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One of the foundations of HR Shared Services is that “the best call to HR is the one that is never made.” A key best practice ensuring that only the inquiries that require HR intervention move into the HR Shared Services model is deploying a robust HR knowledgebase, accessible through a searchable, personalized portal.

Whether your organization uses a homegrown portal framework like SharePoint or WebSphere, or your portal comes from an application provider that delivers framework with the ability to include predefined and customer specific content, the ability to embed the employee’s HR experience in the organizational portal for a seamless end-to-end transaction is critical to portal adoption

Simply put: a unified employee/HR portal makes work-life information easier to access, simpler to navigate and more cost-effective to maintain – all hallmarks of an effective employee and manager self-service model, which is the backbone of a multi-tiered HR Shared Services operation.

Benefits of Unifying HR Information with Your Organization’s Portal

According to Gartner Group, HR information is the most complex and security-intensive across the enterprise. This, therefore, argues for starting with HR information when designing an effective larger corporate or enterprise portal.

Once unified, an HR knowledgebase within the organizational or corporate portal allows employees to perform multiple self-service activities from a single sign-on interface, while working “behind the scenes” leveraging existing software to make it all happen.

The key to adoption, however, is how personalized and searchable the knowledge in the HR knowledgebase is! Because employees are also consumers, they’re accustomed to using the Internet to get relevant information in context with transactions, and completing those transactions within the same session – without any third-party intervention.

The same holds true for your HR knowledgebase unified with your organizational portal: if information is easily found – Best Practices state two clicks or less – then employees and managers will easily be dropped “at the door” of the self-service ERP or other system transactions without ever leaving the comfort of their single sign-on session.

What If The Following Could Be Completed Without Any HR Intervention?

• New-hire onboarding/transfers

• New hire management

• Performance reviews

• Training enrollment

• Time entry

• Open Enrollment using interactive decision support tools

• Life events: marriage, divorce, domestic partner, adding/removing a dependent, retirement

• Search of all published company materials

• Update beneficiaries

• Update Bank or W4 tax info

• Change Address, phone number, emergency contact

• An understanding of all components of your compensation package

The Benefits Of Self-Service Via An HR Knowledgebase Are Obvious:

• Better service for employees, line managers, HR, and finance by increasing access to personalized information

• Utilization of fewer resources in servicing employee/manager requests

• Better compliance with corporate, state and federal requirements

Lower overall hard-dollar costs via better resource utilization (less paper and manual data re-entry), more informed decision-making (employees are better matched to benefit plans, for example) and leveraging investments in existing software.

How often does HR get to actually improve service while lowering costs – with the added benefit of funding additional projects with the savings you achieve while increasing your HR shared services success?

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Source by Michelle Donahue Grant