Employee Self Service is a relatively new requirement in Time and Attendance. Many years ago, timesheets and clock-card systems were the most common method of capturing employee working times. These methods although manual, cumbersome and prone to errors or going missing, were great for one thing. Employees could see their working times recorded in front of them.
Employee Self Service within a Time and Attendance retains, and goes much further than this, providing a suite of benefits.
Improved Employee Engagement and Trust
As time and attendance systems became more and more automated through badges, fobs and then biometric data capture this visual record to the employee was lost. They simply presented their fob, or fingerprint, the reader beeps in confirmation and that was it. The last the employee saw of that event.
How could they now see exactly what was being recorded? What was forming their payroll for that week? What if the system hadn’t sent it to the system properly.
Essentially the first they would know about any potential recording errors is payroll day.
Giving Employees access to a self service portal overcomes this.
Retaining all the benefits an automated Time and Attendance System (there are many – get in touch if you want to go through them!), Employees will benefit from a constant, live, view of their recorded data keeps them informed, engaged and up to date with what data the system has recorded.
As this is maintained over time they see how the system is working, how it is forming their payroll hours such as overtime, which builds trust in how their employer is ensuring their pay is correct.
Reduced Absenteeism
If employees can see their own data via self service they can see how the system has recorded absence data. They will be able to see their own sickness, or lateness records. Seeing it for yourself soon makes you realise that this data, these absence trends, are also being seen by your employer and can be that subtle way of helping the employee improve their timekeeping.
Better Leave Tracking.
With Employee Self Service staff are able to make their leave requests without the need for manual holiday cards or maintaining other spreadsheets. Employees make their requests, which are sent to their line manager for approval. If approved they are added in to the system and to the employees record, reducing any entitlement as it is.
Essentially this means
- No paper holiday cards going missing
- Employee has a constant view of their historic requests
- Employee has a constant view of request status – Pending, Accepted or Rejected
- One point of data entry removes a number of manual actions.
Reduced Admin Time for HR / Payroll / Supervisors.
By putting more of an onus on the employee to manage their own time data, you quickly reduce the admin burden on your HR team or supervisors. If an employee forgets to clock in, they have the ability to put the request in for the time they started as they see the exception. Alternatively this would mean someone interrogating the system then having to find out why the times are missing.
By the employee requesting leave, and it being approved via one system you are ensuring that there is no need for a chain of manual actions, which can often lead to human error. If a holiday is not booked into the system following a holiday card being handed in, that employee will be flagged as missing on that day.
If an employee needs to cancel leave, again they can do this through the system, without passing it on to a supervisor, who then has to pass it to HR, who then have to amend the system. If either stage is missed the employee is still down to be on holiday. This may mean incorrect holiday entitlement, incorrect pay or even extra staff being booked in to cover the absence when it is not needed.
View Data from anywhere.
With Employee Self Service staff can have access to their time and attendance and absence data from anywhere. They don’t just need to be in the workplace. They can have a quick check of their weekly hours so far or to see if their holiday had been approved from any location.
Audit Trail
With all requests and approvals/rejections being logged through the system the issue with holiday requests forms going missing or not being seen is gone. We are sure everyone who uses request forms will have had the issue of a request going missing, or an employee complaining that they are waiting for the approval so they can book their holiday. With a self service system both employee, supervisor and HR can have access to request history in real time to ensure everything is dealt with in a timely manner. It also removes any ambiguity about whether something has been approved and who did it.
To learn more about our Employee Self Service systems please get in touch and we would be happy to talk to you about how our systems can fit your workplace.
