The Benefits of a Unified Employee Self-Service Portal
Today’s business professionals demand more responsive IT services as they become exposed to the offerings of external service providers. Business consumers expect their IT departments to deliver rapid fulfillment of service requests through clearly documented, standard offerings with transparent costs and service levels.
Workers are neither concerned with IT’s back-end processes nor with where the services are hosted. They simply want to see what’s available in the service catalog and place any of their orders via a single, easy-to-use interface—that is, select IT services the same way that they purchase retail services.
On the other hand, IT is more concerned with reducing costs and leveraging automation to increase operational efficiency as they move to an IT as a service model. To achieve both user and IT objectives, IT must package its services for business consumption by simplifying service design and presentation to the business.
A unified service portal provides a single interface for presenting business and IT services and offers tangible benefits—even if service catalogs or automation efforts are still “works in progress.”
A unified service portal will improve the visibility of IT to your business consumers and make it easy and fast for employees to order IT services. It will also reduce administrative costs, boost employee productivity, increase HR productivity, and enable IT to judge the demand for specific services. When you include automated order fulfillment and approval processes, your valuable IT resources are available for innovation projects instead of manually fulfilling requests.
Even if your service catalog development or service automation efforts are still maturing, the benefits to employees who use this “face to IT” to educate themselves, shop, and order through a single, self-service storefront are compelling. As service automation efforts are evolving, there will be minimal disruption to the end user. The storefront also provides immediate insight into the popularity of IT products/services and enables IT to allocate budget and staff to automate the most popular service first.
What Are the HR Benefits of a Unified Employee Self-Service Portal?
Did you know that most HR departments spend over 70% of their time on administrative tasks? While these tasks are integral to running your workflow, your employee self-service portal offers a better way to streamline the process. Letting your employees take control of their own schedules, contact information, and other essential needs that HR once needed to process improves efficiency. Self-service HR software lets your HR department concentrate more on your staff and less on documentation, which is exactly what it takes to improve employee engagement.
Here are some of the top benefits you'll experience with an employee self-service portal:
Access W2, Download Paystubs, and Update Payroll Information
Nearly one in three organizations cite inaccurate employee data entered into the payroll system as a top compliance concern. Agility is the name of the game, and it’s imperative your employee self-service portal is flexible and stays on pace with changing regulations. With employee self service integrated into your system, compliance worries are a thing of the past. Once employees can access their W2s, download paystubs, and update payroll information themselves, accuracy increases. Plus, employees gain autonomy over their information and check off tasks that would otherwise fall on the HR team’s desks.
Reduce Errors and Workload
One of the many benefits of a unified employee portal includes HR self-service. With access to their employee self-service portal, employees can update their information when necessary. When each employee is allowed to make changes as their life demands, it means your HR team isn't taxed with updating all your staff members’ information when needed. This might seem like a small benefit, but for large companies with many employees, it represents a large savings of administrative time, especially when tackling your year-end checklist. You'll also see fewer data errors when employees can access and edit their own information.
Increase Employee Engagement
A unified employee self-service portal allows your teams to communicate with each other easily via social collaboration tools, such as community groups, peer recognition, and in-platform chat. They may offer features very similar to a social network, including the ability to react to and comment on announcements and forum posts, making it easy for workers to connect with the organization and their peers. Unified portals can serve as a hub for both important information and coworker connection, providing an optimal environment for fostering engagement. Employees can also be sent notifications about these activities straight to their email and phone so they never miss an update.
Improve Data Security
If your team has been relying on paper documents or a system that isn't properly secured, your employee's confidential information is at risk. It's also likely that you're not maintaining regulatory compliance regarding data. Your unified portal should provide essential security features to keep you in compliance and secure your sensitive employee information.
Streamline Time Off Requests
Your employees can request sick leave, vacation time off, or scheduling changes through the portal and management can approve or deny requests, as well. This cuts time from the process and automatically gives your HR department a log of all requests and responses in real-time.
Improve Visibility for PTO Accrual and Balances
Employees can easily see their PTO benefits so that they can schedule their personal time and verify the amount of time off they have left in any period.
Simplify Employee Benefits Management
Employees can see and track all their benefits through the employee portal software. This lets them check their balances, see histories, and get answers to any questions they may have.
Easy Expense Management
Expense management is simplified through an employee self-service portal; employees can use the mobile app to track receipts from anywhere and supervisors can grant approval with the click of a button.
More Sustainable and Reduced Waste
For companies that have been relying on paper documentation, a unified portal is a better solution for the environment.
Improve HR Efficiency
Your HR team wins big with a unified portal that eliminates paperwork, simplifies process, and engages employees. With an all-in-one system, accessible to employees, HR is no longer the gatekeeper of payroll, benefits, scheduling, and employee information.
Employee Training and Learning Management
If you have coursework that employees need to complete, they can access their lessons through the unified employee experience portal. This logs the employee's time in training and allows them to complete lessons around their schedule. When you’re adding new members to your team, efficient and accessible learning and development is essential for smooth onboarding. With a unified portal by their side, HR can focus on setting the tone for the employee experience and getting to know new hires instead of spending hours navigating a clunky onboarding process.
Employee Scheduling
With a consumer-like, unified portal, employee scheduling and time tracking will become a breeze. Employees can log in at any time to see their updated schedule. They can request time off through the portal and communicate with HR or their superior about scheduling. This gives management an easy way to schedule replacement staff for sick workers. It also streamlines the process for employees who need to request days off. And all the information is logged.
Making it Happen
Intellective, an Elite ServiceNow Partner that specializes in employee experience, can help you build a unified service portal that enables you to clearly present a single interface for processing orders for IT services from your employees as well as get all the information they need to do their jobs in one location.
We leverage our portal framework of prebuilt templates, design patterns, and code—and our experience implementing unified service portals for ServiceNow users—to speed development and launch of your service portal.
Intellective’s Employee Experience Pack makes it easy to capture data and information across the organization and deliver it in an easy-to-consume manner without your employees having to search all over creation or call a help desk to find what they need. You can also customize their experience based on generational demographics, department, geographic location, and a whole host of other factors.
Intellective’s Employee Service Pack allowed a Fortune 500 organization to completely transform their difficult to use intranet into a simple, compelling, and engaging intranet in ten(10) weeks, saving them millions of dollars in implementation services.
