Everything you’re trying to achieve is dependent on your talent, your people, your human capital. Embracing innovation and digitisation in employee self-service is delivering success for retailers who are adopting what this technology has to offer.
Employee self-service is so much more than a tick-box exercise for operational efficiency. It’s delivering great outcomes in terms of employee engagement, empowerment and retention for retailers. It also delivers on improved margins which hits profitability, and that means the CEO and CFO are happy too.
Simply put, employee self-service (ESS) empowers your staff to access the information they need, anywhere, at any time and on any device. It puts more control in the hands of the employee which is why its leading to greater empowerment and engagement across the business.
Employee self-service is particularly powerful for retail businesses, whose workforce is fragmented across multiple sites. Often staff are hourly paid, shift workers and without company emails. HR self-service enables staff to conduct HR admin tasks, learn about the company, check policies and guidelines and access payslips and absence requests when they want to.
Employee experience is shaping the future in retail
The pandemic has taken its toll on essential workers who worked in supermarkets and essential retail outlets. Their stresses are different to those staff who were furloughed and have returned to their in-store customer facing roles. Worker health and wellbeing remains a high priority for retailers, which makes employee experience paramount. The priority is incumbent for retailers to support their staff in a continually changing environment.
The constant critical balancing act of business needs and staff needs. Delivering a great employee experience supports much-needed business resilience. There is a symbiotic relationship between organisation success and an employee’s engagement, experience and well-being.
Employee self-service is a substantial tool that delivers the experience that staff want. And its good for business too. Overcoming the issues associated with remote, hard to reach staff, shift workers and hourly paid staff whose routines can vary from week to week.
The secret to employee self-service success for Retailers is that it doesn’t feel impersonal, in fact the reverse is true. Digital self-service can be heavily personalised which enhances the employee experience and creates greater transparency. To work seamlessly it needs to be branded to your business, intuitive and easy to access.
Business case
The secret to a successful business case for employee self-service is three-fold
1. Benefits For HR and payroll
HR do not need to fill their days tracking sickness, approving holiday requests and absence requests. This can be owned by the employee with the right levels of permission for line managers or HR approvals where needed. HR do not need to update employee information that is better updated by the individual. Employee self-service can easily automat the repetitive and time-consuming tasks, so HR can focus on key areas or responsibility that have a real impact to the organisation. Saving time, lifting the burden and delivering results on margins and operational efficiency.
2. Benefits for employees
Freedom, control, empowerment and engagement. Staff have the freedom to manage their working lives, in an easy and intuitive way. All accessible on any device, 24/7. The freedom to check their schedule and rotas, share availability for shifts and extra hours, accept and decline shifts.
Successful employee self-service is a real enabler for staff who can make holiday requests, other absence requests, view payslips, change their personal details and access payroll information. Most importantly this is real time, so managers and staff are seeing the same information. Quicker, communication which means whatever your role, workers are not left out.
Access to e-learning and training that can be consumed at the point of need. On-the-job training with managers and updates to health and safety and other personal development modules.
3. Benefits for the business
Employee self-service offers some massive time savings when it comes to scheduling, with businesses reporting up to 80% time savings across the workforce management scheduling processes. This can also result in a 50% reduction in overtime spend and a reduction in payroll errors.
Staff are more empowered and consequently mor engaged, resulting in a reduction in staff turnover. Lower staff churn improves operational efficiency, and a reduction in overheads and costs, which is a positive impact to the bottom line.
Removal of paper-based processes and greater data security. Accurate, single source of truth data to actively see trends, issues and prompt action. Data-led decision making.
More efficient staff management that will deliver improvements to customer service.
Secrets to self-service success for Retailers
The real secret is that employee self-service is what staff want. Workers want to take greater control over their working lives and feel more empowered. Whilst employees will still need HR to assist with tasks and needs, enabling employees to self-serve decreases the burden for HR teams and payroll.
Integrated and transparent scheduling gives staff more control, but not at the expense of the business needs. Self-service utilises technology and can be very dynamic, but it must be intuitive and easy to use. Empowering staff to submit shift requests, holiday and absences can be handled through a combination of automation and approvals by managers (not always HR).
Access to training and key documents allows staff to act and engage when it suits them. Finally, employee self-service goes a long way in supporting the work-life balance of your workers.
No more secrets: get it right and everyone wins.
elementsuite HR Software
