Introduction:
In today's fast-paced world, businesses strive to streamline their operations and enhance employee experiences. For a medium-sized healthcare provider in the United States, the challenge was no different. They have multiple clinics and medical centers located across the country. They serve a diverse patient population offering primary care, specialized treatments, surgical procedures, and preventive care. They cater to medical needs like cardiology, pediatrics, obstetrics and gynecology, and orthopedics. They are a trusted healthcare provider, striving to improve the health and well-being of its patients through comprehensive and compassionate care, advanced medical technology, and a commitment to excellence in healthcare delivery.
With a strong emphasis on patient satisfaction and striving to create a warm and welcoming environment for all patients, they aimed to empower their employees by improving their HR processes. This blog explores their journey of creating a self-service employee portal using the power of technology and how it transformed their HR operations.
Background:
The HR department wanted an efficient and user-friendly self-service solution for routine HR tasks and information retrieval. However, their internal IT team had a backlog, and the delivery date for a self-service portal was 10 months away. Realizing the urgency, they engaged our team of low code experts who specialized in Citizen Development – a concept that empowers non-technical users to build applications.
Problem Statement:
The healthcare provider faced inefficiencies and increased reliance on HR assistance for routine tasks, leading to higher employee costs and delayed essential HR services. Contacting HR team for all HR-related tasks hindered employee productivity and created unnecessary administrative burden. The HR team wanted to empower employees by providing them with easy access to HR-related information and reducing dependency on themselves.
Solution:
The expert team stepped in and designed an intuitive and user-friendly self-service employee portal using Power Platform's powerful tools. Leveraging the visual interface and drag-and-drop functionality, they incorporated crucial features such as payroll information, leave management, "earned incentive" tracking, stock options vesting details, benefits enrollment, and more. The HR team was trained on Citizen Development, enabling them to manage the entire system end-to-end.
We provided focused training and support to select citizen developers. This included training on the low-code/no-code platform, best practices for application development including selecting the right problems, and guidance on security and compliance. We educated them on best practices to ensure the scalability, reliability, and maintenance of citizen-developed applications.
While citizen development empowers users, it is crucial to establish governance frameworks to ensure compliance with organizational policies, data security, and privacy regulations. We helped the organization define guidelines, standards, and approval processes for citizen-developed applications to maintain control and mitigate risks. Most importantly, our experts helped them keep license costs in check, in some cases reducing license consumption from 1000s to 10s.
Power Automate:
To ensure seamless integration and real-time information access, Power Automate was utilized. This automated HR processes, reduced manual effort, and improved overall efficiency. The HR team was trained to automate new workflows independently, enhancing their control over the system.
Power Pages:
The team leveraged Power Pages to create visually appealing and responsive web pages within the portal. This enhanced the user experience and allowed employees to access the portal from different devices, ensuring delightful interaction and accessibility.
Power BI:
The integration of Power BI into the self-service portal transformed the way HR leaders made decisions. Real-time data collected from workflows and user interfaces provided valuable insights into employee engagement, usage patterns, and overall portal performance. Interactive dashboards and visualizations allowed HR leaders to track the effectiveness of the self-service portal, measure its impact on HR operations, and monitor the adoption rate among employees.
Impact:
The rapid rollout of the self-service portal had a profound impact on employees and the HR department. Employees gained easy access to HR information, reducing their dependency on HR personnel and enabling them to resolve queries and perform tasks independently. The intuitive design and user-friendly interface of the portal improved employee satisfaction and engagement.
For the HR department, the self-service portal resulted in a significant reduction in routine inquiries and administrative tasks. HR personnel could focus on strategic initiatives, talent management, and more value-added HR activities. This optimized resource allocation and improved overall HR operational efficiency.
Empower your employees with our Citizen Development services. Contact us now to harness the power of your own people!