Benefits include:

• E-Learning can be completed anywhere and at any time through the ESR Self Service functionality
• OLM supports a blended approach to learning with organisations able to offer in one place, e-Learning and classroom based learning
• Over 800 freely nationally approved, quality assured and centrally maintained e-Learning content as well as access to locally procured or created e-Learning available to play on PCs and mobile devices
• Associate competencies with learning to automatically enrol employees onto learning and update their employee records on successful completion
• Automatic notifications and emails to remind staff and managers when learning needs to be renewed
• Certifications enable staff to view the status of their compliance based learning and see if and when it needs to be renewed
• National competence frameworks including the Core Skills Training Framework (CSTF), Care Certificate Framework (CCF) and an agreed set of Statutory and Mandatory competence labels (MAND) to support monitoring of compliance levels against statutory and mandatory training
• Reduction in staff undertaking unnecessary duplicate learning when transferred using the Inter Authority Transfer (IAT) process
• Reports enable the demonstration of achievement and compliance for all staff within the organisation
• Creation of tests to assess learner understanding, and to provide valuable feedback on whether business goals and workforce objectives are being served

Self Service offers organisations a valuable employee engagement tool, in which employees have the capability to interact with their NHS employment records including updating their personal data, viewing pay and benefit (Total Reward Statements) information, and managing their performance, learning and development. It is widely recognised that if staff feel valued and supported in the workplace by their line managers and the organisation as a whole, this further encourages them to deliver a high level of patient care that supports the values of your organisation.  

Self Service provides organisations with the opportunity to reduce costs on administrative based tasks and supports local strategies around compliance, engagement, and wider productivity and efficiency plans. Self Service also supports paperless office strategies – both reducing associated costs and supporting environmental policies.

Information held within ESR is presented to its users in an easy to read, pre-analysed format, in the form of portlets within the portal or as dashboard reports using Business Intelligence (BI). Such data is available at multiple levels across an organisation, including workforce strategic leaders having access to a ‘Management Dashboard – showing graphical data of key performance indicators in near real-time, on desktops or mobile devices.

Organisations have the ability to set Automatic Internet Access for all their workforce, thereby allowing all their ESR users to automatically access their ESR portal remotely, enhancing the usability of ESR and promoting 24/7 access.

The deployment of Self Service at a pre-hire stage for applicants enables you to empower your applicants to manage their own e-Learning prior to their start date. ESR can generate an ESR user account automatically at ‘Offer Accepted’ stage in the recruitment process. Once generated the applicant can access ESR to view planned classroom training and to enrol or undertake required training at their convenience as an applicant, thus enabling the applicants to work towards training compliance prior to their start date, thereby streamlining the on-boarding process.

Organisations have the ability to set Automatic Internet Access for all their applicants, thereby allowing all their ESR users to automatically access their ESR portal remotely, enhancing the usability of ESR and promoting 24/7 access.

ESR notifications are part of the internal messaging/workflow system within ESR, which can be accessed via the ESR portal. There are a wide range of notifications for employees and managers via Self Service that aim to provide key useful information direct to the user to help them manage their record, or to assist the manager in managing their team.

As well as notifications to employee and managers, the system has a plethora of role-based notifications available to line managers and back office teams to support internal processes and to help maintain the ESR system and its data.

There are 4 ways a notification is generated:

• System generated notification for information or action to employee or manager
• System generated notification for information or action to a role holder
• Notification generated by an action performed by employee or manager
• Notification generated by an action performed by an ESR professional user i.e. HR, payroll etc.

Some ESR notifications have the ability to be delivered directly to a user’s email account. The notifications that can be sent by email are covered in the document ESR-NHS0252 ESR Email Notifications. There is the ability within some emails to approve, reject or request more information as long as your organisation is using NHS.net or has an NHS Digital accredited email server. There are two levels of email capability dependent on email domain security:

• Approval and summary emails – available to NHS.net and other approved secure domains
• Summary email - other email domains outside an approved list

For further information on workflow notifications, please refer to the ESR-NHS0060 Workflow Notifications Guide available in Kbase.

Inter Authority Transfer (IAT) is a unique and automated ESR process that removes the manual procedures associated with NHS Staff Transfer Forms and reduces the data entry needed following the appointment of staff from other NHS organisations.  It is also a fundamental enabler for the National Streamlining Programme, including Doctors in Training (DiT) and the Mandatory and Statutory Training Project (MaST).

Running the IAT at the pre-hire recruitment stage should form part of your standard recruitment process for both general and medical recruitment. As part of this process a specific set of data is provided as followed:

• Recruitment Team will receive vital information required for the production and issue of contracts, which would otherwise be required from the employee directly. A factual reference can also be requested at this stage.
• Learning & Development will receive current training competences, enabling only the required training to be completed prior to or on induction.
• The Occupation Health Team will receive the applicants Vaccinations and Immunisations record prior to starting, removing the need to repeat checks unnecessarily. They can also directly inform the Recruitment Team through the system, once OH checks have been completed and clearance given.

The appraisal functionality available through Employee and Manager Self Service enables an organisation to manage the pay progression and end to end appraisal process online for all their staff.  This includes the ability to access a standard appraisal template or allows the organisation to create a bespoke template using HTML coding. The process includes the reviewing of competencies, objectives setting and enables the electronic transfer of the appraisal between the employee and manager.

Pay Progression

The 2018 framework agreement on the reform of Agenda for Change introduced provisions to move to a new pay system with faster progression to the top of pay bands through fewer pay step points. In response to these new provisions ESR functionality was enhanced to enable managers to undertake pay progression successfully utilising Manager/Supervisor Self Service or via a central function using core form functionality.

For further information download: ESR Supporting AfC Pay Progression

Performance Management Plans

Performance Management Plan functionality works with the appraisal functionality and can be used to ensure that organisational objectives are successfully met, tracking them through the entire workforce hierarchy. The Performance Management Plan Admin URP is used to setup and roll out performance management plans to the entire workforce via Self Service, incorporating objective setting as well as appraisal tasks.
 
The Line of Sight feature is a hierarchical representation of the alignment of objectives in an organisation. This feature displays objectives that are aligned or linked to each other in the objectives hierarchy. Line of Sight helps managers and employees to understand how their objectives have been cascaded down through the organisation and the association between objectives.

The functionality also provides an electronic auditable process for the appraiser to withhold increment progression.

ESR Business Intelligence (ESR BI) transforms your ESR data into visually relevant and appealing dashboards, accessible on desktops or mobile devices.  It contains a full suite of standard reports across the full range of functionality that ESR provides; enabling processes to be monitored and provides an opportunity to empower management with valuable workforce intelligence in a variety of forms to suit the user. It offers detailed business insight for managers to monitor their teams while directors, and senior managers and leadership teams get an effective overview of the entire organisation, allowing them to plan for future business development.

ESR BI can also be used to produce integrated reports with specific data from other systems, and bespoke reports can be uploaded to the ESR Portal, to ensure that the target audience has quick access to information. Benchmarking and alerting are also key parts of ESR BI enabling the ability to target users and encourage prompt action where required.

Benefits include:

• A suite of standard dashboards easily accessible thus reducing the reliance on centralised reporting
• Interactive dashboards allowing users to delve deeper behind the graphs to see the data that sits behind them, thus saving time from producing data in more than one level
• Easy to use standard dashboards resulting in less time spent educating users
• Greater understanding of data and workforce requirements at source
• Improved timeliness of reports resulting in less time spent waiting for reports to complete
• Reports can be exported into many different formats including PDF & Excel
• Improved data quality and accuracy
• Ownership of data at source

Workforce information is available through the ESR Portal and its associated Dashboards to your managers and your back office functions, providing an opportunity to empower management with valuable workforce intelligence in a variety of forms to suit the user. It offers detailed business insight for managers to monitor their teams while directors, and senior managers and leadership teams get an effective overview of the entire organisation, allowing them to plan for future business development.

ESR BI can also be used to produce integrated reports with specific data from other systems, and bespoke reports can be uploaded to the ESR Portal, to ensure that the target audience has quick access to information. Benchmarking and alerting are also key parts of ESR BI enabling the ability to target users and encourage prompt action where required.

Benefits include:

• Manager dashboard with direct links to these areas and the ESR BI reports directly from the Portlets, thus reducing the reliance on centralised reporting
• Interactive dashboards allowing users to delve deeper behind the graphs to see the data that sits behind them, thus saving time from producing data in more than one level
• Greater understanding of data and workforce requirements at source
• Empower your managers to have greater control of their workforce data and targets
• Improved timeliness of reports resulting in less time spent waiting for reports to complete
• Reports can be exported into many different formats including PDF & Excel
• Ownership of data at source
• View key performance indicators for absence, compliance, and appraisals and the ability to access key career information about their employees through the Talent Profile with the ability to produce PDF reports

The Talent Management functionality of ESR provides you with the capability to manage and monitor the careers of your employees. ESR maintains the competences, qualifications, and employment of each staff member and enables you to manage their development reviews and learning.

• Through ESR Self Service managers and employees can access their competence profile, qualifications, and learning record, enabling up to date information to be available for local reporting and analysis of training needs
• Complete integration between Oracle Learning Management (OLM), competency functionality and the employee record, enables updates to individual learning and competency records to be maintained easily
• Local and national competence frameworks including Core Skills Training Framework (CSTF), Care Certificate (CCF), Educator (EDU) and an agreed set of Statutory and Mandatory competence labels are built in, and an employee’s record within these is automatically maintained. Each framework is related to an employee’s training record, competency profile and post requirements 
• Every employee’s qualifications can be maintained, including A-Level, degree and post-graduate qualifications as well as Qualification Credit Framework (QCF) information
• The comprehensive reporting suite within ESR allows managers to ensure that the staff development and review process is being maintained, and provides statutory statistical information

ESR provides a robust and tailored NMC Revalidation solution to support staff throughout their nurse revalidation journey using the appraisal functionality with ESR Self Service. This empowers nurses and midwives to take ownership of their own revalidation with support from their managers and the organisation, whilst overseeing regulatory compliance with the NMC.

ESR provides a standard revalidation template with a standard Business Intelligence (BI) report and also provides the ability for organisations to produce bespoke templates and BI reports.  Professional credits can be awarded to training recorded on Oracle Learning Management (OLM), which supports revalidation evidence.

Job Plan commitments can also be entered into ESR and are available to view in Self Service, with data fields available to capture current Job Plan commitments for Consultants and SAS Doctors.  A BI Medical & Dental Dashboard is available to enable comprehensive reporting.