Employee self service: maintaining the momentum

Avoiding common pitfalls to make sure your self-service programme is usable and attractive to those it caters for. By Hetti Barkworth-Nanton.

Organisations that have been on the internal e-enablement journey for some time will tell you one area that can start driving significant business value is employee and manager self-service. Not just in the obvious areas like HR but, more critically, across your operational processes.

As with all technology, however, many organisations have invested significantly only to be disappointed either by the uptake, the cultural impact within the organisation, or the delivery of real benefit – sometimes all of the above. Some typical responses can be:

“We have rolled out self-service but no-one is using it” – take-up can often be lower than 20 per cent.
“Our employees have no other way of doing things so usage is high, but they are constantly complaining about it” – this in turn will impact employee engagement, which ultimately has an impact on productivity.
“My managers resist it” – self service can often leave the manager feeling that they have lost certain elements of control. A simple example of this would be when an organisation has implemented online expenses and, in doing so, has removed the need for managers to approve submitted expenses claims.

Avoiding the pitfalls

By following certain rules you can avoid common pitfalls, like those mentioned above, to achieve a ‘win-win-win’ outcome with high usage, satisfied users and maximum business benefit.

Focus on the end-to-end

When looking to take your processes online, you will drive the most benefit by looking end to end and focusing on simplification and standardisation. If you merely look to transfer your existing paper-based processes online, it will typically cost you far too much, be time consuming and, most importantly, you are far more likely to get a solution that your users say is worse than the original, offline version. Time and time again, I’ve heard people complain that all they are doing is typing the same information they used to put in forms onto their PCs.

When you start to focus on end to end and simplification, it is more likely that your users will react positively because they should see that it is making the process (and their part in it) more efficient.

Design for ease of use by all participants

My experience suggests you can never make a self-service application too easy to use. I once heard someone say that “no-one was ever trained on Amazon.com and therefore we shouldn’t need to train them on self service”. Frankly, I rarely see employee self-service tools that are as good as Amazon. If your design requires training to use, my view is that it will ultimately fail in either usage or employee satisfaction. Don’t settle for second-best.

Remove other ways of doing things

This is always talked about but rarely acted upon, in my experience. Sometimes this is because the project resources are removed once the solution is delivered and there is no ongoing asset manager appointed.

For the best success in this area, always ensure that removal of the old process is included within the remit of the project. Timing is critical for this and it will depend on the culture of your organisation as to whether it is best to remove them as you roll out the tool, or let them parallel run for a few months.

Ongoing ownership

This is pivotal. Ensure someone maintains ownership for the end-to-end process, responsible for monitoring and maintaining overall effectiveness and improvement where appropriate. In addition put in place local champions who will have an ongoing role to support users as their needs evolve over time.

Measure ruthlessly

This works in two ways. If you can articulate the benefits that are being driven as a result of the changes, sharing that with employees can help them to feel that their actions are helping to save money for the business. If you also create targets around levels of self-service usage to be achieved, it will focus minds on driving the business change against tangible, measurable outputs.