ESR utilisation on track at Health Research Authority

The Health Research Authority (HRA) is an arms-length body with offices in London, Bristol, Newcastle, Nottingham and Manchester as well as many remote workers.

They protect and promote the interests of patients and the public in health and social care research. Within the organisation, some corporate functions such as payroll, recruitment and financial accounting are outsourced to third party providers which means the HRA has to work closely with these providers to ensure adequate control and oversight of the data within ESR.

Over the last 18 months, the organisation has made significant strides in rolling out ESR to streamline processes, remove duplication and empower staff and managers with control of their own/their team’s data.

They began by firstly rolling out Employee Self Service and Supervisor Self Service across the organisation; this enabled their employees to check and update their own personal information and managers to check on their team’s information and also input sickness absence.  Increasing the transparency of data encouraged employees to ensure the data was correct, thus improving the data quality within the system.

Having Self Service rolled out has enabled the HRA to implement further functionality, including a switch to online-only payslips in early 2019, annual leave management, appraisal recording and managing items through the Property Register functionality.

The organisation is keen to streamline their processes and systems, to ensure that there is less duplication of data entry and that accuracy can be more easily maintained. Recently they introduced e-Expenses for all staff to further reduce paperwork, improve management information and ensure continued compliance with local policy.

The HRA isn’t stopping there, they are now planning to utilise OLM to allow staff to undertake their core Statutory & Mandatory eLearning through self service, moving from their current third party LMS, and in the longer term, the intention is to investigate the implementation of Manager Self Service.  This will reduce the number of different systems and log in details that employees and managers are currently required to use, and ensure that consolidated data reports can be produced and checked more easily.

The drive for improved uptake of ESR functionality has been led by Karen Williams, the Director of Finance, Procurement and Estates who says: 

Making better use of ESR and its freely available functionality has massively benefited the HRA. It’s reduced duplication, streamlined and automated processes and importantly gives our people control of their own data through self-service. Our people need to work flexibly and ESR helps make this happen. The HRA also benefits from improved business intelligence and compliance reporting informing decision making and enabling strong governance.