Growing Popularity of Employee Self Service Portals

Employee Self Service solutions are fast gaining ground as they relieve the HR function of time consuming administrative responsibilities to focus on strategic initiatives. Self service as the name denotes facilitate managers and employees to independently manage information, data and processes related to their roles.

Employee Self Service Portals provide significant advantages and cost saving to businesses by enabling a "paperless" office and streamlining processes. With ESS, all confidential data related to employees can be stored in a centralized database providing data protection and easy accessibility and navigation to all relevant stakeholders unrestricted by geographical or time differences. An ESS system allows the HR team to set access rights based on the role of an employee.

By virtue of empowering employees with easily accessible data and information, employee self service portal helps to build an organizational culture of trust and transparency. Information can be accessed on demand eliminating the need to get in touch with the HR/Admin teams and waiting for a response.

Key features of an employee self service portal include

Employee Self service portal allows employees to view pay slip, earning statements, loan installment details, PF details as well as YTD statements online at their convenience. There is no lag time between raising a query and accessing data and information. 

Employee self service portals are based on pre defined workflows aligned to company policies. The system enables employees to initiate a workflow when required and company policy is automatically enforced at the application stage itself significantly reducing turnaround time and administrative costs. All stakeholders are connected via system-generated emails, which help in reducing transaction time and cost.

The Help Desk feature in the employee self service portal helps to set SLAs and monitor and enhance service standards of internal teams like IT, Administration, HR and finance. This feature enables employees to raise a ticket based on the issue being experienced, which is then routed to the concerned department. The ticket remains open till the issue is resolved enabling the manager to track the time taken to resolve an issue by the concerned department.  The feature also allows for an escalation mechanism in case an issue is not resolved within a defined time period.

A well-deployed ESS portal enables organizations to maintain a leaner HR team with higher productivity. The HR survey conducted by the Hunter Group in 2010 found that “companies with successful self service implementations reported a staff-to-employee ratio of 1:151 while companies without self service had a ratio of 1:99”. Self-service becomes an even more valuable tool when employees are provided access to update their personal information in real time. Data accuracy is higher and the system allows managers to update team information online, which is then routed automatically to HR team for approval enabling speedier transactions and better quality of service with lesser staff.

By allowing anywhere, anytime access to information and processes concerning them and their teams, businesses can make use of a powerful tool to empower employees and enable them to make better decisions. Read more on OfficeNet Portal.