Thursday, 25 October 2012
There are two types of self-services which are employee self-service (ESS) and manager self-services (MSS). But here, I would like to discuss only on the employee self-service. O’Brien (2003) classified employee self-service as the intranet applications that give opportunity to the employees to look about the personal information and other things like HR Policies, and safety requirements (Kavanagh et al, 2011). Besides that, employees can also create, display, change and add up their own data in the intranet used at their enterprise (SAP AG, 2001). For your information, ESS is available 24 hours a day and it can be easily accessed as long as you have the internet connection.
We can say that this ESS looks like the UTM aims web, or we often refer it as students’ portal. So, via this aims web, the students are able to check on their account, personal information, result, and any advertisement. By using this, it will give benefit to the employee itself and also the HR Professional. This is because, when all of the informations are available in that system, the employees have to just update or change the information through online without having to go to the HR department.
Other advantages stated by IBM Business Consulting are by using the ESS, the organization can save their budget and the employees easily get the information through the ESS without the human intervention. By using this system, it will increase the employees’ satisfaction in terms of the working environment, productive and engage in any organization activity.
Not only that, as mention by Reilly. P & William (2003), by using ESS, the manager can download the important documents like job evaluation questionnaire, format of job description, or the performance appraisal. While employees also can book training course and apply for the job vacancy in the company.
From my opinion, this web-based self service should be implemented in all company as it brings a lot of advantages to the organization itself. It is more advanced and easier to use rather than using traditional method which costs a lot of time. But, remember that, all technology that you use will have their weaknesses like the system will become slow and ineffective when the internet connections are not too strong. Sometimes, when you forget to log out, other people can easily hack the account and take your information. So, be careful for that thing. (397 words)
References
- Kavanagh, M.J, Thite Mohan, and Johnson, R D (2012). Human Resource Information System: Sage Publication Ltd. United Kingdom.
- O’ Brien. J. A (2003). Introduction to Information Systems: Essentials for the e-Business Enterprise. New York
- Reilly, P.A., William, T (2003). How to get best value from Hr: The shared services Option. United States: Gower Publishing Company.