Human resources departments are put in place to find outstanding people who can drive outstanding results. Finding these well-suited people, with the skill sets your company requires, is essential to remain competitive. However, at many companies, the vast majority of HR’s time is spent on simply keeping the lights on, rather than focusing on this type of key strategic initiative.
If you work in HR, you know that many of your tasks are centered around administrative responsibilities and projects like responding to inquiries on benefits, talent management, talent acquisition, time off accruals, tuition reimbursement — the list goes on and on. If you could break away from spending large chunks of your time on these types of tasks, and instead focus on more strategic initiatives, it would likely go a long way in driving corporate success.
Here are five of the crucial components to help streamline and automate repetitive request fulfillment HR service delivery. Improving these processes will optimise your department’s efficiency and drastically improve the employee experience with HR, while at the same time making employees company-wide more productive and self-sufficient.
#1. Standardise with a single purpose-built HR service delivery platform.
It’s no secret that the HR technology landscape is loaded with various solutions for benefits, talent acquisition, and talent management. There are hundreds of companies with solutions that address these enterprise HR needs. And unlike in the 1990s, when companies would typically purchase single solution suites from single providers, most enterprises today have multi-vendor HR solutions because they are much more flexible to deploy.
While these solutions are great as serving as the single system of record for maintaining employee information, they lack a single platform that’s easy to use to get information in and out of these systems safely and efficiently. That’s where an HR service delivery platform comes in — it can serve as an ideal front end for HR and employees to gain access to these systems, with security protocols to protect sensitive data against security breaches.
You should seek out an HR service delivery platform with numerous integration options with your HR information system (HRIS) solutions and environment. When doing your evaluation, check that there are integration options that meet your needs — not just for today. You want to feel confident that as you perform ongoing software upgrades, the integrations will remain intact as well.
#2. Add an employee self-service portal.
Once you’ve standardised on an HR service delivery platform, the next step is to add an employee self-service portal. This allows employees to access policies and information from one place at any time. A self-service portal delivers two major benefits. First, it provides employees with a consumer-like experience to get the information that they are requesting. Plus, a self-service portal alleviates HR personnel from spending the majority of their time dealing with the burden of answering repetitive requests. The net result is happier, more satisfied, and more productive employees along with more efficient HR personnel.
#3. Add a robust knowledge base to your HR service management solution.
A robust HR knowledge base is a key factor in deploying an enterprise-class HR service management and delivery system. Your knowledge base is the search engine and database of HR information to answer employee questions and requests and serves as the foundation of your HR service management platform.
A key functional requirement is the ability to easily segment information by user-type. This makes the employee self-service experience much more satisfying and efficient because employees are only seeing information that is pertinent to them, based on their role, location, and employment status (i.e. contract vs. full-time and exempt vs. non-exempt). A robust knowledge base is foundational to the success of new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. These new technologies will be infinitely more impactful when drawing information from a strong knowledge base.
#4. Add cross-departmental workflows and automation.
The success of HR initiatives like employee on-boarding rely on multiple departments efficiently executing numerous coordinated activities to make employees successful and productive from their first day. This includes providing access to:
- Systems and applications
- Facilities and physical office locations
- An employee badge and key card with security clearance
- A computer, phone, and access to other equipment and assets
These complex workflows cross multiple departments and functional areas. A robust HR service delivery solution lets organisations eliminate manual processes of communication like phone and email, replacing them with an automated system that routes requests to the proper personnel in the proper sequence to ensure ease of fulfillment while truncating lengthy fulfillment cycles.
#5. Ensure your HR service delivery solution comes with a powerful analytics capability with built-in customisable dashboards.
The final key to implementing a powerful HR Service Management solution is making sure it has the capabilities to measure the time and efficiency of the system as a whole. Strong analytics with the ability to measure and monitor KPI’s like time-to-resolution are essential for understanding the impact and success of your HR service management solution. A powerful HRSM solution with built-in analytics should show a drastic reduction in the time to fulfill requests, even as the number of requests steadily increase in volume. This is due to the aforementioned self-service portal, knowledge base, and automation tools, which should significantly reduce the time that HR spends dealing with manual requests and the removal of bottlenecks with new automated processes.
Learn more about Cherwell’s HR Service Management, and see how it can help your department operate more efficiency, while delivering outstanding employee satisfaction.
For a quote on Cherwell’s HR Service Management, click here.
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