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.

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