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There is an age-old proverb saying “Self-help is the best help”. Taking the idea forward and applying it in the field of Human Resource Management, we arrive at the concept of Employee Self Service (ESS). The concept is as simple as it sounds but is the key to optimally managing any company’s workforce with the least amount of cost & effort. Before we move into analyzing how ESS would influence any company’s RoI bottom line, we need to know how the Human Resource (HR) department of any company works.

The HR Department was previously considered to be a conduit between the management and the employee. Majority of the productive work hours of an HR executive or manager was spent in managing employee data. Be it something as small as an address change in the employee’s records to updation of the Leaves database. Thus the HR staff ended up spending most of his time on non-strategic activities which did not add any value to the company’s bottom line.

When in today’s age, time is money; no enterprise can survive without optimal utilizing every employee’s productive work hours. Every employee has a cost assigned to every hour of his or her official work. So when the HR executives spend most of their time on basically data entry work, every employer is actually wasting money spent on that resource. This is where a Human Resource Management System comes into the rescue.

By leveraging technology and strategy, an HRMS puts the ball in the court of the employee. ESS is linked to an HRMS solution in nine-out of ten cases, so as to free up the HR department and make it concentrate more of its resources to strategic tasks like attracting and retaining core talent, analyzing attrition to reduce it and linking compensation to performance. The HRMS provides the employees with a central web based platform accessible from anywhere through the internet. Thus the employees enter, edit and update any information needed by the employer or external sources like Tax authorities and Clients with critical compliance needs.

Sometimes, the employer also disseminates company policies and other important notices through such portals to speed up the communication process. The employees also feel empowered by the fact that they need not go through the HR to facilitate professionally sensitive issues like Payslip generation, Leave and Appraisal negotiation. With the emergence of the web savvy workforce in today’s age, concepts like Career planning, skill profiles, eLearning and more analytics based HR functions are being integrated into HRM systems to facilitate ESS. Companies which have a geographically dispersed workforce, ESS is a boon to expedite the workforce integration process. For companies with even a single office, there is a considerable cost savings by eliminating printing & posting of forms and the costly careless errors made while manually filling these forms.

The most common features of ESS available on a HRMS are as follows:

  • Paperless recruitment process with electronic storage of all candidate details & information
  • Employee records generation, updation & storage through a web based platform accessible to all employees via an unique username and password
  • Employee’s Payroll data accessible by the employee and only a select group of individuals based on company policy
  • Employee’s Bank details, Tax and PF data managed by themselves only under the HR’s supervision
  • Mandatory Training & Compliance requirements
  • Leave Management System to empower the employee and the managers to prioritize between work & time-off while keeping the discussion within close quarters
  • Initial stages of Performance Appraisal where the employee marks themselves on the various metrics based on company policy and decides their goals & objectives in consultation with their seniors
  • Company policy information and benefits enrollment

Figures across all industries around the world indicate the growing trend of companies using an HRMS solution to implement ESS. However, decision makers who lack the visionary power would still argue that it costs more than it saves. Keeping such small and medium scale businesses in mind, we have designed the PeopleWorks solution.
PeopleWorks is a cloud based HRMS which utilizes ESS more than any other HR software available in the market. Its “Pay as you go” model of subscription also ensures the flexibility to scale up or down according to your business’ short or long terms needs and objectives.

To know more about PeopleWorks or to request an online demo, write to peopleworks@localhost or visit www.peopleworks.in.

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