What Employees Expect from Their Human Resource Information Systems

Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS)Opens a new window have been around for quite some time in the HR world. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERPs), performance management systems, HR analytics tools—the list of how data and systems weave together people management and business decisions can go on. Despite this proliferation of the HR system, we often see employees complain about using these systems, citing reasons such as a slow system or the excessive time taken to learn how to use it. This is an impediment to data-driven HR and one that HR professionals must take heed of very seriously. After all, if employees do not adopt and embrace the HR systems to make their work easier and faster, what is the use of investing millions in expensive HRIS?

It is not that employees do not want to be digitally empowered. In fact, with the rise of the digital natives, the need for digital HR systems is very real. Just that employees are not seeing the right value in the current slew of market offerings. It is the organization’s responsibility to enable its people with the right tools and systems to up their productivity. In fact, empowering employees goes beyond mere productivity—it is a must to create happy, engaged employees who are intrinsically motivated. Employees today expect to have the same degree of fluidic interactions and convenience as they have on their personal smartphone apps. Recreating this experience with the right tools at the workplace is a great way to create engagement.

As an HR, get into the mind of the employee while planning to design an HRIS. Here are some of the essentials that can help you:

1. Usability: Employees are used to achieving things with a single swipe on their smartphones. They get going on a new app and learn it within minutes by experience. Why then, do they need to go through cumbersome user interfaces and extensive training to get enterprise applications working for them? HR must aim to replicate the flexibility, speed, and convenience of the personal app, making enterprise applications highly intuitive and usable for the employee.
2. Desirability: Some of the things that millennials expect from their work interactions are instant feedback and responses, clean user interfaces, and information at the tip of their fingers when they need it the most. No longer is enterprise communication a one-way channel, where the employer disseminates the information and the employee laps it up. Two-way, open and ongoing communication is a must for workplace systems. For example, rather than open the performance management review cycle once a year for an annual review, why not keep it open and design it for continuous recognition and feedback? Such a design will make HR systems and self-service platforms desirable to the employee.
3. Accessibility: Anytime, anywhere has become the bare basic expectation today. Gone are the days when an employee self-service module could be accessed only from the office Internet during office hours. Today employees work on the move, often from remote locations for days together. Lack of access is a handicap that hampers effective work. Always-accessible employee service systems are non-negotiable.

 

Above all, employees must feel that the HRIS adds value to their work lives, and not a burden to be “finished off”. HR professionals can make this happen by understanding their employees better by gathering and analyzing data about their behaviors, preferences, and aspirations. Only when the HR professional puts himself or herself in the shoes of the employee, will he or she be able to truly understand what employees expect from the organization.