HR portals can be a headache. With antiquated systems and outdated technology, we often have to wrestle with every administrative task — all for a system that’s meant to make our lives easier.
In many cases, these portals add unnecessary steps that actually decrease efficiency rather than increase it. Even the most basic HR actions, like changing a phone number or mailing address, often require two or three approvals. According to research from Towers Watson, this is true for 56 percent of organizations.
But why is this the case? After all, HR exists to make work better — not get in its way. And when the requests pile up, these administrative tasks quickly eat away at time that could be better spent developing people.
HR professionals want more strategic roles in their companies, hoping for the chance to leave endless approvals behind. Isn’t it time we do just that?
Building a Service, Not a Destination
Many employees hold as much love for HR portals as I do for my Yahoo account, for which I have to reset the password twice a year: March Madness and fantasy football. After that, I’m using an app, not a portal.
It’s a hassle to remember login information for a destination we hardly ever visit. HR self-service portals have low adoption rates, with 75 percent of employees using them for only mandatory functions, like vacation requests.
Instead of forcing people to go to a specific destination, we should bring the services that really matter to the people. Here are a few steps that every HR professional should take to craft a system that employees will actually use:
1. Move away from portals.
We want to make everyone in the company more productive — not just HR professionals. The typical HR process is tedious: Log in, fill out information, submit it for approval, and wait for a response. Portals are relics of days past, when people sought help in aggregating distributed services and messages.
Today, portals are mainly a delusion that system owners create, believing that everyone is coming to their place — they’re not. We’re living in a time when there are more than 2 billion smartphones in the world; they’re the new portals, and it’s time we treat them that way.
2. Provide mobile access.
These days, many employees work remotely, from telecommuters to salespeople and everyone in between. We have to work on designing our companies to address that reality.
All services and approvals that require a person’s physical presence should be removed. If the HR system is online, but it can only be accessed within a certain network — or, worse, only via a browser — that must change, no matter the upgrades or new technology required.
3. Embrace the mobile revolution.
Those who resist the mobile revolution are bound to be crushed by it. Some will argue that mobile solutions lack the unity and security of network HR portals, but those are just excuses that fail to address the fast-approaching tide.
Under today’s common HR setup, employees need to use a computer connected to the company network to log in to the HR portal and request approval. Meanwhile, they have a device in their pocket that’s always on and incredibly connected to them in a personal way. If we want HR to be a powerful service for the people, it needs to act like a consumer app, designed to add value to employees — not serve as a bottleneck between people and their organizations.
Ideally, we wouldn’t need any approvals. But if an organization insists upon them, make sure they address the way people work today. If our HR processes are more complex than Amazon’s checkout, we have work to do.
Daniel Kraft is the president and CEO of Sitrion. Sitrion provides award-winning mobile productivity solutions for the digital workplace, making work better for working people every day. Sitrion solutions unify and extend communications, information, and processes directly to mobile devices from business systems like SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, and Salesforce. Daniel is a public speaker on topics involving employee engagement and productivity and was featured on .
