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How An Employee Self Service Portal Can Help HR Teams Simplify EX

November 29, 2022
By Ganesh Ram
How An Employee Self Service Portal Can Help HR Teams Simplify EX

Employee experience can be defined as the sum of all experiences the person has with their employer over the duration of their relationship – from recruitment to onboarding and career development to exiting the organization.

In a hybrid work era, EX is now more important than ever. In fact, according to Gallup research on company culture, highly engaged employees mean a 41% reduction in absenteeism and a 17% increase in productivity.

While core HCM systems are necessary to run a company, they are no longer the center of gravity they once were. The layers on top, Employee Experience and Talent Intelligence Systems are increasingly becoming more important in a talent era.

Thus, for people leaders, a crucial strategy to boost EX for a burgeoning workforce is to use a human capital management software that is self-serve enabled and keeps employees engaged.

 

Here is why you ought to opt for an employee self-service portal:

      1. Saves time and costs

        Employee Self Service Portal

        It is a fact that answering HR queries consumes a significant amount of the HR team’s time. This is sub-optimal since many tasks are repetitive and can be automated.

        Examples of mundane tasks that can be automated include pulling out data on self-explanatory employee requests, updating employee documents, updating employee payroll details for employees, getting their attendance and OT corrected, and so on.

        Having an HRMS portal will ensure that the time spent on these administrative activities decreases drastically.

        The lack of modern HCM software can also incur significant costs. According to Ernst & Young, performing a single manual entry of HR data* without using self-service HCM technology costs $4.70 for a company.

        Considering 594 data entries for an employee over the course of his/her tenure, the total costs/employee due to the lack of HRMS software comes to around $2791.8.

        This means for a company with 5000 employees, the total costs would be $13.959 million, and for a company with 10000 employees, the costs balloon to a whopping $27.918 million making an HCM solution worth the time and initial investment.

        Whether improving productivity or increasing compliance, an HRMS portal can contribute positively to the business’s bottom line in a meaningful way. The caveat is the need to organize employee data points during the initial stages of an HRMS implementation.

      2. Ensures better accuracy

        With self-service technology, you can use prompts and ensure various HR data points, such as crucial employee documents, are up to date with the help of employees’ input.

        This enables better accuracy and provides a cohesive, engaging employee experience. Case in point, when it comes to modules such as payroll, a self-serve HCM ensures no delays in salary payments while being 100% accurate with utmost clarity on data.

        Apart from the obvious benefits of up-to-date information, self-serve technology can help the HCM software also make accurate learning recommendations to employees, thus indirectly contributing to the company’s bottom line by bridging the skills gap amongst current employees.

      3. Acts as a centralized hub for documents

        Once you have an HRMS portal in place, employees can upload all important documents to a single hub. This can then be accessed from any location at their convenience, thus reducing the dependency on the HR team and allowing them to focus on other crucial tasks.

        An example of a redundant task that HR specialists could automate would be catering to employees needing their previous salary slips for various purposes. In a company where the size and scale of operations are humongous, even a small task like this can consume many person-hours and delay leading to employee dissatisfaction.

      4. Helps employees perform crucial tasks from their mobile

        HRMS portals these days offer mobile-friendly services, thus giving employees greater control over the information they can access, such as leaves, attendance, overtime, and night differential records.

        Especially in industries where gig force is present and where rostering is done on a shift basis, this data helps clarify their schedule, leave, attendance, overtime, and night differential payments. It also reduces manual reconciliation and redundancies.

        From an employer’s point of view, a mobile-friendly interface can help ensure error-free record-keeping and compliance.

      5. Reduces response time

        As a result of advanced human capital management softwares, the response time to employee queries is bound to go down since employees have access to standard data fields in real time. Moreover, employee self-service systems such as PeopleStrong are equipped with chatbot integration functionalities and AI (Artificial Intelligence), thus reducing TAT significantly.

        With the help of a self-serve enabled platform, companies such as Inspiro have already:

        • Saved 20 person-hours on answering employee queries per month eliminated via AI-enabled HR chatbot Jinie

        • Brought down the time spent on creating 2500 employee reports from 5 person-hours to just 15 minutes

        • Brought down time spent on consolidating payroll inputs from 30 person-hours to just 20 minutes

        • Brought down time spent on creating 2500 employee reports from 5 person-hours to just 15 minutes

        • Reduced time spent on payroll processing time for 17000+ employees from days to minutes

        Check out the entire impact here >

      6. Improves data security

        Manual interventions are prone to data leakage and errors. There are data security and privacy concerns, too, that must be considered. Apart from this, governments worldwide are constantly tightening regulations for greater security and privacy, especially in Southeast Asia.

        This is why modern self-serve-enabled HCM platforms have many security features like two-factor authentication, security questions, and OTP sign-in. Opting for these gives employees a lot more comfort in freeing themselves from the fear of big brother looming over them if they stay up to date by ensuring compliance.

      7. More efficient benefits administration

        Typically, HR teams spend a lot of their time administering basic benefits such as social security deductions (employee and employer contributions), nominee and coverage details, payment history and other enrolments. The processes for administering these benefits are standardized and well-defined. A HR software can help take care of this administration much more efficiently and effectively.

        On the employee front, there are many details that employees want to access. An HRMS portal handles that use case as well. Employees can pull out statements as they deem fit, view, and enrol in various benefit programs. They can also add dependents and download policy documents for insurance coverage.

      8. Improved data analytics & reports

        Since a human capital management system captures several data points, it can give insights into employee behaviour through data analytics. For example, you could measure labour costs, identify HiPo employees, track attendance, etc.

        With a single source of truth, a self-serve-enabled HCM solution can play a crucial role in helping the management take decisions affecting the company’s bottom line and improve the employee experience by taking affirmative actions.

     

    Conclusion

    One of the biggest advantages of having a human capital management solution is that it shows to employees that the organization values the time of its people. It also underlines the importance given to accuracy and excellence.

    For HR teams and companies, this also means better cost savings, more accuracy, a bird’s eye view of the happenings in an organization and time saved that could be spent elsewhere.

    There is a significant cost associated with spreadsheets and primitive HCM solutions that can simply be done away with by going ahead with a one-time implementation of an HRMS system.

     

    Check out PeopleStrong

    With PeopleStrong, you could combine several HR modules and eliminate a lot of inefficiencies with a centralized dashboard.

    PeopleStrong’s end-to-end HR Technology solution also can help manage people and processes while providing top-notch EX and helping HR leaders get a strategic picture of what is happening at the macro level.

     

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