By providing employees with information, tasks, and learnings where they work, not only do you reduce the need for HR requests, you also add value to each employee’s interaction with your systems. Whether through integrations with instant messaging apps such as Slack or a dedicated employee portal, employees should always feel that what they need is at their fingertips. Then, by using analytics to enable HR teams to guide employees through key moments, you ensure that your people have what they need before they know they need it.
Create Self-Service Options
Regardless of how proactive your HR service delivery model is, employees will inevitably have further questions, and making requests at work can be a daunting process. No one wants to waste time looking for the right portal to open a ticket, wait days or even weeks for a response, and then get diverted to a different department. Likewise, employees with smaller requests might decide to not contact HR at all for fear of wasting time. That’s why self-service options are invaluable.
Enabling employees to source accurate answers to frequently asked questions (and even less common ones) should be foundational to any modern HR service delivery model. But those services have to be easily accessed, intuitive, and surfaced naturally. If information is contained within disparate and complex systems, it’s likely to go unread. That means embedding links to related learnings in knowledge articles and giving employees the ability to request further HR help, via an integrated case management solution. After all, your services shouldn’t need their own FAQ to navigate.
Provide Adaptive Support
The only thing more likely to cause frustration than extended wait times is misdirected requests. Meeting your employees in their workflow doesn’t just mean using analytics to surface information, it also means ensuring that the support adapts to their needs. Providing self-service options that are dead ends is like taking one step forward and two steps back, increasing the need for case management rather than streamlining it.
Well-organized, easily accessible resources are essential, but not every question can be fielded by knowledge articles or chatbots. If an employee needs to ask something more personal or urgent—related to a leave of absence, for example—it’s important that your solution is integrated with more traditional case management services. In doing so, you ensure that employees feel like they are being supported as a person, rather than another ticket in a queue.
Personalize, Personalize, Personalize
The bottom line for any business looking to optimize its services, reduce case management load, and provide a higher-quality employee experience is simple: personalization. Without analytics to understand what your employees need (as well as when and why), your services will always miss the mark. In a world where people expect their personal technology to learn from their needs, work should be no different. The logical endpoint of personalization? Individualization.
Individualizing HR services requires businesses to utilize data to create unique and meaningful experiences at the employee level. That means providing contextual insights for employees’ everyday questions, thereby connecting the dots between the questions they’re asking today and broader company initiatives (learning, skill development, etc.). By creating a holistic experience where moments that matter are automatically connected to learnings, skills development, and mentorship, you ensure that employees aren’t just receiving what they need in the moment—but what they need moving forward.