The Employee Self-Service Portal is a personalized platform for every employee in the organization. One of the main objectives of the Employee Portal is to provide, in one place, accessible and structured key personal HR and payroll information for every employee.
We see that the functional scope of the Employee Self-Service Portal should be much broader than the majority of people see it, and that the benefits of these features should be highlighted.
In our view, the functionalities of the Employee Self-Service Portal that provide the biggest value to organizations and most commonly implemented in practice are:
- Employee personal information. It is important when every employee can view his/her personal information stored in the HR and payroll system such as: payslips and their history, current labour contract information and the history of changes, absence history, unused annual vacation balance, etc.
Benefits: This is usually the main topics when employees contact the HR specialists, so the implementation of such a function directly saves valuable time of HR people and employees themselves. - Work time management (WTM). This is important when an organization has remote units and they are independently responsible for a full or partial working time management, can share online with HR specialists current view of the commonly used working time information: created and updated employee individual schedules, sick leaves, other absences, actual worked time at the end or during the month, etc.
Benefits: sharing online the working time management information between remote company’s departments and the HR specialists allows to optimize working time management process itself. It affects the more accurate time planning, eliminates mistakes when the working time data is duplicated, payroll calculation become available earlier and precise. - Employee requests, approval processes (workflow). An important functional feature when employee annual leave and other requests are to be transferred to the online portal, and after all the necessary approvals have been made, absence records are automatically created in timesheets.
Benefits: It is convenient to have the employee requests and their approval processes as part of the HR management system instead of the DMS (document management system), as it saves employees and HR specialists time. When applications are confirmed, absence entries are automatically created in timesheet without any additional efforts and all the confirmation history become available for the future. The possibilities to create flexible confirmation sequences (workflows) for the organization gives the possibility to approve other types of documents as well. - The manager’s environment. It is important when every manager has direct access to the specific his/her subordinate’s information, such as current labour contract information and history changes, unused vacation balances, etc., to be able to approve online employee’s requests.
Benefits: The creation of the manager’s environment eliminates the need for additional reports generated by the HR department for the day-to-day activities for the managers and makes the information instantly available for them. - Notifications for employees. An important tool giving notice for the employee about the new requests to be confirmed not only internally in the Self-Service portal but also by e-mail (especially when employees are not logged in all the time in the portal.
Benefits: The additional e-mail notifications ensure that the information reaches the recipient at the right time, regardless of how often the portal is used.
We invite you to take a closer look at the Employee Self-Service Portal.
Vilma Semėnaitė
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