Employee Self-Service: Is essentially various tailor made web based applications that provide employees with various degrees of access to their personal and payroll details. Employees will have the autonomy to go into the application and change such admin duties as; their contact details, banking information, apply for leave and submitting time sheets.
Since it’s emergence, ESS has allowed employees to interact with their HR department in a virtual manner thus, saving time, resources and energy on having to meet face to face. This in turn, has allowed companies to save time and money on otherwise tedious tasks that would have a prolonged workflow as such that will be detrimental to overall productivity. Think of it as a means in which a “paperless office” can be achieved through a much more streamlined business process.
Human Resource Managers are often being faced with the challenge of having to increase efficiency within the workplace while keeping costs and overall resources constant. While this may seem to be an uphill battle (which it no doubt is), ESS has prevailed to be a dramatic yet practical solution to this conundrum.
If you are wondering about the overall security and likelihood of this data being compromised then you are not alone, however, another added benefit to ESS is that it works within a cloud network. Access rights for each employee can be determined by management and of course will vary by departments and job functions and as a result, with a sufficient back up system in place as well as a logical level of access given to all employees, the likelihood of having whole networks compromised is minimal. As well as this measure, encrypting your data (relevant password protection) is another simplistic measure that is more effective than most realize when it comes down to protecting information on the cloud.
Now in terms of how to actually use this software, typically you will be able to access this type of application over the company intranet or in some rare cases, a portal. Now to simplify further, an intranet is basically a private network which exists within a company. It could consist of many localized networks or could include networks within a wider area. The main benefit of an intranet is to have an all in one place as such to store company information relevant to specific departments and projects that can encourage collaboration within the workplace as well as a more efficient and timely solution to completing short and long term tasks. Employees within a company will be able to access this intranet and as a result, typically the user design will be simplistic enough that minimal training and efforts in educating employees will be needed.
That’s as basic of a description as possible when it comes to this contemporary phenomenon that is starting to be adopted at a rapid pace by companies in different verticals across the world. Along with efficiency and productivity being two aforementioned benefits, another three categories in which ESS can benefit a company are; cost savings, cost avoidance and revenue generation. We will be diving a bit more in depth to ESS in the coming weeks through specific examples of this type of automation and how through case studies we have experienced it’s benefits first hand to our clients.