How to Help Your Employees Embrace Self-Service HR

DIY is the norm for many aspects of our lives, and that is now true of human resources departments. Countless companies of all sizes are adopting self-service human resources, aiming to cut costs as well as free HR professionals to recruit, retain and meet the needs of their tech-savvy Millennial and Gen Z employees. But not every company is doing it right. More often than not, HR departments are launching these Internet-based services with little thought or training, resulting in a workforce that is frustrated and not using the services designed to help them. Companies "are doing a ton of things right but are also making a lot of mistakes" when it comes to moving to self-service, says Ben Peterson, chief executive and co-founder of BambooHR. "It requires a lot of meaningful thought on how to roll it out to employees."

Human Resources Has Changed

Rewind a few years and human resources department were tasked with a lot of job functions. Onboarding, offboarding and making sure employees had the correct benefits were only part of their job role. But doing those mundane tasks like changing an employee's status or researching coverage took them away from recruiting and retaining key employees to the company. Software automates a lot of those processes, making it easier for the staff to get basic information and make changes, as well as let HR professionals help grow the business by finding and keeping key talent. Self-service HR can also bring together disparate HR systems into one place, making it easier for everyone to manage and access them. Rather than having distinct platforms for payroll, health insurance, benefits and performance, many self-service HR solutions contain all of these functions and more, saving employees time and frustration. [Post Jobs Today]

Implementing Self-Service HR

Every company is different, and so are their needs when it comes to self-service HR - but in general, companies that implement this software can enable employees to easily update personal records, enroll in benefits and view personal data such as payroll, paid time off and retirement benefits. In a perfect world you would roll out the software, give a little training and within a few days everyone would be using it all the time. But the reality is change is hard and getting employees comfortable with the new system requires a lot of preparation upfront.

Understand Priorities & Goals

Since usability is the major driver of employee engagement and adoption, Pat Pickren, senior director of product strategy for Ultimate Software, says companies have to make sure they are adopting a simple solution that doesn't require employees to spend hours trying to figure out how to use it. Long before the rollout, Pickren says you have to understand the priorities of the executives and how this will help them reach their goals. You also want to establish a way to demonstrate ROI to ensure you are getting the cost savings you were aiming for. Ensuring adoption happens starts with the human resources department. According to Pickren every member of the HR and payroll teams has to know how to use the software and what will be available online. "These teams also must understand that they should direct employees to the portal for these documents or forms rather than faxing/emailing the documents to employees or performing the functions for employees as they might have previously done," says Pickren. [Related: How to Build a Strategic Partnership with Executive Leaders] One of the best ways to get employees to use self-service HR is to have a great experience from the beginning. If the first interaction with the software is bad, chances are employees will put it off until later or avoid using it entirely. But if one or two clicks gets them to the right place from the start, the likelihood of them using it increases. You also don't want to throw everything HR-related at the employees in the beginning. Peterson of BambooHR says to start off slow and implement more self-service tools once the staff is comfortable. "Software should work for you, not something you work on," says Peterson. "You are hiring software to do a job and you need to define what the job is."