Employees want more control and autonomy. But that doesn’t always require a four-day week or working from coffee shops. Self-service portals can consistently improve workplace loyalty and satisfaction by giving employees more control over their work affairs.
The business world is currently in a tug-of-war. Employers are trying to get employees back to how things operated before the pandemic years. Yet, employees have been exposed to a higher degree of autonomy. Concepts like work-life balance have shifted from fanciful management ideas to practical realities for workers. No wonder employers encounter a lot of resistance from their people when trying to reconfigure remote working and flexible hours.
During International Day of Happiness this March, it’s an opportunity to ask: what really makes employees content, even happy, with their workplaces? There are many answers, yet as the battle over work hours and locations shows, autonomy is often the best.
“Autonomy is very important in a business,” says Tamarin Duncan, Head of HR at PaySpace. “Foremost, it makes sense because it’s more efficient. A business where everything is slow, manual and micro-managed does not perform well. And it makes a lot of sense for employees, both because it shows the degree you trust and respect them, and they have the space to arrange their professional lives.”
The connection between autonomy and happiness is not just anecdotal. A 2022 Journal of Positive Psychology study measured which activities make people happier. They discovered that the type of activity mattered far less than whether the people could do it at their own volition. The fine line between ‘have to’ and ‘want to’ has an outsized impact on personal and professional happiness.
Autonomy and self-service
If we only do what we want, we’d likely be more happy (at least for a short while). But that isn’t autonomy. According to those researchers, genuine autonomy is the sense of wanting to take action instead of being coerced into action.
It’s surprising where this dynamic appears. An obvious example is a management culture that bullies employees into long hours and unrealistic expectations. But we can easily overlook the more subtle encumbrances.
For example, how easy is it when an employee wants to apply for leave? They might willingly apply for leave but then feel aggrieved by having to fill in a pile of paperwork and manually coordinate schedules. How easy is it to get a payslip? Again, the desire for the payslip is a choice, but relying on overworked and stressed HR staff to deliver the slip promptly—that might not be coercive, but it sure doesn’t feel like the employee’s choice.
There is also another point to consider, says Duncan, “Everyone has access to technology. They are used to convenience and getting what they need when they need it. These expectations don’t take a back seat when they enter the workplace. It’s the opposite: they often judge their business tools and processes by that standard, and they become frustrated and annoyed when things fall short.”
Easy ways to create self-service
Employee autonomy and happiness may not require remote working and similar gestures. In many work environments—factories, mines, retailers, to name a few—they are impractical or only serve a small part of the workforce.
But if we consider that technology enablement has increased expectations of autonomy and focus on creating universal self-services for employees, every business can contribute significantly to satisfaction and happiness. The examples of leave and payslips are apt illustrations of this synergy.
“One of our most popular services is a WhatsApp bot that engages with leave processes and payroll services on behalf of the employee,” says Duncan. “They don’t need a laptop or even an email address. They just jump onto the app, chat to the bot, and get what they need. In one move, they get self-service to important business services and they enjoy the same technological autonomy they experience with other services.”
Other examples are also starting to emerge. Most recently, generative artificial intelligence is helping employees access business knowledge and data analysis through plain-language interactions. And employee super-apps that combine multiple self-service and information features into one application are popular at large enterprises.
These concepts represent ways to bring autonomy more readily and reliably into a business. Yet, there is one catch, says Duncan, “You can’t do this stuff on yesterday’s technology infrastructure. The best self-service tools for employees and customers are powered by cloud-native platforms. Otherwise, it becomes far too complicated and expensive to do things like integration and automation, or to design forms and interfaces without relying constantly on IT teams. Meanwhile, the best cloud platforms have these features built-in and ready to deploy, at a fraction of the cost of trying to do it all yourself.”
Research confirms that autonomy is the most significant ingredient for happiness. The digital age has shown people the satisfaction of self-service. Now, businesses can harness both forces together through modern cloud-native business platforms.
Some of your employees might still want to work remotely, and yes, a few will never like their jobs. But for the vast majority, a few self-service portals in the right places are the difference between just showing up and wanting to excel.
