Employee Portals - Improving service levels and lowering HR executive to employee ratios

Every VP of HR asks this question. Do I really need so many executives to ensure that employees are satisfied. Can we provide good service without having to add more resources?

An Employee Portal may be the right answer. Until now such solutions were not so popular since a good percentage of employees needed to have access to a system for it to be successful. Now PC's on every desktop is almost a way of life. Even in manufacturing situations, an easily accessible kiosk is not expensive at all.

Just think about a typical HR transaction in a conventional HR environment for lets say a leave approval cycle.

An employee asks the executive for their leave eligibility and balance
Fills out the request form
Approaches the supervisor a couple of times before the supervisor approves it
The form is manually then submitted to the HR function
The HR executive enters the data in the HR application
Leave is processed at the end of the period

In a self service environment

The employee makes the leave application without a mistake - since the software validates the policy and the holidays
The alert on the supervisors login triggers him/her to approve it
At the end of the period the leave report is automatically available

The self service environment would involve probably one third the effort of the conventional application for the employee and the HR person. Add all the transactions for attendance, claims, benefit balances, IT and payroll queries etc. and one can immediately see the savings in effort for all the employee and the HR executives - and that directly translates to higher productivity for the company. In Employee portal environments, 500 employees being served well by one Executive is common. In non-automated environments the number could be between 50 and 200 depending on the complexity of the HR environment.

Employee portals provide ROI in months - if the right product and implementation is done right. Equally important is the fact that it brings transparency, equity, responsiveness and speed to the whole process.

And that is what we at Kallos intend that our KServe HCM software (http://www.kserve.net/hcm) suite does - To take human capital management beyond the use of the HR function and serve the employee well.