HR self-service systems: labour saving or labour shifting?

Over the last decade self-service portals into Human Resources (HR) systems have become ubiquitous across organisations with significantly-sized workforces. These enable employees to perform administrative tasks that traditionally were the responsibility of workers situated in the personnel or HR function of an organisation. The lack of research into the impact of recent innovations in web-enabled HR system upon workforces has been noted in the HR literature. As such, there is a gap in this literature pertaining to the worker experience of using self-service portals, and critically-minded evaluations of the impact of self-service HR on organisational cultures and structures. Our research will look into this gap by interviewing various stakeholders in two higher education institutions.