Employee self-service is quickly moving from a concept that only the most innovative companies implement to a must-have solution that improves performance for all kinds of teams.
Self-service HR systems put employees in the driving seat of routine HR tasks, reducing the level of admin that human resources can handle. On the employee side, they can usually get results quicker, which avoids frustration caused by delayed response times.
By providing evergreen training materials, automating approvals and reviews, and simplifying leave requests, almost every area of your business can be boosted with employee self-service features.
In this article, we’re going to look at the competitive advantages the trend brings and the mindset shift that is driving it, before outlining 10 ways to streamline HR processes with employee self-service.
1. Automate repetitive tasks to make your HR team more strategic
Let’s be honest, a lot of HR work has traditionally been repetitive and time-consuming. By opening up an employee self-service channel, your HR team can get to more significant tasks such as conflict management, interviewing, and strategic planning.
Initiatives like clock-in and clock-out timers and standardized time-off request workflows are easy to implement and pay off very quickly. These streamlined operations lead to major cost savings, primarily through the shift from time-consuming paper-based processes to automation, which reduces excess expenditure on physical storage and office supplies.
Similarly, they are great for teams looking to scale without placing an excessive burden on their team. It might be OK for an HR team to take care of manual admin work when your company is small. However, as your workforce grows, it multiplies the amount of tasks needed to keep operations running. Automations allow you to stop these repetitive tasks from snowballing into a serious burden for human resources.
Optimize your HR processes with efficient employee self-service systems.
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2. Give access to information and documents for employees
There is absolutely a need to restrict access to sensitive human resources documents, but that doesn’t mean limiting an individual’s access to their own information. Employee self-service allows employees to consult pay stubs, vacations, medical history, and other relevant data, while access permissions block out anybody who doesn’t have permission to see them.
It is an ethical imperative to keep your workers’ data safe, but access management is also one of the most effective HR efficiency tools out there. Routine inquiries don’t call for HR intervention, so giving the responsibility to the employees themselves saves time for both parties.
The result is seriously improved efficiency. Automating routine tasks like personal data updates speeds up processes and reduces the risk of human error while freeing up HR teams to focus on more strategic activities.
3. Simplify leave requests and management
If you’re planning a holiday, you’ll want to know you’re allowed time off ASAP. Until recently, this required sending an email to your boss and the HR department who would then check their schedules and eventually sign off on the request. That shouldn’t be too time-consuming, but with a plate full of other tasks to carry out, leave requests often got pushed to the bottom of the pile.
Now, digital HR tools such as absence charts, automated leave approval forms, and notifications have turned the whole into an employee self-service. Fill in an employee self-service form with dates, the type of absence, and the reason for leave. Bosses and HR teams can check the dates against their calendars to make sure there are no clashes, accept or deny the request, and the individual will get a notification immediately.
4. Allow employees to update their personal data
We’ve all been in the position where your name is spelled wrong on a system and you have to waste time with every interaction explaining the case to the other party. What’s worse is that the inflexibility of old systems meant that correcting mistakes — or making updates — could take weeks if not months.
Nowadays, modern HR management software is more flexible and intuitive, allowing individuals to edit their own profile quickly and easily. A great example of HR process optimization, the ability to update your data empowers people to make quick modifications without needing to draw on HR time and resources. This makes for timely changes and more reliable databases.
Of course, people should only be able to edit their own information. Security measures like multi-factor authentication prevent any bad actors from accessing areas they shouldn’t.
5. Offer access to company information and knowledge
In the same way as they do for their clients, more and more companies are launching centralized knowledge bases for employees to find answers to questions, rather than reaching out to a busy colleague or boss. This HR management software helps to create a culture that gives employees the accountability and responsibility to find answers for themselves.
In the past, one of the greatest difficulties was that the time it took to leaf through an employee guidebook was such that it was more efficient simply to ask. However, navigable repositories have changed the game, making it easy to enter a keyword and find the how-to guide or article that answers their question.
We’re even starting to see the emergence of AI employee self-service portals that suggest material based on the searcher’s job title or the history of their searches. With this shift, HR teams are freeing up time for themselves while facilitating employees to take the initiative and find the answers they need.
6. Create an extensive online course catalog for employee development
Why hold your team back from educating themselves? Sure, there’s a place for in-person classes to train your team, but if you’re working remotely, or if some of your bright stars want to learn outside of office hours, they should be allowed to do so.
User-friendly training materials should first be part of every employee onboarding process then stored on the cloud for any refresher sessions. Back your step-by-step guides and video tutorials with hands-on training so people can use the tools for themselves. This stops employees from seeing it as a box-ticking exercise or claiming they understand when secretly they don’t.
An employee self-service training center is an excellent example of HR workflow automation, whereby team members are encouraged to take courses that benefit them, with all the completion data being fed back into HR management software. Well-designed pathways keep employees engaged with continuous learning so nobody from personnel needs to actively monitor people’s progress.
With everybody’s learning journey available for the HR department to see, you can recommend profiles based on their up-to-date skill set when a project manager could use a helping hand.
7. Track performance on a comprehensive management system
It’s not good enough just to know the theory of HR self-service. For real impact, your workforce must know how to use the options at their disposal. At the same time, HR teams need to measure the efficacy of their initiatives, which requires a solid knowledge of data analytics.
A comprehensive performance management system reduces the active intervention of HR staff, empowering employees to access and update parts of their professional development journey. Here’s how:
Access to objectives: Employees can review and update their work objectives directly through the self-service portal. This means they can continuously advance their targets once previous objectives are checked off.
Performance evaluations: These documents are vital for employees to track their own process, so access to them is a huge plus for employee self-service. Able to see how they were performing in the past compared to now provides a clear view of where they need to improve and where they should celebrate success.
Development plans: By having access to their own development plans, people can identify their areas for improvement and enroll in recommended training courses to progress. Giving people power over their own development plans encourages a culture of continuous feedback and self-assessment, which leads to a greater sense of autonomy among employees. AI-powered self-service portals are beginning to automate this process by identifying weak points and recommending specific courses to remedy them.
Task time tracking and KPIs: It’s important to measure employee efficiency in a fair, unbiased way with task time trackers and target completion rates related to their role. Employees should be able to generate their own reports on KPIs like deals closed and customer retention rates without real-time supervision to have a transparent view of their performance.
Allowing employees to manage their own objectives, evaluations, and development plans not only increases efficiency, accountability, and self-management but also frees up HR teams to focus on strategic activities.
8. Communicate more smoothly with multiple internal channels
Seamless communication is at the heart of every well-run business, and including smart internal channels within your employee self-service system can give a significant boost to the information flow. Each channel has its own specific use, and when all of them work together, you get a more well-rounded communication strategy.
To give a few examples, instant messaging is great for quickly resolving issues and getting immediate feedback, while emails are better for formal procedures where you need a written record of what has been said. Video conferencing is ideal for virtual meetings and training and an internal news feed is perfect for company-wide announcements.
These digital HR tools give you a mix of synchronous and asynchronous channels that help your operations run like clockwork. However, you need to be strategic about your communication policy and make sure each employee understands it for the best results.
9. Provide user-friendly feedback collection tools
Key data to analyze how well your employee self-service works revolves around the most and least-frequently-used options and performance metrics like the time taken to complete a task. However, don’t neglect qualitative feedback from employees, which can reveal more about how to adapt the system or your training.
There’s nothing better than employee self-service surveys and polls to gauge the feeling inside your company. Yes, you need to make your team fully aware of how to use them, but it is well worth a short training session.
Feedback surveys give you a clear idea of employee satisfaction without having to interview people one-on-one. Furthermore, making them anonymous builds trust and yields more honest feedback.
All the data from these forms feed into job satisfaction visualizations so you can quickly pull up a report and see areas for improvement. Make a habit of gathering employee feedback and making incremental upgrades to the relationship between your HR team and the rest of your organization.
10. Boost job satisfaction by giving employees control over their tasks
One of the leading causes of burnout is a feeling of being infantilized. Typical triggers are being restricted from doing easy tasks with no good reason. Employee self-service options cut out the hierarchical nature that comes with outdated tech solutions and promote a sense of ownership and engagement among employees.
In the short term, this is fantastic for the wellbeing of your staff. It leads to increased employee satisfaction due to having more autonomy when accessing payslips and managing leave — tasks that used to be frustratingly slow.
However, it’s even better for your company’s productivity. By treating your team like adults, they’re far more likely to be motivated to work, which has an immediate impact on how you tackle projects. And as an HR department, why would you not want to share some of the responsibilities? HR workflow automation has been a revelation in cutting down the workload on overburdened teams and instead delegating some tasks to their employees.
Bitrix24: A central employee self-service hub
From employee onboarding to training schemes to help your team thrive, HR can avoid micromanagement and empower their employees — as long as they have the right technology to do it.
Bitrix24 is an all-in-one business platform that combines all your HR efficiency tools in one place.
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Collaborative docs with access controls
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Customizable leave management workflows
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A whole suite of internal communication tools
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Knowledge bases and professional development platforms
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A vast array of automations and notifications to pull everything together.
So if you want to optimize your HR processes with efficient employee self-service systems, sign up for Bitrix24 today.
Optimize your HR processes with efficient employee self-service systems.
Bitrix24 is an all-in-one business platform that combines all your HR efficiency tools in one place
Register Today
FAQs
What are the benefits of employee self-service in HR?
Employee self-service systems improve efficiency by automating routine tasks and allowing employees to take control of minor operations instead of overburdening the HR team with them. However, well-designed employee systems even employee satisfaction, reduce operational costs, ensure data accuracy, and aid in compliance.
How can HR automation streamline processes?
HR automation streamlines processes by reducing manual tasks such as payroll, attendance tracking, and benefits administration. This frees up HR professionals to focus on strategic initiatives, improves accuracy through minimizing human errors, and speeds up workflows. Many elements that used to require human intervention can now be done through automations, notifications, and artificial intelligence.
What features should a self-service HR tool include?
A self-service HR tool should include features like:
