I recently had some interesting client discussions about HR Customer Satisfaction and measurement of it. First of all, I find it really, really good that HR organisations are interested in this topic. However, I haven’t seen many of these. Sure, almost every HR organisation’s Shared Service Center has the typical questionnaire or telephone interview for every 10th customer or so – but real end-to-end all-inclusive HR custom satisfaction is something I haven’t seen often, but believe it is important. HR is a supporting function and a service function that needs to do what is best for the business and the overall company’s success. But how do you know if you do this if you don’t measure or assess it? – sure, there are HR and HC metrics that you can measure and that provide some insights – but HC metrics are about the workforce as a whole and therefore more than just HR work influences them. HR metrics on the other hand are mainly process driven and give you an idea how single processes perform – but don’t tell you anything about their contribution towards the company’s success.
So let’s measure HR Customer Satisfaction, let’s ask HR’s clients how happy they are with the HR services they receive. What looks easy from the distance gets a bit more complicated when you look in detail. You cannot just ask about satisfaction as satisfaction might be influenced by many different variables and alone it does still not tell you if “what HR is doing is the right thing”. Also, the best way to drive up satisfaction is to give everyone what they want – but this would not be in line of what I believe HR should be about. From my perspective, you have to dig a bit deeper and get a 360° picture of HR to understand its performance and (more importantly) improve its performance and customer satisfaction.
So how do you do that? – Well, it is a bit more complex, but still doable. The major questions I believe should get answered by such an effort are:
- Is HR doing the right things
- in the right quality
- at the right time
- to the right customers
- at the right costs
And therefore, you should design your assessment tool around that.
The most important question is if HR is doing the right things – you can be excellent in your work, but if you are not doing what is needed, than you are not supporting the overall company’s success. So I suggest, starting with senior leadership interviews. Be open and honest with your most senior stakeholders. Perform qualitative interviews to assess if your HR organization is doing the right things: today AND tomorrow. Listen to what they say and how they rate different aspects of HR service (and by service I include the Business Partners as well as the CoEs – because in the end, HR is a service function). This forms the basis of everything else.
Next, go broad and survey your complete workforce – but segmented: Segment different workforce types to be more precise and get more insightful results. For example separate blue-collar from white-collar, separate management from non-management, etc. – and survey for two things mainly: how is the perceived quality of the services they receive, and let them assess the most important services they receive – not everything. And the importance depends on the job each responder has to perform every day. Like this you will have a good overview of quality, time and customer centricity.
This leaves us with costs. You cannot assess quality and satisfaction without costs. Of course the more money you “throw in”, the higher the possibility of good satisfaction results. But, who can afford this? Who should afford this? – I suggest complementing the satisfaction survey with a high-level benchmarking to understand in comparison how much money is spent to reach the level of satisfaction and quality. This does not have to be a big effort – just compare people and non-people costs against your competition and similar size/ organized organizations. This will give you a good understanding on where you stay.
In addition to these two efforts, there are two analyzing tools that are close to my heart. Number one is about the HR employee as a human at work. As I have found out in my recent research study and what is supported by years and years of academic and popular research is that the perceived service quality of HR services (and again, this includes business partnering and centers of expertise) is dependent mostly on the individual HR employee and his/ her:
- will to perform
- ability to perform
- possibility to perform
and therefore, to find out not only about perceived satisfaction, but also be able to tie it back to specific objective insights and be able to increase satisfaction, survey all of your HR employees on these three categories. I guarantee you that the results will be very interesting and will help you with improving perceived satisfaction.
Last but not least, analyse and understand from a strategic point where you are good at and where you need to improve. Take all the results and insights you gained from the surveys and from the benchmarking and run a series fo HR SWOT workshops. With the different insights from leadership, management, 3rd party comparisons and deep understanding of how your HR team is ticking, you are able to really assess and improve your HR department starting at the strategic end.
Now, again, once you go through the steps, it seems actually not so difficult – but what is really difficult for most HR organizations is the feeling of being exposed to all employees and management. From a change perspective this is really tough and needs to be managed so that no harm is caused, but everyone within HR understands and accepts this as a fantastic opportunity to improve quality.
Whenever I have run similar efforts at my clients, the success was overwhelming. If you approach HR customer satisfaction in this all-inclusive, 360° way, you get more than just an idea how satisfied your clients are with your services. You get:
- a differentiated view from all important customer groups on satisfaction
- not only a satisfaction score, but sufficient insights to improve satisfaction
- senior leadership attention and buy-in which will help you not only in improving satisfaction, but across your whole portfolio of HR initiatives
I suggest you start today and ask your customers at all levels on all services about their satisfaction and what they are missing. I know that this is not an easy undergoing, but it is definitely worth it!
Chief HR Officer 