Is ESS right for your company? Before moving HR applications to the web, consider your company's culture and the potential ROI of automation - Technology - employee self-service

HR Magazine, Dec, 2002 by France Lampron

First in a two-part series.

You've read that moving HR tasks--everything from benefits to compensation administration--onto an internal intranet can reduce HR's daily administrative work and increase opportunities for strategic planning and counsel. But in the midst of shrinking budgets and expanding workloads, can your HR department successfully implement employee self-service (ESS)? Should you even try?

Many in HR management think capital equipment costs and employee privacy are the initial considerations in the development of an intranet, yet the first things to consider are the company's culture and HR's volume and complexity of tasks.

Getting Started

A quick evaluation of the forms and paperwork in any company's HR department make the economic benefits of moving tasks to an intranet obvious. A company directory and the employee handbook can be posted on a web site and kept up-to-date without incurring annual printing costs. Forms for address changes, benefits enrollment and emergency contact information are all easily posted, reducing the time HR and employees typically spend processing the data.

"But the biggest reason and perhaps the most difficult to quantify is that by moving HR applications to a company intranet, HR management and generalists can focus on the more strategic aspects of HR," said Julie Boudreau, HR systems manager at IDG, a publishing company based in Boston that has implemented ESS. "Freed from any number of administrative tasks, the HR team can now function as a business partner to the company's executive team." Automation provides the time and data to analyze HR's role within the organization, she says.

To determine the business drivers for a company HR intranet, consider some of the following questions:

* Does the HR department employ an HR specialist just to handle administrative work?

* What strategic reports could HR provide to corporate leadership if the department was freed from data entry and other administrative tasks?

* Are the HR generalists throughout the company mired in administrative tasks, instead of acting as strategic partners to the business units?

* What reference documents (employee handbooks, directories, benefits guidelines, training booklets, etc.) could be posted to an intranet to reduce printing costs?

* Does the company provide a means to collect and verify information from employees and managers to support analytical reports?

* Could HR reports to executive management be more factual?

Corporate Culture's Impact

Before beginning an intranet project, it is important to consider your company's culture. Some organizations embrace change readily. A company with younger employees may wonder why everything isn't already on the web, while a more established, traditional company may still expect an HR generalist to enter employee data on the new intranet. If the latter is true, HR would just shift the administrative work, instead of streamlining the process.

How computer-literate is the company? Does the company have an internal intranet? If so, HR should ask the webmaster or intranet team leader about employee usage, rollout issues and initial resistance.

Otherwise, assess corporate culture by asking:

* Does everyone at the company use a PC?

* How willing have managers been to accept self-service applications, for example, to book their own travel? This will provide insight into how easily a company might adopt a self-service web application.

* Will managers be expected to use the self-service capabilities, or will HR be expected to act on behalf of a manager?

* Do managers want to own employee data?

* Do managers want to feel empowered to make decisions about their employees?

Forming a Project Team

Once you've determined that your organization will embrace ESS, the next key step is putting together the right project team. The project should be driven by HR and therefore heavily weighted with managers and generalists from benefits, compensation and HR administration. The team should also include a representative from the company's information technology (IT) department, a manager, an employee and, of course, the application developer. This team will shape what the intranet will look like and its content, and will decide which applications will save the most time and money and which uses employees are likely to accept.

IT needs to be fully represented, as that department will likely host and maintain the system. In some cases, IT may develop the application, and, in other cases, it will only provide tech support for the application. In either case, IT will support the intranet, ensure that there is adequate performance and security, and solve any network connectivity issues. A solid working relationship between the application developer and the IT department is crucial to the success of the project.

Executive sponsorship is another key element of the team's success: The project needs high-level champions. The vice president of HR is an obvious choice, in addition to a steering committee of executives from finance and IT. This team can promote the application to other company executives and help clear any roadblocks that arise.