What employee self service is
Employee self service (الخدمة الذاتية للموظف), abbreviated ESS, is an arrangement in which the employee carries out personally what used to pass through human resources: requesting leave, updating their own details, and viewing their documents and their balance.
What employee self service actually solves
The problem that employee self service addresses is not a lack of effort in human resources. The problem is the intermediary: the person through whom every simple request has to pass before anything happens to it.
When a simple request passes through a person, three things can follow from it.
- A queue. It forms because each request waits for its turn with the person handling it, behind the requests that arrived before it, however simple each of them is.
- A question asked again. It is a question about a request already submitted, put to human resources again because the answer can only come from the person handling that request.
- Information copied by hand. It passes from the employee to the person handling the request and from that person into the record, and in being copied by hand it can be copied wrongly.
When the request is carried out at its source, by the employee to whom it relates, the time it takes is shorter and the data is copied fewer times. The queue is shorter because there is no longer a person whose turn the request has to wait for, and fewer copies leave fewer points at which an error can enter.
What employee self service can cover
The tasks that employee self service can include are these:
- Leave requests, with their status and the balance. The employee submits the request, follows where it stands until a decision is made on it, and sees the leave balance that remains.
- Updates to personal details and contact details. Details such as how the employee can be reached are changed by the employee at the point where they are kept.
- Access to the employee’s documents and certificates. Any of these held on the employee can be looked up without asking someone to find them.
- Requests for letters and certificates of employment. A letter or a certificate stating the employment is requested directly, so the request starts with the employee rather than with a conversation with human resources.
- Access to the work schedule and attendance. Both the schedule being worked and the attendance record can be seen by the employee concerned.
The condition of employee self service that is overlooked
Employee self service moves the procedure to the employee. It does not remove the organisation’s responsibility for whether that procedure is correct. The employee now starts the task, but the organisation still answers for what the task produces.
A request submitted through an employee self service system therefore remains governed by two things that existed before that system did: the organisation’s policy, and what was agreed in the employment contract. Submitting the request on a screen changes neither of them. The approval also remains the decision of whoever holds it. Employee self service changes who submits the request; it does not change who decides on it.
For that reason, the approval paths are built into the system first, before requests are carried out through it. An approval path sets out, for each kind of request, whose decision is needed before the request takes effect. A system that carries out requests with no approval path moves the disorder from one place to another instead of removing it.
The data side of employee self service
The employee file is personal data, and the way it is handled is a question of employee data privacy: it falls under the provisions of the Personal Data Protection Law (نظام حماية البيانات الشخصية) in the Kingdom, issued by Royal Decree M/19 of 9/2/1443H and amended by Royal Decree M/148 of 5/9/1444H. Among its provisions are the following two duties of the controller.
- Specifying the purpose of collection. Three of the articles that set it out are the following. Article 10 of the Personal Data Protection Law permits personal data to be processed only to achieve the purpose for which it was collected, subject to the seven exceptions that article lists. Article 11(1) of the Personal Data Protection Law requires the purpose of collecting personal data to relate directly to the purposes of the controller and not to conflict with any provision established in law. Article 13(2) of the Personal Data Protection Law requires that, where personal data is collected directly from the person it concerns, that person be told the purpose of collecting it.
- Limiting the data to the minimum that serves that purpose. It is set by Article 11(3) of the Personal Data Protection Law, which requires the content of personal data to be appropriate and confined to the minimum necessary to achieve the purpose of collecting it, while avoiding content that would lead to the person being identified specifically once that purpose has been achieved, and which leaves the controls needed for that to the Implementing Regulations of the Law.
In an employee self service system, the disciplined practice is that the employee sees their own data, and that a manager’s access is limited to what the manager needs for the decision in front of them. That is a practice in how employee self service is set up. It is not one of the statutory duties named above.
What employee self service does not do
Employee self service makes the procedure faster. It does not repair the policy behind the procedure.
If the rule on leave is unclear, the system will produce rejected requests, and it will produce them faster. Employees submit requests on a rule they cannot make sense of, the requests are turned down, and the speed of the system brings each rejection back to them sooner than before.
The practical order is therefore to settle the policy first and then to build the screen on it. The policy decides what can be requested and on what conditions. The screen then lets the employee make that request without passing through an intermediary.
This is an explanation of the concept and of the statutory provisions cited, not legal advice.
A standalone Saudi HR system
One employee file holding the contract, the documents and their expiry dates, the attendance record, leave, salary and end-of-service entitlements. End-of-service, overtime and leave-balance calculations are built into the system.
A standalone system on its own subscription. The connection to Qoyod Accounting is now available.