Above all other departments within an organization, human resources (HR) must keep employees well informed of important company issues in addition to the details pertaining to their personal health and well-being. By using an intranet to publish corporate information and transaction applications to provide personal data, HR departments can free their staffs from answering routine questions and doing basic processing tasks. HR departments can publish information and enable secure transactions such as the following:

• Benefits information and enrollment
• Corporate policies
• Company mission and goals
• Job postings and internal job transfer forms
• Searchable telephone directories
• The annual report
• Employee development
• Departmental and personal home pages
• Classified bulletin boards of items for sale, housing, etc.
• Medical referrals

For example, biotechnology pioneer Genetech provides its employees with access to information on research seminars, company announcements, building facilities, the employee directory, commuting options, benefits, child care, how to place purchase orders, how to get business cards, safety equipment, and more. They look at the web as an online employee handbook with information on how to do things at Genetech.

Client-server applications eliminate much of the routine paper processing that HR departments typically handle while providing employees with immediate access to their personal information. Access can be restricted to certain departments or users. Secure applications can enable online employee enrollment in benefit plans, such as 401K programs; employee surveys; employee lookup of vacation balances, options, etc.; and online submission of employee status change forms by employee survey managers.

Newsgroups hosted by HR departments are particularly valuable within large companies because they deliver a quick and cost-effective way of
communicating with specific groups of people such as senior managers, people with 401K accounts, and employees with dependents. Such newsgroups simplify the task of informing employees about changes in corporate policy that would affect them, and provide a forum for discussion among those with shared interests.

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