Sustaining a business venture is more critical than starting one. A successful small business can be one that starts from hiring the right people, grows by getting the business idea across to them, and is maintained by building the right brand image in the minds of its clients and target audience.
Businesses, whether large or small, may face a standard set of challenges. But the challenges of a small business are unique in the way that large businesses may have done away with them long ago.
Among the many challenges faced by small businesses today is that of sharing your HR-related information with the employees. The basic information meant for and concerned with all the employees in general, should not only be accessible to all the concerned staff members of the organization, any updates in the information database must be conveyed to them as well.
While changes to the employee details are difficult to be conveyed across all departments, it becomes, even more time consuming to incorporate the information from paper documents to the spreadsheets. For organizations that function from multiple geographically-distributed locations, it poses a greater challenge to be able to collaborate with the teams working from different geographical locations.
A cloud Employee Self Service (Online ESS) solution can be the right choice for an organization facing such a challenge in the functioning of the enterprise. It doesn’t only provide access to all the information anywhere, anytime, but it also provides the flexibility to view it on any device without having to waste hours searching for the requisite employee information.
The employees of an organization implementing the right solutions, especially the HR department that needs information at every step of their functioning, can get it within seconds, without the unnecessary hassle of going through papers and spreadsheets. In this way, the time that they would have otherwise spent on looking for information can be utilized judiciously towards working on the core strategic issues of the growing enterprise and in turn, contribute towards the organization’s growth.
Online Employee Self Service module also makes it easy to update employee details as all the employees of an organization have access to it and can update their information on their own. The individual logins for all employees mean that employees can view and update their information such as temporary, permanent and emergency contact details. In other words, it means that an Online ESS can centralize the data by decentralizing the data entry.
As a value addition, an Online Employee Self Service can be a single tool to view code of conduct, employee handbook, list of holidays and other documents for the new employees. It can also help employees get timely access to the latest news and announcements within the organization and participate in opinion polls for the issues that affect the different departments within the enterprise.
For team leaders and managers, the Online ESS can be a platform from which they can review and approve leave requests and check-in and check-out entry and exit timestamps punched by the employees. This creates a transparent system for approval of leaves, time and attendance which can put an end to confusion and unnecessary delays.
In addition to the ability to view their payslips and statutory deductions, use of an ESS empowers the employees to submit their savings, investments and taxation details online so that they can be made available to the HR or finance department at the time of filing of the annual income tax. Moreover, employees can also download their Form 16 directly from the Employee Self Service making it easy and hassle free to file their tax.
If you are a small or medium business enterprise looking for an Employee Self Service Solution, we at Brio, will be happy to provide our online payroll software that integrates the payroll function with the ESS, loan management, leave management, and time and attendance management. Brio’s Perk online payroll software system can automate the aforementioned complex administrative tasks to provide business owners more time for strategic planning and ultimately greater business growth.