What is employee self-service?
Employee self-service is a term coined to empower your employees by giving them access to their information within the organization, thus providing them a right to alter and add their information namely their contact details, bank details, and benefits on their own. ESS as a feature is present in the modern HRIS software, thus making the interaction within the organization as a two-way process.
ESS is a self-service portal being a part of the software that all of your employees have access to, it is not just HR professionals but benefits every member of your organization. Employees are able to access their payroll, schedules, and benefits information can even update their own details, and much more.
ESS has gained all of its popularity because of the evolving corporate cultures that require the HR systems to evolve. While this may seem to of no importance, it has turned out to take a long time for HR systems to evolve from their regular manual process that was used for decades to automation backed by efficiency.
With the introduction of self-service HRIS, the landscape of HR is now making changes from mere spreadsheets towards a more logical and efficient system.
What is Employee Self Service in HRIS?
The existence of ESS came into picture by the widespread of the Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS), the ESS functionality gave a boost to organizations, right from the small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and even the large enterprises including colleges and universities
ESS features enable the employees to take more responsibility for their jobs resulting in their development. This is proving to be the biggest highlight of every Human Resources Information Systems.
HRIS, when embedded by the ESS feature, helps the Human resource department and managers to focus more on the relevant tasks than being engaged with the redundant tasks and complaints from their employees.
What are the substantial feature of Employee Self Service System?
Employee self-service portals are important from every perspective with respect to both, the employees and the management.
Let us list some of the important features of the Employee self-service portal that is making it a trending requirement at present work culture.
Employees here get access to all the present web portals of an organization through a single login credential
Information here is divided into the portal to ensure the convenience of employees
ESS provides performance notes, these notes can be tracked by employees and managers both at the same time, thus helping them track their activities accordingly.
ESS is offering a platform for regular interactions between employees and HR professionals
Time off requests from employees can be tracked easily by managers rather traveling the journey of leave submission to approval manually, to everything automated it can also help the payroll professionals to prevent any sort of confusion and inefficiency.
ESS also acts as a platform for updation of any information related to the training schedules, travel updates, internal hike opportunities, and so on.
Digital time cards here can even help the employees to track their working hours in an automated way.
All of the documents of HR can be shared at a single platform to be accessed by employees
What are the benefits of Employee Self Service System?
Employee Self Service was initially created to reduce the redundant tasks of the Human resource department, consequently helping the employees get access to their vital information.
1. Empowering Employees
Employees are able to view their schedule, access their time cards, and accruals without having the need to go through a supervisor or to the Human Resource department. Managers are able to conveniently view, monitor and authorize request changes by employees online. Managers here can even select which associates are allowed to manage their own time cards.
Employees here can even manage their tax declarations, benefits and other HR data on their own without even asking for the HR to assist,
Employees are able to transact with the Human Resource department remotely and with higher clarity
2. ESS prevents Understaffing
If an employee is interested in open shifts they can request it via the ESS portal. Managers here can approve shift changes which can also trigger automatic notifications to all parties involved.
3. No Confusion
When all of the data with respect to the employee and HR is managed on a unified portal everyone in the organization is on the same page thus deleting any sort of confusion within the organization. Automatic notifications inform the whole organization about the important scheduling events and time card information.
4. Releases burden from Managers
Managers being responsible for all the tedious and crucial tasks of the organization happen to spend their most time in completing tasks of least importance ESS service thus helps them being spared from all the back-and-forth redundant tasks. Let the employees check their own accruals and the total number of hours worked.
5. Reduces Admin Time
When an automated system takes over crucial assignments, supervisors are free to work on other projects. This can even help the growing companies as there is no need to hire as many HR people as their workforce grows. Employees can all of their important information anytime and from anywhere on the go. ESS can easily integrate the recruitment and onboarding processes efficiently. All of these resulting in an increase of productivity & efficiency of an organization, as labor hours are saved dynamically
This helps the employees with their career planning, setting of KRAs, and applying for appraisals all at once
Data entry errors can be avoided by empowering employees to manage their own information
What are the factors to be considered while Investing in Employee Self Service Portal
Before you are selecting your HR management software with employee self-service module for your organization, it is essential for you to consider certain important factors:
- Find out which software is best for your organizational needs.
- Conduct a thorough research to analyze what your employees need from an employee self-service portal.
- Budgeting constraints can also play a major part thus should also be kept in mind. This will help you in shortlisting the best software within your budget.
- There should be a thorough training for your employees so that they know how to use the HRMS software with employee self-service portal.
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