Editorial
Some of the most unsettling stories I’ve read about “employee self-service” don’t come from tech conferences or HR blogs. They come from the parenting site Mumsnet.
In one thread, someone describes logging into her company’s absence system after miscarrying. To take time off, she had to select a reason — either sickness or bereavement — from a drop-down. She chose the former — not because it fit, but because the form demanded a category. The system logged her response.
When she returned, still raw, she was called into an “Attendance Review” because she had crossed a trigger point. An automated process is now pricing the physical and emotional aftermath of losing a much-wanted pregnancy.
No one chose to be unkind. No one had to be. The system handled that on their behalf.
The Official Story of Self-Service
Employee self-service is not meant to look this way.
Self-service is sold as empowerment: employees in control of their data, their time, their working lives. No more chasing HR for payslips. No more opaque processes. Just speed, autonomy and ease — the frictionless workplace, finally delivered.
Sometimes, that promise is real. It is genuinely useful to be able to update your details at midnight, download a tax statement in seconds or book annual leave from home.
But lurking inside that promise is a less marketable shift — one the sales pitches are noticeably silent on.
The Labor Transfer: Self-Service as Techno-Admin
What most employee self-service really does is not the removal of admin, but the redistribution of it.
This dynamic sits neatly within what British writer and internet theorist Jamie Bartlett has called “techno-admin.” That is:
“a pervasive phenomenon, whereby we customers are forced into infuriating, confusing, absurdly time-consuming and bleakly unrewarding tasks by a machine.”
That is the promise–reality gap of self-service in a single sentence.
Forms did not disappear; they moved. Data entry did not vanish; it was reassigned.
Evidence gathering, process navigation, error correction, compliance checking — all of it still exists. It is simply no longer concentrated within a service team. It is carried, in fragments, by people who weren't hired to be administrators.
What used to be a conversation is now a workflow.
What once was a judgement call is now a dropdown menu.
This is the hidden trade at the heart of most self-service systems. Organizations reduce visible service load while increasing invisible employee effort.
The admin hasn’t disappeared. It has simply moved downstream — into employees’ portals, inboxes and evenings.
And because their labor is fragmented, normalized and off the books, it isn't counted. It doesn’t show up on dashboards or efficiency reports. But it accumulates all the same.
Where the Model Breaks: Grief, Illness — and Basic Reality
The logic of techno-admin depends on a particular kind of user: rational, emotionally neutral, cognitively available. Someone who can read carefully, remember rules, compare options, upload documents and wait patiently for outcomes.
Grief, illness and burnout dismantle all of that.
In those moments, people are not at their most administratively capable. They are disoriented. Exhausted. Anxious. Time collapses. Memory falters. Decision-making degrades. Yet systems demand the most precision during these moments : correct categories, correct evidence, correct timing.
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Bereavement becomes a reason code. Sickness becomes a workflow. Pregnancy loss becomes an absence type. Burnout becomes a pattern of trigger points. What should be held as human exception is processed as statistical deviation.
The model’s failure isn’t confined to moments of emotional vulnerability. It also collapses under the weight of basic practical reality.
A corporate laptop won’t turn on. The user calls IT. The instruction: “You’ll need to log a ticket in the service desk system.”
There is, at this point, an obvious problem.
A small procedural standoff ensues while the user is instructed to find someone else to log the ticket on their behalf. After a call back and a brief description, someone is dispatched to the desk.
For two hours, the organization paid for email to be done on a phone so that a workflow could maintain its dignity.
In both cases — the miscarriage and the dead laptop — the system behaves exactly as designed. The problem is not malfunction. It is misalignment.
This Isn’t a UX Problem. It’s a Power — and Logic — Problem.
It would be comforting to frame all of this as a design failure. But this is not, at its heart, a usability issue. It isn’t even just a human one. It’s a question of where organizational burdens sit, and how rigidly we insist people obey systems when they clearly make no sense.
Economics has a name for this dynamic: the principal–agent problem. The people who choose the system are not the people who have to use it. HR, IT and procurement optimize for compliance, cost, risk and reporting. Employees optimize for speed, clarity, dignity and getting on with their actual jobs. These goals are not remotely the same.
Self-service systems don’t just change how work gets done. They change who carries the weight of it. The labor of administration, once visible and contained within specialist teams, is now dispersed across the entire workforce. Each individual task is small. But taken together, they represent a significant transfer of effort.
And the benefits of that transfer accrue unevenly. HR functions quite reasonably celebrate reductions in ticket volumes and faster case resolution. IT teams defend clean workflows. Finance teams see lower service overheads. The organization sees efficiency.
What it rarely sees is the workforce reluctantly absorbing:
- the emotional cost in moments of vulnerability.
- the cognitive cost in moments of overload.
- and the sheer wasted time when process becomes more important than outcome.
This is why the language of “empowerment” can feel so hollow. Power is not simply the ability to submit your own form. It is the ability to be met by a human when the situation is irreducibly human — and to bypass the machinery entirely when it is obviously obstructing rather than helping.
When a miscarriage, illness and broken hardware are all treated as workflow problems, we’re not optimizing efficiency — we’re optimizing compliance with the system.
What Real “Next-Gen” Self-Service Would Actually Mean
The answer isn’t to abandon self-service. It is to redefine what we mean by it.
Let’s start with metrics. Genuinely helpful self-service would measure success by time saved, effort eliminated and stress reduced during vulnerable moments, not by ticket deflection or case-handling speed as the primary metrics. Not how quickly a workflow completes, but how little it intrudes.
It would be built around a different set of assumptions:
- People do not encounter systems in neat, emotionally neutral states.
- Exceptions are not errors but a constant feature of working life.
- Moments of crisis require fewer steps, not more.
In practice, that means fewer forms and more intelligent exception handling. Fewer proofs and more trust. Narrower use of rigid categories and wider use of human judgement. And critically: clear, visible escape hatches to a person when the situation is irreducibly human or plainly illogical.
Real empowerment does not come from the ability to submit a form unaided. It comes from not needing one at all on your worst days.
Next-gen self-service, if it is to deserve the name, should not make HR quieter at the expense of employees. It should make work feel lighter. Especially at the heaviest moments.
The Diagnostic Test
To find out if your self-service model is genuinely employee-centered, or a poorly-disguised exercise in labor transfer, ask this: if the system disappeared tomorrow, who would feel the greater relief — employees, or the service function?
If removing it would cause chaos for IT but relief for the workforce, it was never really self-service. It was outsourced admin.
Bartlett’s warning about techno-admin is that it rarely arrives with fanfare or malice. It creeps. It embeds. It becomes the unexamined default. The only real antidote is deliberate human oversight: the ability — and the permission — to say “this shouldn’t be a workflow” and route it back to a person.
For now, the most honest thing we can say about much of what passes for “next-gen self-service” is this: it isn’t removing friction. It’s just moving it.
Editor's Note: How else is technology transferring cognitive loads to employees?
- The Anti-Nudge: When to Leave Employees Alone — Nudge technology aims to help. But more often than not, the most helpful thing is providing employees with a little bit of silence.
- Information Overload Is Bad for Your Health. Here's What You Can Do — Information overload has become as much a part of the workplace as the technology that is creating it. Here are ways to manage it.
- Modern Work Is Breaking. We Need Behavior Change, Not More Technology — Middle managers are being asked to hold modern work together, but without the tools, support or behavioral norms needed to succeed.
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