Businesses are always seeking ways to improve their HR operations. For that several tools and technologies are used, a HR self-service kiosk is one of the most modern technological solution to boost HR efficiency. A high-performing HR department not only ensure employee satisfaction and higher retention, but it also guarantee superior operational performance and higher profitability. Over the past decade the HR technologies have evolved massively, the HR kiosks and other self-service HR solutions are have revolutionized the HR services and operations. The HR managers are well-aware of the fact that the HR team has to deal with repetitive tasks on daily bases involving daily employee requests. All this can take most of the time of the team, on top of that a lot of documents are processed on daily bases adding up to the cost of printing documents and managing the records manually. Implementing a self-service solution could greatly improve employee experience and reduce HR cost while significantly enhancing HR performance and efficiency. The HR kiosks are one of the most effective type of self-service channel to offer HR services. In this blog we will discuss how customized HR self-service kiosks can be designed to align with your exclusive business needs to maximize the impact.
How to Design a Customized HR Self-Service Kiosk?
What is an HR Self-Service Kiosk?
An HR self-service kiosk is a computer terminal which is equipped with specialized features to facilitate delivering HR services with an intuitive self-service experience. The HR self-service kiosk offers excellent employee experience and can greatly boost HR performance. A standard HR self-service kiosk can have document scanner, printer, facial recognition, biometrics, Emirates ID reader, RFID card reader, interactive touch screen, intuitive user interface and a smart backend management software. The HR self-service kiosks can be deployed in both attended and unattended service centers. The HR team can have them in the HR offices as an alternate service channel to distribute the workload of the HR team and it can also be deployed at remote location to make HR services more accessible for the employees. In either case the businesses have two options, the off-the-shelf HR kiosk or the customized HR self-service kiosk. Now a days, businesses are turning toward customized solutions, due to their capabilities to deliver exclusive features, higher adoptability, flexible integration and much higher ROI.
What is an HR Self-Service Kiosk?
Designing a Customized HR Self-Service Kiosk
Before we step into the process, it is important to understand that a standard HR Self-Service kiosk has two distinct part one is the software and the other is the hardware. The primary objective of customization is to have all the hardware and software features that a business needs. Hence the customization is done to fully align a solution to the unique and exclusive business needs. Furthermore the customization also help businesses save cost, instead of paying reoccurring fees and subscription charges, businesses can pay upfront and get a proprietary application. Here are some important aspect of customizing a HR self-service kiosk which will help you design a high-performing and impactful solution for your business needs.
Understanding the Business Needs and Set Clear Objectives
Any good projects starts with requirement gathering phase. This is one of the most important step of a customized project. If you are aiming to design a customized HR self-service kiosk you should involve all stockholders including users/employees, HR team, HR managers, experts/consultants, higher management and the vendor who will be developing the solution for you. Once you have everyone onboard, you need to identify some crucial processes and challenges which are hindering your HR’s performance, such as:
- What are the most common tasks the HR team is engaged with on daily bases?
- What are the most time-consuming HR tasks?
- What are the most repetitive tasks your HR team has to perform on daily bases?
- What are the most important tasks that can generate high value in HR’s function?
- How you can utilize the HR Kiosk to streamline any of the above task to boost efficiency?
- What are the most common challenges your employees are facing while dealing with the HR, such as long wait time, difficulty in accessing information, etc.
- How you can utilize the HR kiosk to enhance employee experience?
- How you can utilize the HR kiosks to increase HR accessibility?
These are just generic questions, you can engage all relevant stakeholders and ask them about their experience to identify the common challenges which are undermining employee experience or hindering your HR team’s performance. This will help you set up clear goals and objectives for your customized HR self-service kiosk.
Understanding the Business Needs and Set Clear Objectives
Incorporate your Organizational Culture and Local Contexts
Incorporating your organizational culture and tailoring to local contexts could greatly improve the efficiency and efficacy of your customized HR self-service kiosk. This aspect is often overlooked, however, this is one of the most important emotional aspect of your solution. As businesses in Dubai, Sharjah, Abu Dhabi and all around the UAE are well aware of the fact that most of the workforce comprises of expats from various countries, regions and ethnicities. Especially when you are designing a system for a wider audience you should consider all these aspects. You can easily cater to a large variety of employees by simply adding up more languages to your customized HR self-service kiosk. Furthermore you should also consider of the fact that your HR self-service kiosk will be used by all types and levels of the employees on a wider spectrum including white color, blue color, senior management and everyone else. This means that your customized HR self-service kiosk should be capable of delivering a satisfactory experience to all employees regardless of their computer literacy, job designation or language preference. There is no need to reinvent the wheel, keep the system and processes aligned with your existing organizational culture to make them familiar for the employees. These features will definitely raise employee satisfaction.
Incorporate your Organizational Culture and Local Contexts
Enlist and Define the Features of Your Customized HR Self-Service Kiosk
This is one of the most important step in designing your customized HR self-service kiosk. You should enlist and define all the features that you want in your HR self-service kiosk. For example, enlist all the services that you want to offer through your HR self-service kiosk. Such as:
- Employee Information: Instant access to employee information, personal details, family/spouse details, dependent visa details, work schedules, and much more.
- Leaves Forms and Applications: Allowing employee to submit and track a leave request through the HR kiosk. Enabling several application forms to streamline HR processes.
- Payroll and Compensations: Enabling the employee to easily access their salary and benefits details along with any other compensation or financial information.
- Document Printing and Submission: The onboard document printer and scanner allowing employees to print important documents or scan to submit updated documents.
- Internal Job Portals: Enabling employees to keep track on internal job openings and also offering them to apply for the position through the HR self-service kiosk.
- Secure Login and Authentication: Enabling employee to login to the kiosk using their RFID enabled job ID, QR Code, OTP verification, username & password, Emirates ID scan, etc.
These are some of the most common features business in Dubai, Sharjah, Abu Dhabi and all around the UAE are offering. These features depends on business needs and the challenges they face. You can also classify features in two categories such as essential and advanced, you can start with offering essential features and later on improve employee experience by incorporating advanced features such as AI ChatBot, Access to IT/HR Team, HR appointment booking, and much more.
Enlist and Define the Features of Your Customized HR Self-Service Kiosk
Prepare a Scope of the Project Document
The scope of the project document is a simple technical document which is majorly used to define the working of a software based project. When you are designing a customized HR self-service kiosk you should consider preparing the scope of the project document. As this document will enlist and explain all functionalities and technical details for the project. It is a more technical translation of your requirements and the scope of the project document is used to outline the objectives, deliverables, constraints, and boundaries of the project. The scope of the project document serves as a roadmap and provides a very specific and clear understanding of what the project will accomplish. Furthermore the acceptance criteria, platform requirements and technical specifications are also listed in this document. As at this stage while you are preparing the scope of the project document the project is still on paper, so you must engage a technical team to help you prepare a comprehensive scope document. It is important to engage the third-party vendor or software development partner at this stage as the resource planning, technical specifications, software stack, platform limitations and such details should be worked by the technical team who will be developing the project. It is better to involve all stakeholders at this stage and take feedbacks multiple time to refine your scope of the project document.
Prepare a Scope of the Project Document
Choose the Right Vendor for your Customized HR Self-Service Kiosk
Whenever a business decides to design a customized software, application or solution they biggest challenge they face is to how to choose the right vendor. Same is the case with the customized HR self-service kiosk. Here in UAE there are hundreds of vendors available which could make things more confusing for the project managers. Here are a few simple steps which will help you selecting the right vendor for your customized HR self-service kiosk:
- Market Research: Start searching for vendors in the market who are expert in HR self-service kiosk or HR solutions. You can start with Google, make a list of top 5 websites, and try to add more to this list by asking colleagues, friends and business partners.
- Evaluate Vendor Experience: Now that you have a list of at least 8 to 10 vendors, it is time to evaluate them on the bases of relevant experience. You can contact vendors and ask them about their previous projects related to your requirements and refine the list.
- Share Your Requirements: Share your customized HR self-service kiosk requirements including features, technology stack, platforms, integration needs, system implementation policy, and most importantly your budgetary limitations and expected deadline.
- Request Proposal: Ask all vendors from your list to submit their proposals and quotes on the bases of your requirements and time limitation. Once you go the proposals it is easier to find the suitable vendor for your customized HR self-service kiosk project.
- Compare Vendors: Compare all vendors on the bases of their price, technical details of their proposal, cross-check the references they provided, compare their portfolios and specifically experience in the relevant solutions, maintenance and support policy, AMCs, SLAs, etc.
- Sign the Agreement: Once you are satisfied with above mentioned comparisons, you should visit the vendor’s facility and sign the contract. You should also carefully compare and negotiate the agreements and contract to ensure you are getting most out of it and your rights are protected.
If you will follow the above steps you can work systematically to identify the best vendor for your customized HR self-service kiosk project which guarantees a great outcome.
Choose the Right Vendor for your Customized HR Self-Service Kiosk
UAT and Launch of Customized HR Self-Service Kiosk
Once your customized HR self-service kiosk system is developed, it is time to perform through testing before going for a full-launch. The UAT or user acceptance test is a key to success of any digital solutions. However, the testing could be done in multiple steps, starting with functionality testing, this testing involves testing out the system in a way to ensure all the features are fully developed and functional. It will help you to understand if all the functions are working as you wanted them to work or not. Furthermore it will also test the system technically and will help you rectifying the bugs and errors. Then you should form a closed user group involving key stakeholders, project owners, a chunk of end-users and the IT or management team who will be managing the system at your organization. The next phase is the soft-launch where you select a slightly wider and diverse user group ranging all different user sets and let them test the system thoroughly. It is extremely important that you take feedbacks of the users at all stages, do the revisions if necessary and retest the system. Once satisfied with all these testing phases, you can go on with full-fledge launch where the entire organization starts using your customized HR self-service kiosk. It is important to incorporate a feedback mechanisms in the system to keep taking user feedbacks. It will help you further refining the HR self-service kiosk efficiency and efficacy. The testing and feedback is a great way to optimize the performance and impact of your customized HR self-service kiosk.
UAT and Launch of Customized HR Self-Service Kiosk
Conclusion
In this fast-paced market landscape it is crucial for businesses to remain competitive and innovative. Any business’s strength lies in the strength of its team, the employees. Happy and satisfied employees tend to perform well and high-performing teams generate more value and increase a business’s profitability while strengthening its growth and brand perception. The HR department or team is the key player when it comes to employee satisfaction, retention and performance. The technology is completely revolutionizing everything whether it is personal or our work life. The HR practices, methodologies and technologies have also evolved greatly. Now a days’ businesses and organizations are using a variety of HR management tools to enhance HR performance. However, there are certain challenges which every HR team had to deal with, such as daily footfall, repetitive work, time consuming paperwork and manual tasks, and various other inefficient processes which are not only hindering HR performance but also undermining employee experience. A HR self-service kiosk is a full package that can help both the HR team and the employees to overcome several HR related challenges. Businesses are now realizing the superior impact and efficiency of customized solutions. Therefore businesses in Dubai, Sharjah, Abu Dhabi and other regions of UAE are also leaning toward customized HR self-service kiosks instead of readymade solutions.
In this blog we have elaborated the designing processes of a customized HR self-service kiosk. If you will consider following the above mentioned steps while designing a customized HR self-service kiosk, you would be able to systematically design a high-performance HR kiosk solution. If you want to learn more about the subject or if you need our help in designing a customized HR self-service kiosk for your business, please feel free to contact us through our Contact Us page or leave a comment in the comment box below and we will get in touch with you soon.