The Power Of Employee Self-Service To Cut Time-Consuming Ties

Transforming HR efficiency and empowering employees

In the 1940 animated movie Pinocchio, Walt Disney’s brought-to-life wooden puppet happily sings, “I got no strings so I have fun, I’m not tied up to anyone…” while he shows he is no longer merely a marionette operating at the whim of others.

The powerful desire to be in the driving seat of one’s own life is something that employers of all sizes can, and should, take full advantage of to improve their employee experience and, happily, reduce workload for their HR teams.

Building employee self-service capabilities into many of the daily processes around functions like payroll, PTO booking, benefits, and accessing HR information, is incredibly powerful. It delivers the twin benefits of improving the overall experience of employees by giving them control over their own information and the processes that most directly affect them, and inevitably it reduces the workload of your HR and payroll teams by eliminating many of the repetitive and time-consuming inquiries and requests. 

Indeed, these repetitive tasks are devouring HR resources. In a recent isolved survey of 500 HR leaders from across the U.S., 41% reported they answer the same repetitive questions consume from half to almost their entire day.

Delivering self-services access to that same information presents a huge opportunity to reduce workload (and make the day-to-day lives of your HR team far more bearable).

But how? How do businesses successfully move from manual, centralized processes to reliable, self-serve?

There are three key elements of successful self-service HR processes.

First, of course, must be the technology to power self-service. Software that is robust enough to be used by non-HR (and sometimes tech-wary) employees is a must if you want to avoid replacing manual HR process with a tidal wave of support requests. Thankfully, many HCM platforms are capable of delivering some, or all, of the tools to automate such tasks to deliver self-service capabilities.

The second requirement is the ability to access that technology where and when employees need it. This may seem obvious but is actually an area where your self-service strategy can easily fail. For example, creating self-service capabilities that are only accessible when in the office is of no use to a workforce that is often off-site, at remote locations, at home, or working on the road. 

Mobile devices can offer up a great platform to enable service, but they must be reliable and capable of operating in situations where connectivity may be spotty at best. Most importantly it should be consistent across platforms. Delivering a self-service approach to accessing payroll information should look the same. for example, regardless of where or how the employee wants to see it. If not, you will need to train, and maintain, employees on both interfaces (a strategy that will quickly create more work than it saves).

And lastly, you must be ready to enable access. Self-service access to HR, benefits, and payroll systems is going to deliver the greatest benefits when employees feel confident enough to “fly solo” and not constantly checking in with the HR team on how to get access and perform tasks.  

Investing in enablement is the only approach that will truly move the workload, and the sense of control, firmly and fully to your employees. It is also another reason to try to ensure that the user experience on all platforms is consistent, rather than having different tech running on different platforms. (Things like progressive web apps offer a great solution here, able to adapt their interface to whatever platform is being used.)

With these three elements in place, it is possible to both improve employee experience and reduce work, both of which are huge wins for your HR team. New technology is offering even more opportunities to extend self-service even further. AI-based chatbots can be used to improve interactions and access and steer employees to answers and services more quickly, adapting and responding very much like a human member of the HR team.

Indeed, AI-driven interactions, including the ability to more accurately predict what employees will want, are going to become more and more the norm as HR functions are able to step back from being interaction-driven to more strategic and empowering.

Wherever your organization is on the journey to delivering self-service to your employees, following these steps of deploying technology to power interaction, making it available in a consistent way, and investing in the initial enablement training, will help ensure that, like Pinocchio in the movie, your employees are free to go and do whatever they need and are not tied up waiting for help to get to the very things they need.

Geoff Webb is the VP of Solution Strategy at isolved.