|
Employee Self Service
We live in a self-service society - we select our own food from supermarket shelves, we fill our own petrol tanks, we take money out of machines. Has this trend been driven because the grocer, the garage and the bank have taken away personal service in order to cut costs? Or is it prompted by the consumer's preference for choice, for independence?
If you find it more satisfying to select personally your own breakfast cereal or shampoo, would you also gain more job satisfaction if you could choose the way in which you do your work? According to Simon Nelson, general manager of Concur Technologies, staff retention is a matter of "promoting a self-service culture among staff that cuts down administrative drudgery and rewards those who help themselves. Self-service promotes job satisfaction, and also staff loyalty, principally by streamlining business processes so that staff have more time to spend on their core job, the work they really enjoy and want to do well".
So, self-service has to be one aspect of an organisation's culture if it is to generate job satisfaction but Nelson believes that it must be supported by an Internet-based Employee Self Service system, ESS for short.
What is an ESS system? Just as there used to be a counter in the grocer's shop, the traditional payroll and personnel departments have kept control of their assets, i.e. the valuable business information they maintain for the benefit of the organisation. If a director or line manager wanted information, it was supplied "over the counter" by the payroll or personnel manager. ESS removes this barrier. Wayne Carstensen, MD of Arinso, explains: "Many organisations now allow their staff to view and manage their individual records. ESS provides managers with great access to team information directly from their desktops, removing delays in the information process. This is very different from traditional HR models where personnel information was kept under lock and key within the HR department."
In its simplest form, self-service for employees and line managers is generally provided by allowing browser access to the payroll and personnel system. Depending on the visitor's security profile, certain pages allow information to be viewed, updated and analysed. At the other extreme, self-service involves a "portal" or doorway, again using a web browser, through which all of the information relevant to employees' work and their pay and benefits may be obtained, and even information to help them organise their out-of-work activities. And of course, they can use these facilities from their living room sofa as well as from their office desk.
Elizabeth Wilson, product strategy director for PeopleSoft, describes the issues that organisations must address if self-service is going to fulfil its potential. "Employees need to know how to get to and use many different systems. They need to remember each of their user IDs and passwords. In contrast, using a single ID and password, My Yahoo! brings in stock quotes, news, weather, maps, yellow pages, and much more from many different content partners in a completely seamless manner and even delivers such content in a personalized way based on what it knows about the user. Such rich and diverse content seamlessly woven together is key to its popularity and usage. HR organisations need to take note. If a wide variety of systems, both internal and external, are used to deliver services through their intranets to employees and managers, then they must do their best to make the solutions seem like one to the end user."
Uses for Self Service
- maintaining employment records and contact details, and validating input
- holiday requests by employees, and approvals - or otherwise - by managers
- changing bank details
- evaluating development needs and booking training courses
- claiming business expenses
- viewing, enrolling for and changing employment benefits
- applying for job vacancies
- distributing company news to the organisation
- sharing diaries and making appointments
- audio and video conferencing
- e-learning
- distributing management information
- publishing policies and procedures
- conducting employee surveys
- marketing the organisation's products and services
What are the different services that can be provided through ESS? The wide range of functionality that may be implemented by employers is summarised in the Table alongside. Although many of the uses for ESS are of a personnel nature, the potential for its use in payroll is considerable. The contributors to this article made the following suggestions:
- single input of data to eliminate errors
- employees can enter overtime hours when they happen, obtain approval from their managers online, check that the payments are included in the next pay run, and print off a copy of their payslip, without involving the payroll department
- automatic reminders of action required can be issued to ensure that payroll data input deadlines are met
- notification of intention to take maternity, paternity, adoption or parental leave
- maintenance of personal deduction information for AVCs, SAYE, subscriptions, charity donations, etc, saving time and eliminating paperwork
- ready access for both managers and employees reduces telephone queries to the payroll department
- pay analyses can be sent automatically to portals for directors and managers to review at any time.
A common objection to ESS is the cost of developing and running a complex intranet that links together payroll and personnel systems, and other relevant applications. Can the investment be justified and even provide financial returns? Some benefits are clearly intangible, such as improvements in communication and better access to information.
However, Michael Richards, CEO of Snowdrop Systems, maintains that the benefits of an HR and payroll self-service model are compelling. "In particular", he says, "our clients' HR and payroll departments are seeing tangible benefits such as a fall in absenteeism because employees can see their absence record, a reduced workload because better communication results in fewer queries from employees, improvements in data accuracy and reductions in process times, improved retention rates due to increases in employee satisfaction. The delivery of payslips in PDF format brings cost savings to the payroll operation."
Convincing the Board is only one of the hurdles that must be jumped in order to introduce ESS. There can be significant user resistance to a major culture shift. Employees may wonder why they have to maintain their own information when it has always been the job of the payroll and personnel departments. Managers may be resistant to seeking out information that has always to prepared for them. Wilson of PeopleSoft argues: "To overcome these barriers, the users must be able to see and experience the benefits. Line managers need to get accurate information in order to make timely decisions, otherwise they will think of self service as an administrative burden. Employees may not see updating their home address as a high priority matter, but being able to book holidays without having to wait weeks for them to be approved, or being able to see that they have been paid before their payslip arrives will provide a greater incentive to use self service."
With or without self service, the way in which payroll and personnel offices operate is changing. Richards of Snowdrop Systems sums it up in this way: "HR is moving towards a more strategic emphasis - providing a service rather than administration. When managers handle many of the administrative processes themselves using web- or workflow-based technology, they are closer to achieving their higher-level, strategic objectives."
|
|
(Ian Congreave would like to thank
for their specific contributions towards this article.)
|
For Payroll and Human Resource Professionals
