An employee self-service or ESS portal is now an integral part of every leading human resource management software. ESS lets employees perform many different human resources and job-related tasks that would otherwise be performed by human resource executives. It is a proven fact that when employees gain access to the employee portal and easily access online their payroll and other job-related information, their trust and motivation levels just go up.
Employee self-service portal (ESS portal) simply brings more transparency into a business organization and employees trust the organization more. Winning the trust of employees is one of the key ways to grow faster. In a trustable organization, employees perform better and employers enjoy more productivity even without spending more.
Nowadays, many leading human resource management software solutions come with an advanced ESS feature. In this way, not only you can take your employees onboard easily but also your human resource executives get some added time and concentrate on other important tasks.
Previously ESS used to come as a separate software solution and lots of business organizations used that to successfully handle employee management tasks. But nowadays, next-gen human resource management software solutions like HRMWARE come with an ESS feature and there is no need to enable a separate software solution to let employees handle some tasks on their own.
What is this ESS- Employee Self Service portal?
ESS- Employee Self Service is an advanced technology that lets an employee perform many HR, IT, and administrative tasks on their own. Nowadays, it has been coming as an integral part of human resource software as a service. And one can easily access it via an internet portal. It usually facilitates common tasks such as updating personal information, accessing handbooks, daily attendance, leave application, salary summary, and other payroll tasks. Some advanced ESS portals also let employees easily handle insurance plans and other benefits at the same time.
The types of tasks an ESS portal used to manage are sorts of routine HR tasks and earlier we used to perform that using pen and paper. In a manual mode, it used to take a lot of time, and a lot of errors used to take place. But thanks to innovation and leading technologies that now digitalization or business processes have become possible in all ways. The self-service regime is now making organizations save a lot of time and money. And at the same time, reducing human error and satisfying a variety of employee requirements have also become effortless.
When an employer can reduce administrative costs automatically he/she can concentrate more and spend more on additional employee benefit programs. ESS portal often comes as a part of wide technological initiatives and delivered via any SaaS platform.
How does an employee self service portal work (ESS)?
Generally, an employee self service portal acts as a combination of the interactive web application with searchable knowledge databases. In this way, employers get a full suite of features that simply transform the way an organization used to manage all its employees. The interactive part of ESS actually combines the automated systems with customer support in form of a ticket-based help desk system or in form of a live chat.
There are different types of companies and their needs are also different. Based on the requirement set, you need to choose the best employee self service portal. There will be a set of features or options that will help employees to perform their daily or monthly tasks without facing any kind of interruption or error. There are some HRMS solutions that come with such a portal and employees can easily handle that. Just a small demo video is enough to make all your employees understand the working style. Or just a single training day is enough to make all your employees easily use that ESS portal without facing any interruption.
Along with this, the entire process is super secure and employees will be able to maintain their privacy at the best level.
Is an employee self service portal secure?
You know that HR departments need to handle a lot of sensitive information including the financial and personal details of each employee of the organization. An ESS portal allows employees to view, edit, and manage their personal and organizational information is beneficial but you will agree that security is paramount. ESS systems are very careful when it comes to maintaining security and privacy on both the server-side and client-side.
An employee will be accessing the portal or the personal information only with the right user id and password. Some ESS portals or systems often come with dual-authentication systems to ensure added security.
There are some employee self service systems that can be accessed from the open web. Apart from this, there are some ESS systems that can be accessed using an active visual personal network connection. VPNs act as extensions of private computer networks. In this way, computers act as they are physically part of a local network even though those computers are communicating over a public connection. Many business organizations prefer to make employees use VPN when employees are working remotely.
Employee Self service portals are easy to use, safe, secure, and so many other benefits are on the list. How an ESS is going to completely transform your employee management job or human resource management job, you can easily understand that if you explore all benefits of an ESS.
Benefits of an Employee Self Service (ESS) portal
Employee control & engagement- when you make your employees able to access and upload their own data, you not only save a lot of time but also this process helps employees with more transparent, accurate, and timely information. We have seen that employees do not prefer to wait for long when it comes to fulfilling basic information requests. If employees want to view their benefit information nor how much PTO they have, they can easily access that via an employee self service portal. Via an employee self service portal, everything related to employment will be rightly accessible to an employee anytime and anywhere.
When employees can take care of their own information, your human resource executives will get a lot of free time to concentrate on other important aspects that ensure the steady growth of a business organization.
Information accuracy- we have seen that lots of vital information get lost in translation when a company tries to work for long with an intermediary. An advanced human resource management system with an ESS feature or portal helps eliminate duplicate data entry and improves record-keeping accuracy just by allowing its employees to view and edit their data.
In this way, employees will be able to update their own information such as emergency contacts, certificates, addresses, phone numbers, and so on. Getting the required information directly from the sources reduces errors as well as increases efficiency.
Enabling an ESS means your employee will get a centralized place to check all organizational details such as policies, organizational news, handbooks, and so on. In this way, you will be able to reduce the chances of confusion and miscommunication.
Benefits management- we have seen that human resource executives in small businesses or startups spend a lot of time on routine benefits administration. But an advanced human resource management system with ESS feature can easily track as well as monitor employee benefits information, including employer and employee contributions, coverage details, COBRA enrollments, payment history, and so on.
An employee via an Employee Self Service portal can also track their own participation, eligibility, statement for benefits, retirement and other savings plans, and so on. Being an employer it is your duty to maintain a proper level of transparency so that employees can trust you more and pour dedication while performing for you.
With an ESS, your employees will be able to find as well as navigate their benefits at your organization with ease. In this way, you will be able to keep the entire process simple with one employee portal. Here, an employee can easily review pay history, view benefit status, explore recent organizational announcements, and so on.
Expense management- generally, employee self service portals come with expense management benefits. Employees can easily file expense reports, 24/7 access to approve and reimbursement process, and upload receipts, and manage expenses while traveling.
With an ESS, there is no need to communicate to the various departments to do expense management. An employee will get the expenses easily after applying via an ESS. in the same way, the approval procedure also becomes easy and the responsible professional can do the fact check and approve the expense.
Time-off management- maintaining attendance information along with paid time off requests is one of the most important, mandatory, and time-taking tasks that your human resource department needs to perform on a regular basis. An advanced human resource management software solution such as HRMWARE comes with an ESS portal and lets human resource executives easily track absences and perform other attendance-related tasks. They can easily access time-off requests, find out who is available to cover a working shift, and track their PTO hours.
With an automated employee self service portal, a business organization will be able to save a lot of time and money. It will also be able to improve compliance with federal and state compliance.
Cost and time saving- an ESS can save a lot of money and the saved cost extends into many areas of a business. Based on the research of the Center of Effective Organization at USC, an HR department spends nearly 50% of its time properly processing employee information and answering various questions of employees. A next-gen HRMS solution like HRMWARE is able to drastically reduce time spent on many administrative duties just by organizing all employees, payroll, attendance, benefits, training, hiring, and other information in one centralized place.
With an ESS, employees can easily access and update their own information and HRs get free from such time-consuming tasks. The HRs and employers will get more time in order to improve the work environment and save more money on workforce-related expenses. Employee self service solutions are able to boost the businesses’ bottom line via increased productivity, improved compliance, time, cost, and labor savings, and so on.
Routine HR tasks require a lot of time as well as labor. With an ESS portal, that time and energy can be spent on other important areas. With an ESS, HRs will be able to concentrate on things like strategic business partnership activities, hiring, training, and so on.
Employees no need to wait for a long time to get general organizational updates on policies, compensation, and so on. Via ESS, they can explore everything in one centralized place and satisfy their requirements.
Compliance reporting- there are some government laws and regulations such as FMLA, EEO, OSHA, and so on that require significant reporting requirements. Advanced human resource management software with an ESS portal helps in reducing mistakes and avoid penalties. There are also a lot of robust systems that help in tracking as well as automating reports in the proper format. They also help in getting regular legislative updates.
These are the top benefits that one can enjoy after enabling a human resource management software that comes with an ESS portal or feature. Now, the question is whether you should go for an ESS system only or you should go for a human resource management software that comes with the ESS feature.
This era is all about doing more with less. So, it will be better if you choose a human resource management system that comes with an employee self service portal or feature. In this way, you will be able to better manage your employee base even without spending more time and money. But while choosing a human resource management software you should be a bit more careful. The market is filled with a lot of solutions and you should pick the best one from the crowd.
Things to consider while choosing the best Employee Self Service portal for your company
There are some important facts that you need to consider when it comes to enabling an HRMS with an ESS portal to satisfy your organizational requirements. Below, we are going to list down the facts that you should consider with care.
Ensure that employees will actually use that portal- the term’ employee self service’ sounds really attractive yet some people will be reluctant to use a new thing especially when they are already habituated with your existing process. Before investing in an ESS portal, it will be better if you conduct an internal survey to understand what your employees actually want and which type of ESS should be best to make your employees self-sufficient.
Check the feature set- when it comes to checking the feature set, you should check that that system comes with all the best features or not. There should be all basic as well as advanced features to offer your employees a true ESS experience. Generally, leading ESS portals come with features like leave requests, payroll history, information view and edit, attendance, organizational announcement, and so on. All these things should be super secure and employees should be able to access them remotely as well as securely.
Ensure it is easy to install- the ESS portal needs to be perfectly compatible with your existing office systems. It should come in a cost-effective installation manner. You can research a bit in order to check which options are truly cost-effective and you can easily avail of.
Ensure that the learning curve is not hard- the Employee Self Service portal should come with a simple as well as easy-to-understand interface. It should not be difficult to navigate otherwise your employees will lose the interest to explore it and know more about it. It should be simple, clear, and well functional across all leading browsers.
These are the 4 most important things that you need to consider when it comes to choosing the best Employee self service system. You can share your organizational announcements via this system and inform all your employees instantly.
Conclusion
Now you know the benefits as well as the ways you should consider while going for an Employee Self Service portal. Cost, features, usability, and everything discussed above, you should care about everything and make a wise decision.
If you are in search of an HRMS that comes with a robust ESS portal, you can go for HRMWARE without having any second through. This is a feature-rich human resource management system that comes with all the best things that you will require in order to manage your employee base and run your organization smoothly.
This amazing software as a service solution is free for those companies that are running up to ten employees. It can satisfy the requirements of small to giant organizations regardless of the company type and size. If you have human resource management and employee self-service management requirements, going for HRMWARE will be a wise choice.