Employee Self-Service

Enabling employees to use the network to access information such as benefits, job opportunities, and directories

How can businesses increase the proportion of the workday that employees spend being productive--and decrease the amount of time they spend searching for information and answers? Employee self-service provides a solution, allowing employees to help themselves to a complete range of information--payroll, benefits, directories, customer data, competitive information, industry news, and more--from any PC.

An employee working on an extended assignment in a client's office can make changes to his health insurance over a secure Internet channel. A new employee enrolls in a customized set of benefits, appropriate to her individual needs, over her home PC. Phone numbers are available to office-based and remote employees in a searchable online directory, without need to call the switchboard operator. Rather than having to wait for a monthly corporate newsletter, workers receive, via e-mail, daily high- lights that provide links to more detail on selected topics for those who are interested. And all these feats of corporate communi- cation and human resources management are accomplished more quickly and without taking valuable time from Human Resource staff. This scenario frees Human Resource employees for more strategic activities, such as employee recruitment, development, and retention.

Employee self-service enables companies to:

• Improve productivity

• Reduce administrative costs

• Enhance decision-making, by providing easier access to competitive and market data

• Improve organizational teamwork, by providing a common base of information for all employees to share

Implementing Employee Self-Service Applications

Until recently, businesses could provide access to corporate information on line--and enable employee self-service-- but only in a mix of dissimilar formats. Network-based directories, benefits listings, and corporate news may have been stored on different servers and were difficult for employees to locate and use. Today, widespread adoption of browsers as a standard desktop interface enables companies to build powerful intranets, which provide uniform, point-and- click access to these varied types of company information.

Intranets are built on a sound network structure that provides fast, reliable, secure access, both over local connections and between dispersed offices, over a business' wide-area network (WAN). Today, improved network security and new, high-speed access technologies are making the Internet a powerful tool for supporting employee self-service. Password-protected access to a corporate Web site allows companies to open the door to internal databases over the Internet, so employees can plug in from anywhere, at anytime. They get the information they need quickly, while consuming fewer of the business' human resources.