Labor Relations

"If you have experience with employee self-service, please be sure to share the experience. Did you feel empowered using employee self-service? If you took a job with a company that didn’t offer employee self-service, would you recommend to them that they add this technology? If you don’t recommend employee self-service, explain why.

There are many ways of performing administrative tasks of running a business. On line payroll services are obviously one of them. The positive side is that you don't have to continually upgrade local software as the laws change. The down side is that it costs and many businesses have payroll workup integrated into an operational system. Some pay commission, some hourly, some a combination of both for example. There are a zillion retirement and healthcare plans available. There has to be a method for extracting the payroll data from the system and often that's a more difficult job than the part the service provides.

My objections to these types of questions is that they almost always assume that every business is capable of operating the same way. That may be the way it looks to an academic but it's not how it works. In real life, when it's time to choose ways of doing things, you look at all of the choices in the framework of how your business model operates. How well will it integrate? Can we do this in-house? Contract the coding? What about security? The bottom line is, you have to clearly understand ALL of the parameters of how the business works before you make any recommendations. New employees don't have that understanding.

In 1985, I wrote a complete point-of-sale software package to manage my business and the payroll was built into it. The same code is still being run today. I didn't look at the complete package as empowerment, rather time saving and a great advantage over the competition. We could do three times as much with half the employees with almost zero mistakes. That converts to profit, the ultimate objective of running a business.