Employee Self Service (ESS) Portals

The most used system in an enterprise is the one employees open to ask for time off. It deserves the attention we give to customers.

The situation

HR and payroll platforms are built to be correct, and correctness is the reason they are hard to use. Employees raise requests by email, managers approve from memory, and HR staff spend their days answering questions that the system could answer if anyone could find the right screen.

What we built

ESS portals for many enterprises. The portal gives each employee a simple way to see and request what they are entitled to: leave, payslips, personal records, letters and approvals. Managers act on requests from a queue, including on mobile. The portal reads from and writes to the system of record, whether that is SAP, Oracle, Sage or a custom-built ERP, so the HR platform stays the single source of truth.

We did not replace anything. An employee who uses the portal never sees the ERP, and the ERP never knows the portal is there.

What we have learned

Every enterprise believes its HR rules are unusual. Many of them are, and a portal that cannot express the organization's real policy will be abandoned. The work is in the rules: eligibility, approval routes, delegation and what happens when someone is on leave. We spend more time on those than on the screens.