How to Use HRMS Employee Self-Service Strategically

Often when we think of HRMS employee self-service, we think of mundane tasks such as updating a home address or entering a highest education level. However, a savvy HRMS manager knows that it’s a lot more than that! Enabling self-service on data elements that are important to your strategic business plans is a way to gain even more value from your system, and here are some ideas of where to start.

Strategic Data Elements

When you think of HRMS employee self-service, it’s often seen as ‘doing HR’s work’. However, as HRMS professionals, we need to reach outside of our HR circles, and into the business. For example, I’ve seen in a manufacturing environment, where we had a lot of internal engineering talent, as well as previous experience. Much of the staffing of future design work, however, depended upon word of mouth between managers. We were able to tap directly into employees’ knowledge, by enabling self-service transactions that allowed for the entry of relevant product launches and design. When managers needed to find someone who had experience in certain previous product launches, it was able to be provided without extra efforts, allowing for better decision making on staffing future products.

Another similar example is the tracking of employee languages. At global companies, there are often many hidden and undiscovered skills, for example, the German employee who had a Chinese mother and has native fluency in Mandarin. As this employee did not have a university degree or another indicator, it was only through casual conversation that one would find out about this talent. With employee self-service, however, suddenly the needle in the haystack becomes visible when we allow employees to directly enter competencies, as well as self-rate their proficiency in these areas.

Recommended Reading: HRMS Self Service - Steps to Success

Tip: As always, remember to keep in mind data privacy, to ensure that any new data captures are compliant and suitable for purpose.

In each of these examples, a key to making this functionality work is the participation of employees. While HRMS employee self-service transactions are often easy to build in a variety of technologies, it becomes a marketing exercise, to highlight the career advancement possibilities to employees, so that they see value in entering this data. HR partnership is needed on this front, to ensure that your HRMS software is able to capture the relevant data, as well as to promote the functionality to ensure a full set of data is available.