A lot of the conversations I have with customers are around self service (or shift left strategies). One of the most common questions I get it is "how do we get started or what do we include in self service?"
It can be a little overwhelming to think about where to start in a self service initiative, especially considering all the different types of interactions an HR department has with employees, but it doesn't need to be the case. A lot of our HR customers have taken the self service journey and matured over time. Phasing your self service initiative is a great approach.
Take a look at what your high volume and high touch interactions with employees are — these are always good candidates for self service. It's not necessarily the most complicated process that you need to tackle first. Think about the repetitive types of tasks the HR team deals with that can be eliminated through workflow and automation.
Some examples of processes our customers have implemented in phase 1 include:
- Tuition Reimbursement
- Employment Verification
- Employee Changes
- General Questions
These are all great examples of high volume and high touch processes that can be automated. Of course automation can mean many things, some examples are; approvals being automatically sent, updates made to a core HR system through integration, activities assigned to HR personnel or simply the assignment of the case to a specific group.
You can then demonstrate quick wins and ROI in these areas then start to tackle more in depth or complicated processes along your journey.
Other customers have very different examples, including Leave of Absence requests. For one of our customers, this was the process they spent most of their time on so they decided to tackle this first. This was a process that was entirely paper, email and fax based. Back and forth interactions over email to gain approvals, send the forms, get documentation back etc. By enabling this in self service and utilizing workflow, they were able to reduce the amount of processing time from days down to hours.
Once you have rolled out your initial services, you can employ continual service improvement strategies such as surveying your employees. How do they feel about self service? What would they like to be included in the future?
Another method to determine the services to include next is to look at reporting. For instance, what are people searching on in the knowledge base? Are a large number of searches benefits related? Perhaps this is an area that can be considered next.
Look at self service as a journey, and include continual service improvement strategies to improve it over time!
Until next time, Lynda
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