Exploratory Study on User Satisfaction of E-HRM: Evidence From Brunei Government Employee Management System (GEMS)

Introduction

The computer has undeniably affected every aspect of our lives, especially in the advent of information technology, together with communication technology (ICT). The necessity for efficiency, high responsiveness and prompt readiness among the workforce is sought after from ICT. According to Akinyede and Daramola (2013) the computer has remained one of the most powerful tools that has served as an aid to decision making in recent years, mostly because of its efficiency in terms of speed, accuracy, reliability, mass processing, cost and security, among others. It has inspired many advancements within today’s workplace, in different sectors and fields; human resource management is no exception. Human resource management (HRM) activities were always carried out manually and paper intensive using the traditional method system. Presently, with the availability of ICT, human resource management has transformed to a sophisticated Electronic Human Resource Management (E-HRM) system.

HRM comprises all management practices and decisions, that affect the employees. In today’s world, HRM are facing challenges which include competitive work environments, to allocate growing demands, provide service quality, growing workforce, globalization of economy and many more. To facilitate, HRM is moving to an inevitable power of technology that transforms HRM into E-HRM. E-HRM has a lot to offer and contains features representing the functions of a typical HRM department, that has claimed to be effective by saving time and effort to increase productivity. Brunei Darussalam without exception, has also been practicing E-HRM within the Government sector for over a decade, called the Government Employee Management System (GEMS). Effective management of employees, enhance well-being and satisfaction of employees, respond to employee conflict and management, keeping track of employee attendance, work-time and absenteeism are among the functions of HRM, in order to achieve an organisation’s goals and strategies. The adoption of technology has simplified routine tasks, particularly with the continuous upgrades seen in its processing speed. Thus, introducing E-HRM may maximise HRM potential, content and positioning to positively impact the organisation’s overall goals and strategies.

In the perspective of circular economy (CE), the utilization of E-HRM enables to transform the linear “take-make-use-dispose” model of production and consumption of IT into a circular model of resource management (Eposito et al., 2018). For Human Resource (HR) executives, trashing data, information and knowledge that could be repurposed and resold violates a basic tenet of efficiency: leave value at the ‘dump’ . A CE of E-HRM is designed to waste out unnecessary tasks, routines and tasks of the HR system and extending the useful life and restoring natural systems for user satisfaction. Additionally, there is also a rapidly evolving theoretical and critical literature on CE that suggests that, in order to achieve a true transformation away from the linear model and towards a circular management of resources, practices and strategies should go beyond the minimization of waste and towards a reframing of human and social behaviors such as consumption patterns with practices inspired by the sharing economy suggesting various forms of collaborative consumption (Hobson and Lynch, 2016; Moreu at al., 2017). Other practices are aiming at building awareness, at increasing knowledge and acquiring the appropriate skills through the training of managers and employees in organizations, strategies focused on the human and social dimensions of organizations influenced by the field of Green Human Resource Management (GHRM) (Chiapetta Jabbour, 2019).