Improvements HRMS self-service can bring to your business

For some time, the watchword for good leadership has been collaboration. As a business owner or leader, you want the whole workforce working together and, even more importantly, with you, towards making your strategic goals happen. But with collaboration comes responsibility, delegation, empowerment, innovation… and on a day-to-day level, building that kind of company culture usually involves giving your employees a reasonable degree of autonomy and control (‘servants’ tend to be less motivated to go that extra mile than ‘partners’) and that’s where HRMS self-service can help.

HRMS self-service is the feature set that allows employees direct access to certain HR services, usually via an HR portal accessed online. Features might include limited editing rights for their personal HR records, access to rotas and work schedules, requesting vacations and time off, and viewing their own paychecks and deductions statements.

How can it benefit a business?

Any business can benefit from providing HRMS self-service options to its workforce. Acknowledged HR-related benefits include:

• Improved access to HR services – When managers are no longer the gatekeepers between HR and the rest of the workforce, not only does the HR team become a little less faceless but the speed and efficiency of services increase. This has an obvious and positive impact on managers and supervisors. Released from easily automated, mundane tasks (for example, booking vacation days) the manager can focus on their own, more strategic duties.
• Reduced HR costs – Though managers’ time is freed up, the burden of the “mundane task” is not passed to the HR team, but instead is largely handled by the HRMS itself. This allows for potential cost savings via a reduced HR overhead.
• A better-focused HR team – Alternatively, instead of leveraging it as a cost reduction, the time saved by automation could be invested in other, more strategic HR work (for example, employee engagement initiatives) that has a more direct impact on the company’s business objectives.
• Fewer errors – A significant benefit of HRMS automation is that fewer errors are made. In fact, as long as the data is accurate at the point of input, you should be free of those tiny, easy-to-make mistakes (a wrong digit on a bank code, for instance, that results in a salary not being paid on time) that turn into time-expensive problems, often the kind that result in a degree of resentment towards the company.

Finally, to return to the issue of giving employees autonomy and control over elements of their working lives, that together with a more efficient experience when dealing with HR issues has an impact on employee satisfaction and motivation. In small, often unnoticed but significant ways, HRMS self-service can help create a business culture of goal-oriented collaboration, as opposed to one in which people simply do as they’re told…