Employee Relationship Management

I have started my train of thought in my last post referencing that we might need to reconsider what HR stands for and how we as HR best support the success of our companies. I believe we need to take a bit of a sharp turn. In recent years we have reduced our headcount and the higher the ratio of employees to HR was, the better it was – as it meant lower costs for the overall company. But this is not really where the value of HR lies. We are a back-office function, but one that needs to be more than just „service and forget“.

Understanding Marcus Buckinghams‘s research, we have a much higher share in achieving engagement and retention than what we give ourselves credit for. Employees demand us – and not really for solving their specific small administration issues – but for trust, as coach and as partner. Not only senior management, but every employee.

Now, how do we do this? – as I wrote, I don‘t think that the solution is to get back into the HR generalist ancient times, but we need to listen to our employees and the needs they have. Not because we are „Human“ Resources and it is expected, but to make sure our companies can perform and grow. Trust in HR is according to research a very important aspect of an engaged employee. This builds the business case and clearly lays out that HR needs to be more than a pure anonymous service function.

The idea of Employee Relationship Management (ERM)

But how do we do this? How can we be such a partner and coach to employees without going back to the HR generalist times? And how can we build a business case that makes economic sense and delivers more value than it costs? – my answer is Employee Relationship Management. We need to build out a new process of Employee Relationship Management.

Despite the naming, this process would not be a mirror of Customer Relationship Management, but with a similar intent. We would treat our employees as individuals that we need to serve and keep as engaged members of our organization. We don‘t want to sell them anything but we want to make sure they feel that they get from this relationship everything they came for while making sure that they stay engaged and committed to the company’s purpose and goals. It is proactive engagement management. And this can‘t be a telephone number or a chat or an AI – this needs to be a human connection and relation that we need to build. The basic idea is that this human connection would provide a trusted partner to the employee, taking care of the employee and its requirements of (career) development, connection and point of contact for this employee in case of any issues or concerns.

It is though not anything that should be seen as transactional or as rolling back self-services. Only an organized and structured self service offering will enable the financial playing field to make such ERM happen. 

The structure of ERM

So how would this look like? – It is despite the rolling back metaphors actually the next evolution of the shared service model. If you want to build such support in today‘s environment you need to make it human and efficient at the same time. It needs to be built with scale in mind. Therefore, I would not roll back anything you have in your GBS environment and continue heavily with self service and automation – and at the same time take a hard turn.

Build up an infrastructure for an Employee Relationship Management system that can hold all relevant information about your employees from career aspirations, specific future thoughts and coaching needs – similar like a CRM, but more of a Talent Management System on drugs. Next, transform your Tier 1 Service into one area that continues to take regular service calls in case self service doesn‘t work – and a second area that is actually significantly more senior, but also with language capabilities and on top with coaching capabilities. These Employee Relationship Managers will proactively reach out to their population to have check ins, coaching sessions, career conversations – to support the People Manager but also as a trusted partner for the employee that stays with the employee throughout its company-journey. 

This is of course only a rough draft of how I am envisioning the future model and I will provide more details in one of my next posts. But what do you think about ERM? Do you have something like this already in place? Have you considered it? Or do you feel that it is not adding any value?