Why Employee Self Service (ESS) is integral to your HRMS

BANGALORE, India - July 12, 2017 - PRLog -- Like most support functions, HR is very heavy on transactions and need to keep records of each such transaction. In companies with more than 50 employees this aspect starts to become a drain on the HR department. With most simple requests and queries HR would typically take too long to respond or complete those tasks primarily because of the volume of such tasks and/or because of those being neglected as HR is busy doing something more important in the moment.

Timely response, just like in all customer service situations is the key factor here. Most employees when they raise a query or request with their HR will expect a similar behaviour and response when they raise a query as a consumer. In these situations impatience is not a flaw, but a virtue. Digital abundance has made standing in a queue and waiting for things, both virtual and physical, a thing of the past.

As companies look at the digital experience of their customers both external and internal self service applications are fast becoming a cornerstone of customer experience. In the HR context employee self service is an important aspect of the overall employee experience that one can create via HR technology.

Benefits of ESS to stakeholders

The 3 key stakeholders in an ESS environment are – employees, managers and the leaders. Let's take a look at the key benefits that each of these stakeholders can derive from an ESS environment.

Employees

·         SLA driven response mechanisms for most requests and queries.

·         Self service enables them to view and edit basic information about themselves.

·         Self service enables them to apply for leave, look for leave balance, check & correct attendance and other such simple tasks without being dependent on HR & availability of HR person on his/her desk.

·         Self service enables access from any place, any time, thus giving a lot more flexibility to employee to complete these "non-core" activities outside their core hours.

Managers

·         Complete view of all information about their team at one place.

·         Ability to plan effectively as they can see who has applied for leave & how many people would be available over the next few weeks/months.

·         Take control of all information about their employees and remove the dependence on HR for such information – birthdays, work anniversaries, performance records, leave trends etc.

·         Ability to create custom reports based on available information or just download in Excel and create your own report.

Leaders

·         Access to HR information & dashboards- real time.

·         Higher information accuracy as more eyes audit the information in the system.

·         Improved employee awareness and engagement with basic policies & processes.

·         Improved employee experience which essentially paves way for a more digitized work environment.

If you notice here we are not even talking about what it would do to your HR function as it's very easy to understand that HR will then be able to focus less on clerical, mundane tasks and move to do more value added activities in support of business activities.

An ESS is An ESS

Many a times we lose sight of the details required to successfully implement an ESS within our organization. We offer you some tips for a successful ESS implementation.

·         Like any other digitization effort ESS cannot be seen in isolation, ESS operates as an interface on top of a functional workflow. Hence look for applications which cater to your existing and changing process needs. The underlying workflow has to exactly match the practiced process so as to just move the offline experience to online.

·         If you are looking to make changes to the fundamental process while taking it online and ESS way – a strong recommendation is to pilot it with a smaller and diverse group, understand their concerns, address the same and then move for wider roll out.

·         ESS is all about ease of operation for everyone – HR, Employees, managers & leaders. Hence it is critical these individuals are involved in the process. Understand and map their expectations from an ESS and ensure the system is capable and flexible to handle these demands.

·         ESS is a culture change – it requires all stakeholders to change their behaviour about data. Ensure that you communicate enough, identify early adopters, and celebrate small successes.

·         ESS is not an end, but a journey. Once people have access to certain HR specific information and see how they can use to make effective daily decisions, they are likely to ask for more information access in various other areas. Create a mechanism to evaluate all such requests and incorporate them in the overall ESS journey.

·         ESS enables access to critical company information over the internet to employees and hence data security becomes very important. People will access this information from anywhere and from any device, thus ensuring that the ESS application is supported with robust encryption and security protocols is mandatory. You would want to double cross this, especially in the wake of recent cyber attacks on companies across the world.

·         Just because you have implemented ESS does not absolve HR of the responsibility towards ensuring accurate employee records. You would need to ensure that you have an effective data governance mechanism in place & enable HR to focus on data governance than data entry.

To know more visit https://www.peopleworks.in/