ESR Road Map Update

Release 33 was successfully deployed into ESR at the end of December 2016.   With an improved design and user interface of ESR Self-Service and OLM functionality, Release 33 was the second stage of our ambitious Road Map plan to improve your ESR solution.   

New branding and revised forms have given ESR a different look and feel, and whilst the fundamental processes and functions remain the same, some forms have significantly changed with new features added.

 

We are now working towards the next stage of the plan, with Release 34 scheduled for deployment at the end of March 2017.  As with all releases into the ESR solution, Release 34 will be subject to successful testing and deployment. 

ESR Portal is launched to our Beta Sites

On January 16^th we began deploying the new ESR Portal to our Beta sites.  This has been a very successful deployment across the eight sites with over 11,000 individual users accessing the Portal to date. This progress has enabled us to take on an additional three sites, from within our original Pilot cohort, in the last few days and they are also now progressing with their roll-out.

Our Functional Advisors are working closely with the sites, providing support and gathering their feedback on the new functionality and their experiences of interacting with the new Portal.  This will enable us to ensure that all users will have the best possible experience of interacting with your new look ESR when we have completed the Beta phase of deployment.

“We are pleased to be going live with the new ESR Portal and confident that this will greatly enhance the user experience.  Being involved in the development programme has been a great opportunity to help shape improvements to the system from a user’s perspective. We are an organisation that embraces the use of ESR for Employee, Supervisor and Manager Self Service and e-Learning and we welcome the developments.  We are particularly looking forward to the simplification of eLearning to help increase our training compliance and the flexibility that the improved access will bring”. Amanda Rawlings, Director of People and Organisational Effectiveness, Derbyshire Community Health Services NHS Foundation Trust

Provisioning and Roll-out

Following the beta phase we will begin a controlled roll-out to provision all user organisations with access to the new Portal. This will commence in May and will be complete by the autumn of 2017. 

As part of our planning, we have assessed individual organisations against a number of criteria:

• IT compliance against our MM-0100 standard – currently Internet Explorer 11 and Java 1.8.0_74 for full support;
• Employee Self Service Usage;
• Evidence collected from our user facing teams through tools such as the ESR Assessments and other interactions.

We will be writing to NHS HR and Workforce Directors to advise which roll-out Wave their organisation has been allocated to. However, if in meantime your HR Director feels that your organisation is in a position to roll-out the new functionality without needing on-site support, and they are confident that your organisation can meet our IT standards, then please encourage your HR Director to register this interest with us, by emailing esr.communications@nhs.net as it may facilitate an earlier provisioning date for you. To date, twelve HR Directors have requested an early provisioning date on this basis and we will manage future requests on a first-come-first-served basis.

Whether you request an early provisioning date, or accept the scheduled date, we will be providing support materials to support you and your teams, including set-up checklists and example communications from our Beta sites. However, in advance we encourage you to read the recently published I.T. guidance – this is particularly important for I.T. Departments and Providers.  You can access the I.T. guidance on our website

Education and User Readiness

During February and early March the NHS ESR Team ran a series of Road Map Release 34 webinars.  Webinar 1 focused on further user interface (UI) optimisations that will be delivered in release 34 and Webinar 2 focused on the new ESR Portal, providing information on how the portal can be personalised for an organisation or an individual.  With representatives from Beta pilot sites sharing their first hand feedback on their experiences, the webinars were very popular with 638 participants.

As with Release 33, the ESR Education Team published the following HTML captivate lessons and User Guide on ESR Infopoint.

Education Materials

• Auto Enrol process User Guide
• Employee & Manager e-Learning lessons
• Administrator Self Service lessons

Portal education material is being developed to help users familiarise with the new portal functionality.  We will be making this material available in advance of organisations going live with the portal, and further communications about this will be shared in due course.

If you have any questions about the Road Map please contact your NHS ESR Functional Advisor or Account Manager.

Gender Pay Gap Reporting

A draft Order, The Equality Act 2010 (Specific Duties and Public Authorities) Regulations 2017, is currently laid before Parliament and is expected to come into force on 31^st March 2017. This regulation imposes obligations on public authorities to publish gender pay gap (GPG) information, relating to employees, to demonstrate compliance with the duty imposed by section 149(1) of the Act. The first publication must occur no later than 30^th March 2018 and at intervals thereafter no greater than a year since the last publication.

GPG Reporting via ESR

Work is underway within the ESR Team to reproduce the specific calculation of Pay as defined in the draft Regulations. We will advise of the reporting solution and availability in due course. Note that the Regulations remain at the draft stage, so may be subject to change. When it is implemented the ESR solution will enable reporting for the year to March 2018 in order to meet the requirement.

ESR will enable reporting as set out in the draft Order:

“In particular, public authorities are required to publish the difference between the average hourly rate of pay paid to male and female employees; the difference between the average bonus paid to male and female employees; the proportions of male and of female employees who receive bonuses; and the relative proportions of male and female employees in each quartile pay band of the workforce.”

Organisations will be able to run the ESR reports for any chosen period, so that interim monitoring can be undertaken ahead of the annual publication.

Whilst the legislation focusses on Gender, it is intended that the ESR reporting solution will enable Pay Gap Analysis across a range of other protected characteristics including: age; disability; religion or belief and sexual orientation.

Please note that Gender Reassignment is not currently recordable on ESR. NHS England is leading a review of equality standards across the NHS and should Gender Reassignment be added to the standard applicable to Workforce, then it will be reflected in ESR.

Next steps

The specific calculation of pay required is being worked on and the Payroll NSIG will be engaged with regarding the inclusion of local elements.

A set of reports will be developed, with assistance from both the Human Resources and payroll NSIG’s, and these will be made available and publicised to users as soon as possible.

Further information regarding the GPG reporting requirements is available on the NHS Employers website

 

Change Event Log Availability in ESR BI

The Change Event Log report in Discoverer has always been a very popular report, allowing organisations to audit the changes made and is central to the best practice approach to reviewing changes to employees throughout the organisation.  As part of the reporting strategy,  ESR Release 33 included a number of changes to allow the data captured by the change event log to be reported using ESR BI.  Building on the reporting format from Discoverer the BI version has the following benefits:

• Over 1,000 data items are tracked in the BI version compared to around 200 in Discoverer, including tracking a number of items made in Learning Administration;
• Changes made by Proxy Users can be audited;
• Report runtime is significantly reduced (although changes cannot be reported until the following day);
• A large number of supporting data items, including employee attributes and assignment attributes are available to give great flexibility in local ad-hoc reporting.

The changes introduced help organisations more easily report on changes made to all employees but also enable more analytical reporting over time, including identifying Self-Service utilisation.

Changes made by ESR Self Service

Understanding not only ‘what’ changes are being made but ‘how’ is an additional benefit of reporting on change using ESR BI.  The ‘Self Service Analysis’ tab has been introduced enabling organisations to view the percentage of changes made via ESR Self Service,  compared to those changes that could have been made via ESR Self Service. This allows organisations to measure and prove the benefits and efficiencies of using ESR Self Service. A monthly view is also provided to measure improvement over time:

How to access it

The Change Event Log Dashboard is available to the following responsibilities: 

• Absence Administration
• BI Administration
• Employee Relations Administration
• Finance Reporting
• HR Administration
• HR Management
• Learning Administration
• Occupational Health Administration (for OH Changes Only)
• Payroll Administration
• Payroll Super Administration
• Pensions Administration
• Recruitment and Applicant Enrolment Administration

 

Introducing the new ESR App

Utilising Local Competencies in ESR

The approach taken by The Christie NHS Foundation Trust

Background

The Christie is an acute cancer specialist treatment centre based in Manchester with circa 2,700 staff.

Christie implemented Manager Self Service and use OLM to monitor compliance with Statutory and Mandatory Competencies via BI, but they have been looking at ways to monitor specific training and compliance at a local level in Departments as well.

Staff Engagement Manager Carol Reah explained:  “Our Catering Department had a particular need to ensure that all their staff are trained in specific skills to be able to undertake the full range of duties expected of them. The Catering Manager together with our Head of Workforce Information, Diane Jackson, looked at all possible options and came to the conclusion that the most efficient way to do this would be via OLM and Local Competencies.”

Approach

The Catering Department identified the Competencies that they needed to assess and passed these over to the Workforce Planning team so that they could be set up in ESR. The local ESR Team was able to use the Career Management URP to set up these Local Competencies. 

The following Local Competencies were set up in ESR:

413|LOCAL|Catering - Advanced Food Hygiene Centre|

413|LOCAL|Catering - Basic Food Hygiene|

413|LOCAL|Catering - Cash Handling Procedure|

413|LOCAL|Catering - Code of Practice of Food Handlers|

413|LOCAL|Catering - Control of Substances Hazardous to Health (COSHH)|

413|LOCAL|Catering - Degree or Equivalent|

413|LOCAL|Catering - Diet Cookery Course|

413|LOCAL|Catering - Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) Level 4|

413|LOCAL|Catering - Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) Policy|

413|LOCAL|Catering - Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) refresher training|

413|LOCAL|Catering - Intermediate Food Hygiene Certificate|

413|LOCAL|Catering - Manna|

413|LOCAL|Catering - Monika|

413|LOCAL|Catering - Refresher Hygiene Training|

413|LOCAL|Catering - Risk Assessment and Management Training|

413|LOCAL|Catering - Till Training|

413|LOCAL|Catering - Wages|

The Competencies have been assigned to all the Positions within each staff group in the Catering Department and these now show in the individuals’ Compliance Matrix.

Christie currently delivers this training face to face in the Catering Department with the employees’ supervisor. 

The Catering Supervisors have all been allocated the ‘Class Administrator’ URP so once the training has been completed the Supervisor will use ‘Class Administrator’ to confirm that they have attended the training. The Supervisor will then go into Supervisor Self Service and update the competency.

Monitoring Compliance

Compliance of the Catering staff with their local requirements is carried out via the BI Compliance Report that is available in Supervisor Self Service. This has enabled the Catering Manager to monitor compliance in a much more effective way. Catering Manager, Marinus Foolen said:   “I have been really impressed with how easy it is to use ESR and to be able to manage my Team’s requirements. With all the training requirements in one place it is easier to monitor compliance effectively, but also, now thanks to ESR, once the training is completed we can update competence and report on compliance, without having to involve our colleagues from the Workforce Department.”

The Employees in the Catering Department are also able to view their learning history and check their compliance via Employee Self Service.  Catering Assistant Jawad Nazir said:  “It’s brilliant that I can check not only my Payslip and Personal details but also if I am up to date with my training. Until we had access to Employee Self Service I was never able to do this.  Being able to access my ESS via the internet has helped as well. Having an electronic record of my learning and development will support my career ambitions in that I have a transferable passport of training”

The Future

The Christie has plans for the future that will increase their use of ESR, and in particular e-Learning. They want to change the way in which the Catering training is delivered. Rather than face to face sessions, the training will be developed into e-Learning lite bites.  They will then be put into e-learning, completed by the individual and the competency will automatically be awarded on successful completion of the course. This approach will be a Flagship for the Trust to highlight that all future training will be completed via e-Learning in ESR.

Carol Reah said:  “We are really excited about our plans to move all of our e-Learning into ESR. The vision is to have all new staff complete their training needs via ESR remote access prior to on-boarding. This will ensure that staff will be able to remain compliant with their training needs and having access to Employee Self Service and e-Learning will really make a difference”.  

For more Information

For more information please contact Carol Reah 0161 446 8423, Carol.reah@christie.nhs.uk

ESR benefits and implementation of Employee Self Service Limited Access

A case study by Hull and East Yorkshire NHS Trust

Background

Hull and East Yorkshire NHS Trust operates on two hospital sites; Hull Royal Infirmary and Castle Hill. We employ approximately 8500 staff and welcome around 1 million patients through our doors every year. The organisation has an annual budget of around £555m.

We went live on ESR in April 2008 utilising the HR, Payroll and OLM modules within the system.  

Simon Nearney, Director of Workforce, joined the organisation in 2012. Simon’s vision for Human Resources was to transform back office functions, implement efficiencies and ultimately operate a paperless department. So that challenge was set; HR were asked to develop strategies that would help achieve this vision. Initially we explored utilising an e-form solution external to ESR which would provide a mechanism for managers to notify central functions of employee changes electronically. However there were a number of IG, IT and financial challenges identified with this solution. Around the same time the NHS ESR Central Team launched the ESR Health Check and we saw an opportunity to re-assess our existing ESR usage and look to implement functionality to maximise efficiencies and derive greater benefits from ESR as our single workforce solution.

Sue Richards, Head of Workforce Transformation and Service Delivery established a HR and Finance Transformation Group to take forward the ESR Health Check recommendations. The Group met on a monthly basis and was comprised of stakeholders from Finance, HR, Medical Staffing, Recruitment, RA and Learning and Development.  The group particularly focused on streamlining internal processes, Self Service and Establishment Control. More recently the Group has focused specifically on the implementation of enhanced ESR functionality.  This has involved inviting core ESR and self-service users into the Group from January 2017.  This brings a user perspective, will give feedback on the functionality offer advice on local communications as they are developed.  

The Project

We were keen to reduce central control over HR transactional processes but wanted to ensure that we had the appropriate mechanisms in place for supporting and authorising changes initiated by managers through ESR. We felt that Employee Self Service Limited Access (ESS LA) would be an ideal starting point for us, introducing an electronic solution for staff to manage changes to their employee record directly via ESR.  We use a two page Notification of Change Form which is completed by staff to notify central functions of personal details and assignment changes and as part of the project we are planning to remove this paper form and adopt an e-form as a precursor to full ESR Manager Self Service.

ESS LA was implemented within the Trust in February 2016. From December 2015 we utilised numerous local communications channels to help cascade the message that ESS was being implemented for all our staff.  These included the Chief Executives Brief, Daily Updates, e-news and the organisation’s newsletter. Alongside this, we ran drop in sessions which were designed to help staff to understand how they would access their ESR record, navigate the screens and raise any queries. These sessions were well attended and were often scheduled during lunch times to ensure staff could be available to attend. The Registration Authority Lead also attended the briefing sessions to assist with resolution of any smartcard related access issues (all staff are issued with a smartcard on joining the Trust) and  a dedicated ESR page was set up on our staff intranet site which provided staff with ‘how to guides’ on the range of functionality available within ESS LA.

 

 

Feedback from our staff has been really positive, they have reported that they found ESR easy to access, have liked having access to their own employee record, being able to view their payslip, P60, Total Reward Statement and make changes electronically to the information held about them. The only challenges encountered during implementation were initial access issues for some staff and ensuring Trust computers had the appropriate IT software installed.

Having successfully implemented ESS LA, we were also keen to deliver further efficiencies through the removal of paper payslips within the organisation. There were a number of challenges with the distribution of paper payslips to staff including the time spent by Payroll and Post room staff in sorting and delivering the payslips, payslips going missing or being delivered to the wrong location. This was particularly problematic for medical staff that moved around the organisation. With the changes to the electronic payslip viewable through ESS LA and the ability to suppress paper payslips at organisation level - made available in ESR in June 2016 (Release 31), we were afforded the opportunity to do this.

A proposal to remove paper payslips was presented to and agreed at out Trust Board and agreement was also reached with the staff unions (the JNCC and LNC) to adopt this model.

We put in place a realistic lead time of several months to prepare our staff using internal communications mechanisms and drop in sessions and electronic payslips were implemented in our Trust from August 2016. Feedback from the HR Department was really positive with them experiencing very little resistance from staff, and few calls were received following implementation reporting problems accessing payslips. The timing of this coincided with the Junior Doctors rotation so they were advised at the earliest opportunity that they wouldn’t receive paper payslips.

Key Benefits

• Greater transparency for staff through being able to view their own HR record.
• Enabling a sense of staff ownership of their ESR record; with the ability to view and make changes directly within the system.
• Easily accessible for staff,
• Greater data accuracy, for example in relation to equality and diversity data.
• Less transactional changes being processed by central functions
• Amendments to internal Notification of Change Form removing some fields altogether.
• Time savings of 36 hours a month in the distribution, postage and delivery of paper payslips

Next Steps

Now that Employee Self Service (Limited Access) is available to access via the internet, we are in the process of promoting this functionality to our staff. We anticipate that this will provide greater flexibility for staff that may not have access to a computer in the workplace but are now able to access their ESR record via a smartphone, tablet or home PC. We are also in the process of reviewing arrangements for Establishment Control in ESR ahead of moving forward with a Manager Self Service implementation in 2017.

Lessons Learned

• Establishing a Steering group with key stakeholders ensures that any issues are identified and addressed and contributes to the overall success of the project.
• Ensure that you engage staff through communicating the forthcoming changes via a variety of different communications channels to help them prepare and to allow sufficient time for any access/IT issues to be addressed.
• Get agreement with the relevant unions before implementing changes of this nature, having their support ensures staff acceptance.
• Hold drop in sessions at a time when front line staff are able to attend.
• Make sure it is easy for staff to identify who to contact if they experience any problems accessing the new technology.
• Ensure that changes made in ESS LA are audited and quality checked. For example monitor bank account changes as part of payroll processing.

Future plans

The new ESR Portal is scheduled to be included in Release 34 at the end of March 2017 (subject to the usual testing caveats). Following the release of this functionality we intend to start rolling out Manager Self Service (MSS). We are keen to utilise as much of the functionality as possible. Piloting MSS has already commenced in the Workforce Department where they are booking annual leave, inputting sickness and undertaking online appraisals. This is enabling them to have experience of using key functionality and building hierarchies to ensure they are able to offer effective support to managers across the Trust when we move forward with full implementation. This pilot is being extended to include Organisational Development and HR during January and February 2017.

Through the implementation of MSS, we intend to remove our local Notification of Change form entirely along with any other paper change forms currently in use. We also intend to reduce change processing times and improve the timeliness of getting data into ESR.

We recently had our ESR Assessment with our NHS ESR Account Manager and Functional Advisor and as part of the Assessment we were presented with figures on our ESR Self Service usage and we were pleased to see that since our implementation in February 2016 over 3,500 changes have been made by employees through ESS LA.

Further Information

If you would like any further information on this case study please contact Andy Barker, Workforce Planning and Information Manager at Andrew.Barker@hey.nhs.uk.

If you would like more information about ESR Self Service please visit our website.

There are a wide range of business benefits from us ESR Self Service.  Visit our Case study section to see what other NHS Trusts are doing.

East Midlands Regional Workforce Reporting Special Interest Group (SIG)

There hasn't been an East Midlands Workforce Reporting SIG for several years, but after discussions during recent HR & Self-Service SIG meetings, the Workforce Reporting SIG has been re-established.

Within the region, there are 10 Trusts who currently share specific Workforce data (Turnover, Training Compliance, Appraisal rates, Sickness) to enable data comparison and bench-marking to be completed when information is being supplied to Trust Boards.

Gathering the information is predicated on Trusts completing a round-robin spreadsheet, which in itself can present some risks, so after discussion the recreation of the Reporting SIG was agreed.

With consideration to the planned changes to ESR’ reporting capability, this prompted further discussions about how best to support ESR Workforce Reporting teams across the East Midlands.

The newly formed Workforce Reporting SIG met for the first time on 10^th January and already has a packed agenda; discussing issues and sharing best practice regarding ESR Business Intelligence, discussing current Reporting requirements and the processes within ESR to enable such reporting and looking at future system developments and potential enhancements to improve the quality, reliability and accuracy of Reporting from within the ESR solution.

If you are interested in attending or want to know more, contact Greg Chambers, Workforce Systems Manager, Derby Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust e-mail: greg.chambers@nhs.net.

Introducing the new NHS Account Manager for the North East

Liane Moralee joined the NHS ESR Central Team as the new Account Manager for the North East at the beginning of March.

Having worked in the North East at Northumbria Hospitals as the ESR Lead for many years, Liane has a wealth knowledge and experience to share with Trusts across the region.

Speaking about her new role Liane told us: "I am thrilled to now be working with the NHS Central Team as the North East's ESR Account Manager and I am really looking forward to working with all the Trusts in making the most of the exciting developments ESR has to offer now and in the future".

 Liane can be contacted at liane.moralee@nhs.net or on 07875 399830.

 

Introducing the new NHS Account Manager for London

Diya Aswani joined the NHS ESR Central Team as the new Account Manager for the London Region in February.

Diya has worked in the NHS for 9 years in various Workforce roles. Before joining the ESR team, Diya was a Workforce Analyst & Workforce Manager at Frimley Hospital.  

Speaking about her new appointment Diya told us:  "My current role is to help NHS organisations achieve maximum benefits from ESR and drive the deployment and utilisation of the ESR footprint. This also involves engaging with stakeholders to help them achieve strategic benefits.

I am very passionate about ESR and I am looking forward to sharing my experience with Trusts in my region to help them achieve full benefits of ESR".

Diya can be contacted at diya.aswani@nhs.net  or on 07971 472568.