4 Ways to Engage Managers with HRMS Self-Service

If you want the optimum return on your HRMS self-service investment, you need your managers (at all levels) to be using it as part of their everyday working lives. As well as accessing, maintaining and utilizing their own personal data and thereby role modeling system use to their teams, managers should ideally be leveraging the information that is now directly available to them to make more informed and insightful decisions.

HRMS manager self-service can, as a minimum, allow managers to juggle people data and create reports without the need for HR intervention; they can handle certain transactions – including authorizing pay raises, promotions, approving leave requests, and changing employee data – directly; and they can be more involved in classic HR functions such as performance management, succession planning and onboarding. Put simply, HRMS self-service should help them do their jobs more effectively. The key is to encourage your managers to ‘self-serve’.

1. Emphasise the Benefits

It’s the classic engagement question: what’s in it for me? Well, the answer for HRMS manager self-service and your managers will almost certainly include: improved accuracy of people data; faster transactions and people processes; less administrative interaction with HR staff (no offence intended to those in HR); better real-time decisions on matters such as scheduling; preset alerts and flags will prompt timely management action; and reduced overall people management costs (especially compelling for senior managers and leaders with budgetary responsibilities).

2. Help Them Achieve Better Manage Performance

On a day to day basis, priorities shift, schedules change, rotas are re-shuffled – in other words, your managers are engaged in a constant dance, balancing necessary outcomes and available resources. HRMS manager self-service talent management and personnel records options can give those managers much-needed direct access to people data, including location, availability, deployable skills and knowledge, and so on that makes for much more informed decisions and therefore more efficient workforce management. In the longer term, the same data combined with compensation data can be folded into better strategic succession planning.

Recommended Reading: HRMS Self Service - Steps to Success

3. Offer the Right Metrics

One way to convince your managers of the value of HRMS manager self-service is to offer them genuinely useful metrics and measures that demonstrate the ongoing usefulness of the system. Use the following data to prove that self-service is worth using: track the volume and speed of key transaction types; break down the split of time spent on transactions (HR time vs. management time) both before and after the introduction of self-service; track HR case volumes (and speed of throughput); compare error rates and data quality pre- and post-implementation; and quantify where possible the hard cost savings to the organization.

4. Engage Managers in What Comes next

Like any technology, HRMS manager self-service does not stand still. According to the latest Towers Watson HR technology survey, 36% of respondents implemented and leveraged manager self-service in the last 18 months. As new self-service functions become available, engage your management team at all levels in the process of keeping your HRMS up to date. In other words, ask them what new bells and whistles would help them do their jobs and then do something about it.