a matter of when rather than if.

Everyone sees everything. If a UK employee finds the US bereavement policy first, the intranet has actively made things worse. Targeting content by location, role, and department stops being optional the moment you operate in more than one country.

There is no evidence anyone read it. For most HR content, availability is enough. For some of it - codes of conduct, health and safety, data handling - you need to show who has read the current version. If the intranet cannot tell you, somebody is keeping a spreadsheet instead.

The name suggests HR owns it. In practice ownership splits three ways, and being explicit about the split prevents most of the friction that follows.

HR owns the content. Policies, guidance, onboarding, benefits. What it says, whether it is current, and who it is aimed at.

Internal comms usually owns the platform. The homepage, the information architecture, editorial standards, and the overall employee experience. HR content sits inside a structure comms is responsible for.

IT owns the environment. Permissions, integrations, security, and the Microsoft 365 tenant it all runs in.

The arrangement that works is HR publishing its own content, within standards comms sets, in an environment IT governs. The arrangement that fails is HR needing a ticket to change a sentence.

If a meaningful part of your workforce does not sit at a desk, the HR intranet is the hardest thing to get right and the most valuable. These are often the people with the most questions about pay, shifts, and absence, and the least access to answers.

Two things decide whether it works.

First, whether they can reach it on a personal phone without downloading a new app or remembering another password. Second, whether the content is written to be read on a phone during a break rather than on a monitor at a desk. Shorter pages, obvious headings, and no ten-page PDFs.

If you are on Microsoft 365, the Teams mobile app is usually already deployed across the business. An intranet that surfaces inside Teams reaches frontline employees through something they already have, rather than something you have to roll out.

Most HR teams we speak to are not choosing between intranet platforms. They already have SharePoint, and they are trying to work out how to get something usable out of it.

SharePoint gives you the foundation, and you are already paying for it: content management, permissions, search, and Teams integration. What it does not give you out of the box is the HR-specific structure - a handbook that navigates properly, targeting that is straightforward for a non-technical team to manage, a people directory that draws on the profiles you already have, and a layout that looks like your business rather than default SharePoint.

That gap is what Lightspeed365 fills.

The part HR teams tend to care about most is who holds the keys afterwards. Pages are built from pre-made templates and web parts, so the people who own the content own the publishing too. An HR business partner can update a policy page, set which locations or job roles see it, and publish - without a developer, a ticket, or a wait for the next release. That is usually the difference between an HR intranet that stays accurate and one that quietly stops being trusted.

Last updated: 4 August 2026