Dear readers,
apologies for a very quite summer on this blog. The bad news is that I was extremely busy – the good news is: with interesting stuff. So expect new and exciting PoVs and posts coming soon.
Thanks for sticking around.
Ambient HR – the next revolution of HR Technology
In today’s world, the challenges and requirements towards HR are manifold and changing on an almost daily basis: Customer expectations, our social and cultural environment, technology – everything is changing more fast paced than ever. And that of course has a big impact on companies well. HR has to find the right answers to this changing environment – of course. But today I would like to write about a very old topic that is still very much present in our daily business and HR lives: The actual connection between HR and the business – or in more concrete terms, the connection between the people or line managers (at all levels) and what HR has to offer them to support.
There are many different areas of potential connections of course, and one specific connection that is especially frustrating and truly very rarely working seamless. The administrative pieces of people manager work.
I believe we all as HR professionals understand and advocate for people managers to be the owner of the people relationships and people management – and this ownership means that they should manage their teams and employees end-to-end. This actual accountability is today not really a big debate anymore. It is understood and accepted – but the debate starts where the act of actual management of people, the conversations, decisions, recommendations have to be turned into action – the act of initiating a pay raise after the conversation with your employee, the act of initiating recruitment after you have reached agreement with your manager about that role. This is where it often gets clunky.
Of course, modern HR systems like Workday or SuccessFactors make it easier than ever before and also very often straight forward. But: As a people manager you still have to:
- Log-on to the system
- Find the right process/ action
- Understand what needs to be done
- Fill in all required information (hopefully you have them or know where/ how to find them)
- Send the request off… and wait
This does not feel right in today’s world. And this is where Ambient HR as an idea comes to live.
HR processes should only be there for two reasons:
(a) to support the business in what it needs to achieve
(b) to adhere to local legal regulations
(b) is something we cannot really change. But (a) is something where HR technology and processes need to seriously upgrade to toady’s technology possibilities. I imagine Ambient HR as a way to overlay the actual work that people managers are doing with the required HR actions. Let’s take the above cases.
A pay increase for example, should be initiated based on a conversation between people manager and employee. Ambient HR is connected to all systems people managers use in their daily work and so also to the calendar account. It notices that the people manager has set a career conversation with his/ her employee and automatically does two things:
(1) before the conversation happens, it pops up on the people managers computer and asks what this career conversation is about (e.g. new job, performance improvement, promotion, etc.) and based on the people manager’s choice, provides on the spot, just in time support (e.g. what needs to be taken into consideration, how the process works, how long it takes, what exactly needs to be done by the people manager – all in context of the employee the manager is seeing) and recommendation (e.g. how high a pay raise could maximum be).
(2) after the conversation, the people manager receives the next pop-up window, asking for action with a pre-completed form based on the employee the manager has seen as well as the choices the people manager took in the first step (e.g. it is a promotion conversation). The manager just has to review and send off. All work done.
With such an integration, the administrative part for the people manager’ job to set in action what he/ she has discussed or decided to do becomes a simple, not time consuming and effective process. And similar integrations are possible with other systems at work like Time & Attendance, like your Sales System, etc. – and because of AI, contextual information and actions are easy to realise – it is like Google Now for work. Ambient HR is immersive in your day-to-day activities, not a nasty add-on, but an integral part of how you work – you don’t have to remember what, when how – it will tell you. And it will learn throughout your work day to be better every time it supports you.
Of course, you need to trust this system as it has access to all your data – but hey, you trust Google or Amazon or Facebook at home with your private data and at work such a system already houses your most sensitive data: people data. So why shouldn’t you trust it to listen in to your daily activities as a people manager?
Ambient HR is the future of HR Technology and it needs to start today.
Digitalisation of the workplace – further differentiating our workforce…and society
The future is bright and shiny – AI, RPA, IoT will make our lives easier and will help us getting into a more balanced way of work and life. – does that sound familiar? Right! The same claims were made with the introduction of computers into our (work-) lives and later with the online economy. And what was the result of both? – you know it: even more work and less freedom for those who still had a job – and an even more growing number of people w/o jobs. Sure, each revolution has also created new jobs – but not for everyone. Each revolution created jobs for a smaller and smaller talent pool. Why? – the skills, the requirements, the capacity one needed to have to fulfill these new jobs were more and more difficult to have or build. Many employees were just not able anymore to learn these new skills or to even think in the new categories that these new business models required.
At first – during the early revolutions, this was dealt with by early retirements – but this gets more and more difficult as employees need to work longer to be able to have a life as retirees, as well as there is a growing number of middle-aged employees too far away from retirement that cannot meet the requirements.
Don’t get me wrong – I am all in for the digitalisation of the workplace. I am a big fan of digitalisation and the chances it opens up at the workplace (and in private lives). But we need to change the way we handle the implementation of such revolutions.
In the past, businesses, the econcomy as a whole had always the same reaction: “Way we work”-revolutions led to new employees that can fulfill the demands of faster and more (let’s face it – besides many great outcomes, the recurring theme is that with each new revolution, workload increased, turn-around times decreased) while many old employees were squeezed out (and old not necessarily being used for age, but for long-standing). Companies used the easy way out. The pool was big enough and the outcry of the ones squeezed out was sufficiently small. Now, my thesis is that we are reaching an inflection point where this way of working – the way we actually do business is coming to an end.
Let me tell you why:
(1) More and more western countries are starting to have social uproars, to a great extent due to rising unemployment and increased social jealousy – the haves and the have-nots
(2) Even the part of the population that still has a job (the “Haves”) is struggling – struggling because of workload, increasing speed and required new skills.
(3) Job related illnesses that are psychological/ mental nature are raising and have surpassed physical illnesses (see here). Psychological triggered missed-work-days are having a higher negative impact in companies than physical triggered missed-days.
The next revolution of digitilization is quickly approaching and the populare opinion on what needs to happen is the usual: work faster, build up new skills. Problem is: Humans are NOT bots, cannot just as easily be reprogrammed or get a new, father processor. As after each work-revolution there will be loosers – just that this time I am afraid the added loosers will bring the system to the tilting point. The part of the workforce that will still be able to follow and be the winners of each revolution will be too small to stabilize the system – a system where the average age of employees in western countries is rising. And with rising age, adaptability and speed are decreasing – this is fact. Another key message from last years INSEAD “The Global Talent Competitiveness Index” reads “Low-skilled workers continue to be replaced by robots, while knowledge workers are displaced by algorithms” (see here for the detailed analysis of our global workforce). – another group of losers. Also, just look in many of today’s boardrooms (and let’s leave the Silicon Valley out for a moment) – how many boardmembers are truly immersed in today’s ways of working? Social Collaboration, Social Media, “Appinization” – these are for many of them interesting concepts, but that is it. There is still a very large number of senior leaders that ask there assistants to “print their emails” so that they can “reply”. And they are supposed to lead us into the next revolution? – but this is a different story for a different post…
My statement is that we need to drastically change the way we do business from “employees that serve the company” to “companies that serve the society”. The solution is not to stop the future (although this is currently very much a popular theme in Trump-America), the solution is though to actively shape the future in a way that it serves society – and I mean each and every member of it. And not how we did it in recent industrial-revolutions: In a way that it serves the Shareholder alone. We must understand this now – or we will face the consequences of the path we are on – and although I am repeating myself, the signs are more evident than ever: Brexit, Trump-America, Alt-Right and other popular extremists on the rise.
The societal impact: Shared Services 4.0
One of the big themes and big discussions today is Industry 4.0 – what is meant is the next industrial revolution via IoT (Internet of Things) and further integration, communication and automation of machines. You can read more about it here. It will for sure have another big impact on worklife, culture and society.
What I would like to talk about today though is Shared Services 4.0 – which I believe is going down a similar route like Industry 4.0 – and therefore the same naming convention 😉
Shared Services 1.0 – 3.0
When you think about Shared Services from its origins in the early 90ies till now, it was about the following themes:
- Process standardization
- Process rationalization
- Self-services
- Near- or off-shoring of work
And subsequent near- or off-shoring of jobs. Because of Shared Services, many former colleagues in HR (or in any other (back-office) function) have lost their job, were in need to find a new job. Some of these colleagues had luck and found a new job – some of them for longer, many of them for short periods only. Why that? – quite frankly it was not one company that implemented Shared Services, but many – and with it 10.000s of jobs, all the same kind of jobs were near- or offshored. And only some former employees of these jobs understood it right and found their work-future in upskilling towards jobs that could not (at least for a period of time) get near- or offshored. A big majority though did either not understand that “rule” of life-long learning or – and no offense – were not capable to perform the next higher-level job. These former colleagues have lost contact and access to their job market – they are the lost people of globalization, being not unhappy anymore, but angry – don’t see any perspective other than turning back time. And as we all know, you actually cannot turn time back (at least not yet ;)) – and even if, there are sufficient people that don’t want to do that. In any case though, there are winners and lost people that now rather fight against each other than try to repair what has been damaged for the greater good of all.
If you think in broader terms though and at a global scale, you must admit that the majority of the jobs were not made redundant, they were just relocated. And so, the Shared Service economy has born new winners – countries like India, Costa Rica, the Philippines, a big portion of the Eastern European countries have “received” 1000s of jobs and with it managed to catch up with western countries, created new middle classes and brought young people into great starting jobs – with big potential for international careers.
Shared Services 4.0
The new waves of innovation and thinking in the shared services industry though will have different effects. Nothing will really change with the losers of the first waves – except that the distance between their knowledge and capabilities and the job requirements is growing. It is more and more unlikely that these former colleagues find a new job similar to their old one – they either stay unemployed or go for 2-3 parttime jobs which still cannot feed their family at home.
What is worse though is that the winners of waves 1.0-3.0 will turn into losers as well. – and the upskiled colleagues from the first rounds will lose their jobs, too. RPA and AI are the keywords.
Robot Process Automation (RPA) will slowly but surely eat away the lower qualified jobs in Shared Service Centers. Robots are getting sufficiently smart to execute without break, without mistake most of the standardized work within centers. Recent studies show that by now 80% and more of standardized work can be transfered to bots. And in turn, 80% of new colleagues will lose their jobs.
But it does not stop with RPA – AI, the next evolution is already on its way. Today mostly too expensive to replace low-cost country colleagues, but tomorrow (and it is almost literally tomorrow) this will change and not only standardized work will get automated but even more complex work where situational assessment and decision making are required. I know that most of the readers cannot wait to have AI in their life – me, too – but in their private lives, not at work. At work, this will lead to the next “let go” of colleagues – now though again in both western countries as well as low-cost countries. New losers of globalization are created.
Of course, this is great for the bottom-line of a company’s balance sheet and maybe for its Shareholders. But what about the rest of the country? rest of the world? – it will only further grow the difference and distance between the “haves” and “have nots” and it will further spur societal conflicts that are already on the horizon – or already in our lives like Trump and Brexit.
It is on us to change this, it is on us to make sure that we take everyone with us on that journey. Again, it is not the solution to stop time, but it is time to stop spreading the difference between winners and losers, generating more losers than winners. It is on us – we in HR are the ones closest to our workforces. We need to listen and come up with a plan.
That time of the year (again)- Performance Management (still)
Yes, that time of the year again – no, I am not talking Christmas or New Years. I am talking Performance Management – it is the time of the year again where thousands of companies demotivate their staff by still holding on to an antiquated process that – and this is a fact – just does not what it is supposed to do (or what it is named). Performance Management you would think is about managing performance of employees towards joined goals and to motivate them to bring out the best in them. However, still way too many companies are holding on to the outdated process of: Objective setting – Mid-year Review – Calibration – Year-end Review and send their employees off for a demotivated Christmas. Is your company doing the same? How do you feel after your review? – check out this post
Technology Disruption in the workplace – the societal impact
In the aftermath of the US elections, but also seeing what is happening in other countries like Germany, France, Italy, Hungary, the UK, I believe that we need to reflect on what we as Human Resources Practitioners are doing every day in our workplaces and what the effects are (supporting business reorganizations, restructurings, outsourcing, as well as our own HR outsourcing or low-cost job placement, automation, etc.). I don’t believe that anyone should now complain about a single election outcome in the US or of raising right-wing parties in European countries or of Brexit. Are we and can we really be surprised about that? – maybe if we have lived in our own bubbles for the last few years, but not truly when we think about what we in HR have done, supported, paved the way for in the last years: In essence, more and more lower qualified jobs have become obsolete or moved to low-cost countries. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to say that we have done things wrong or are the sole cause of what has happened in society – and I don’t believe that we need to justify what we have done. I believe we had sufficient supportive reasons for it. However, I believe that we are an integral part of the picture – and can and need support making it right again.
Now, what I want to say is that we probably have not looked at the societal impact of what we were doing. I strongly believe that we are splitting the workforce every day. Splitting it into the ones that can participate and the ones that can’t or are even ousted. Technology is a great enabler of our every day life – also at work. It is though also an instrument to split the workforce.
Let’s take the rise of the computer as one example with which the current revolution started – slowly at first, but now more rapid than ever. With the “normal” PC coming into the workplace, more and more activities could be dealt with via Computer – and you did not need an employee for it anymore. The normal computer has taken workplaces and transformed employees into unemployment.
But it is not only about “losing” your job. Let’s take Social Collaboration as another example – Social Collaboration is how we get things done at work now, or at least when we are young and grew up with it. But what does Social Collaboration do to Baby Boomers or Generation X colleagues? – No offence, but they are truly used to different ways of working and have a hard time to adjust, if they can. Social Collaboration can in fact alienate from the workplace. If you cannot participate, you are separated and slowly lose touch with your workplace, with your work.
And there are many more of these examples where I believe that for good reasons, we in HR changed the way our company operates, but maybe did not always think about the colleagues that we leave behind. And after all, I believe that being left behind at work or even losing your job is one of the main impacts or factors that places people on the losing side of Globalisation. It is explainable – it is man-made, and now we should not complain that these former colleagues or still colleagues that have lost touch and connection are unhappy and protesting. Inclusiveness at work is not only about the usual topics, it is also about technology.
BUT, in the same way we moved these colleagues to the other side, we can and should and need to move them back onto the winning side. This is the only way to keep us all together as a strong society where everyone can participate. This is the way civilised societies deal with these kind of things. It should not be about who screams louder or who is stronger – the elite (and yes, this is us) the elite needs to be the smart party here and needs to start listening and acting. Further separation and ousting of colleagues does only further nurture the fire that is burning. Globalisation, the way we live today, the way we work today, how small the world is, what we have achieved is worth fighting for – and we should fight for it. Just not in the way that these right-wing parties are doing it, not in a way that further alienates and makes people aggressive. But in a way that brings people together again – and this needs to start at the workplace. And we as HR are the ones that are responsible for the culture at the workplace, for how we work and for how we create inclusiveness.
And with this, I will start a new series of posts around how technology has shaped our workplaces in the recent years and future years to come and what the impact on workplace culture and society have been and might be. This is a topic that I believe needs more attention and explanation as it has such a big impact on our every day lives. And only when we understand, we can change something, and we can get back on a path of an inclusive society.
We are too complex: Simplify and cut it out
In one of my earlier posts (actually from quite a while ago already), I have laid out how complex HR has become and what kind of different asks, topics, areas of responsibility came into HR and bloated this function. It is massive and not everything that was placed into HR belongs into HR – but that is a story I have already written. Today I want to focus on a different issue with a similar outcome – topics and responsibilities that HR decided to take on, decided it needs to take on.
How many HR policies do you have in your organization? How long do you need to read through all of them? – or what can you do without asking HR for permission today as a people manager? I guess not much? I just recently had a conversation with some of the leading HR SaaS vendors and what they call leading processes. These leading processes are still a self-fulfilling prophecy about what HR wants to hear, wants to do and believes is responsible for instead of rethinking people processes and transforming them in to the 21st century.
Let me give you an example: Organization Management. Leading practice is supposed to still be that an HR Business Partner or similar checks and approves a new position that a manager creates. How can that be? – why is HR involved in this process in any other way than the pure back-office to make sure that all next steps are triggered correctly? Why does HR believes it owns the people costs? Does in your organization Finance approve every expense that a manager has? Does Finance own the money of the company – or do they manage it only?
I strongly believe that although we have transformed HR probably more than any other function (this topic is going on since 1997 when Dave Ulrich started all of this) in the recent years, we did not truly change anything:
- We have implemented Shared Service Centers to take on the back-office – but we did not revolutionize the back-office processes itself…
- We have installed self-services “to empower people manager” – but in the end we just ask them to do the admin work of completing forms…
- We have done away with HR Generalists and installed HR Business Partners – but in the end we just renamed them, did not change the what, how and why of their work
- We have saved millions of $ in the HR function – but today less HR people do more work and we still did not truly enable the main part of this Transformation Business Case which is the workforce
Of course, my above statements are not true to 100% of the companies and HR functions out there, but I am sure that at least two statements are true for the majority of HR departments. So what are we doing now? – is this what companies want and need? Is this what employees and people managers want and need?
Ok, let’s not really ask the “want” part of the questions, and focus on the “need”. We as HR need to scrutinize each and every HR process and have to ask us two questions:
- Does that HR process and/ or policy add any value to the company or the workforce? – and if the answer is no, just stop it, cut it out
- If the answer is yes, ask the question: Does the way we execute this process differentiate us from our competition? – and if the answer is no, just cut it out and ask a specialized best of breed vendor to take it on for you
And everything that is then still left in HR and in your company: Simplify, streamline and ask what HR’s value add in that process is. I tell you, most processes will just run fine without HR interference. I am myself an HR Pro and I believe that sometimes we take us and our function to serious and important. Let’s jointly cut it out and simplify our, our colleagues’ and the whole company’s life every day. Let’s be only where we need to be, not where we want to be.
Why the HR structure is industry agnostic but not time agnostic
Every company’s HR Function needs to look different, needs to be composed of different building blocks – and this is even more true when you have different industries: An HR Function for a major Retailer should be based on different building blocks than the one for a Financial Services company. This is what Consulting firms tell us and this is what we see out there – therefore, it is right.
Is that so? I see that different. The general concept of the HR Organization can always be the same. Every company needs the same foundational building blocks:
- Talent Management
- HR related Business Consulting
- HR Specialists
- HR Admin
And any company that does not see the need for any of these is definitely missing something. Now, don’t get me wrong – I don’t say that every HR Function should look the same. I am just saying that actually the differences needed are not based on industry or country or workforce – but based on firm and HR maturity.
To get the basics out-of-the-way: The way how you fulfill these 4 foundational building blocks can be very different – you can outsource, you can consolidate them into unified roles if size does not allow for separate roles, you can have contractors supporting you, etc. – but you will always have all four foundational building blocks. If not, than you miss out or… and this is where my point is coming…or you are at a different state of maturity. What does that mean? The HR function is evolving since its beginning and there is still no end to see to it – where HR will be in 10 years from now or even in 5 years from now is a very interesting question. Only thing sure is that it will look very different from today. HR is still no stable function, no commodity, but still finding its purpose and its direction, defining where it should play and where it shouldn’t. This is all influenced by many different topics like workforce expectations, regulations, management needs, etc.
HR does not stand still and won’t – and any differences that there are between HR Functions of different firms are not based on industry or size, but on maturity of both the HR Function and the firm itself. HR is 100% a support function and needs to support whatever the firm needs to be successful, and only the firm itself knows what it needs – there is no personalized model per industry or country or workforce, but there is a basic model which needs to be adjusted to the needs and maturity of a company. What is right and fitting perfect today, is wrong and too tight or too loose tomorrow. Don’t go into the trap of “if my competitor is doing it way A, I need to do it way A” – look inside your company only and listen what is needed, what is wanted – and use this to shape your HR organization, every day.
HRIT: Are we still converging or already exploding?
I have recently spoken about HRIT and SaaS already but now I feel that there is still much more to that topic than I have written before. When you think about HRIT and SaaS I believe that at least 90% of you are thinking Workday or SuccessFactors. That is my experience. Also, when you speak to consultants, this is what you get as an answer – take Workday or SuccessFactors, maybe Oracle Fusion. But that’s it. But if I look into the history of not only HRIT, but also consumer technology I must wonder if this still is the right answer. In addition, the clearness of consulting advice you get towards these two/ three solutions makes me cautious.
Think about consumer tech. Since the Apple iPhone introduction which is celebrating its 10 year anniversary next year (yes, time flies, and also yes – 10 years ago there were no real smartphones!), we are on a path of convergence. Most of our technology, most of our daily tech interaction is with the iPhone or any other smartphone for that matter:
- Consumer grade cameras and also video cameras are or have been replaced by the phone
- The Walkman, Discman, MP3 player as a separate device has disappeared and was replaced by the phone
- Your landline phone has disappeared
- You are utilizing your computer much less for internet browsing or similar
- Your TV or home Hi Fi system remote controls have merged into the Phone
- There is an App for everything
- and more and more and more
In essence, the phone was becoming (and still is) the monolithic device that steers our lives and that we would probably miss most if we lost it. However, this trend is rapidly changing. The App industry is going down, phones now are turning modular (see here or here) or are enriched with additional, separate tech tools. The consumer tech industry is bringing back gadgets, Apps are no longer a lasting business model (except for the global big players). After 10 years of convergence, the phone is exploding and bringing back gadgets that are not multi-purpose, but specialized, that are not ok to use, but the best for a specific use-case.
And now think about the history of HR tech. The real HR tech started truly with systems like SAP HCM or (Oracle) PeopleSoft. These systems started out as “better” payrolls and converged into monolithic HCM suites for any use-case of data admin, payroll, recruiting, performance management, self-service, etc. But at some point in the years of 2000 (more towards the middle and end), these monoliths were “exploding” and the newest trend in HR tech was “best-of-breed”. You did still use your HCM monolith, but only for some core applications and only because it was the knot that hold everything together. But you mainly worked in specialized Apps for Learning, Performance Management, Recruiting, etc.
Today, it seems like we are again for a long time – at least for the last 5-6 years – back with monolithic systems. It is just that they are called different now (SuccessFactors, Workday, Fusion). But why should we be at any different point than consumer tech today or HR tech 10 years ago? – I actually believe that we are even closer to the explosion in HR tech than in consumer tech. Why so? – we are at the perfect storm of two catalysts joining up:
- HR significantly evolving and repurposing important topics like engagement, performance, compensation, succession, learning
- Tech significantly evolving with a multitude of start-ups that are now no longer consumer focussed, but B2B focused like tinypulse.com or everwise.com
This perfect storm will bring up the question of how the new monoliths can integrate with best-of-breed, and that at a faster pace and probably not with standardized interfaces to connect and exchange data. It will bring up the question of how we should think and prepare for that future – today.
Trade-off – Efficiency and Effectiveness: Do we have the right focus?
In my last post I pleaded that HR for once should stay ahead of the curve and not blindly follow any trends. I am still 100% behind that and would like to support it today with some additional thoughts: The trade-off or conflict between being efficient and effective.
As an HR Consultant there is one slide that is one of the most important when it comes to making the case for change/ making the case for an HR Transformation. It might look different from consultancy to consultancy, but each and every HR consultant has that in the back pocket with the same message. The pyramid or small square in a big square – the message that the true value of an HR Transformation is not really in HR, but in the workforce, realized by easier HR interactions, faster HR transactions. Don’t get me wrong, I still believe in that slide – have used it myself multiple times. But have also seen multiple times that the consequences of this slide were not taken when actually transforming HR. And this is the target conflict, the trade-off between efficiency and effectiveness – not in HR, but in transforming HR.
Why is that so? – when designing a new HR Organization, companies and consultancies tend to design it as lean as possible, as specialized as possible and as rigid as possible – with global standardization, global technology, global processes, etc. – and all of this is necessary for a lean and efficient HR organisation. But what about effectiveness? Yes – the CoEs will be designed with a bit of slack so that they can drive HR effectiveness and all is well. But is that so?
Coming back to the original “slide” that I was referring to: The real deal, the real business case is outside of HR which in turn means that we need to make sure with every HR Transformation that this part of the company, the overall workforce, the business stays effective! This is the effectiveness that we should watch out for, this is the actual conflict and trade-off we need to discuss and align. Because lean HR in 9 out of 10 cases means:
- Standardized processes with one size fits all – no special treatment of any business unit or employee group, regardless if it is needed or not
- Self-service for initiating any people related transaction
- but also self-service for employee or manager education on HR policies and procedures
And of course, this is necessary and completely normal for transformed HR organizations with Shared Services. Some are even more rigid and only allow self-services – no personal case resolution or handling or intake anymore. The people manager or employee has to fit into the pattern of self-service possibilities and policies published. If not, too bad.
The question is: Is that the right approach? – sure, this is the right approach if you want lean HR. But it is not the right approach if you want to achieve the complete business case of an HR transformation. Don’t get me wrong – I am not against self-services or publishing of policies. But what happens in many cases is that this is focused on HR and not on the consumer of the service. Companies are slowly understanding this. In fact, I had a conversation last week about self-services vs. telephony support for employees and managers. A company has changed its approach on how to take requests in – from a focus on self-services, short call turnaround times and mass-handling to an open menu for the employee or people manager: Take the contact method that you feel best fit for you for your specific case today. – result was that significantly more calls were coming in to HR now than before and that call handling times have almost doubled. But employees/ people managers came less often for the same request – could receive a satisfying answer and action earlier. In total, employees and people managers had to spend less time searching for the right answer to a complex case/ question online before starting a self-service request which triggered multiple back and forth between HR and the requestor due to incomplete information, misunderstanding, etc. They now had the chance to call in immediately for complex cases and got help through a conversation (another change) rather than scripted call handling, which was much more effective for the requestor. Now it seems that this would be less efficient for HR – but preliminary results show that the total handling time of a single request was reduced due to less back and forth and having all necessary information. Let’s see how that plays out in the long-run.
At the end it seems that there maybe isn’t even a target conflict, but we will only find out if we not only during the business case, but also when designing and implementing the transformed organization, processes and systems focus on the holistic picture and the company as a whole, not only HR. And in coming back to my plead of the previous post: Don’t go all digital, allow for analog conversations to happen in real-time (sure, it does not need to be phone, can be chat as well – but let’s face it we as humans are much more efficient in telling our case/ issue/ request than writing it) and make these human interactions with a conversation – not scripted – to achieve best outcome.
Chief HR Officer 