HRExecutive recently posted an article on ‘3 essential strategies to win the war for talent’. It is an interesting take on winning the war on talent. One of the key items mentioned is to automate labor-intensive HR tasks and activities.
HR has been working on this one forever! The key is to crawl before you run. And the action plan is to know what you currently pay for with your current HR technology vendor and figure out how to use it asap!
Yes, there is more technology than ever. HR Tech is a multibillion-dollar industry. There is a vendor for every spot in the candidate to retiree journey. You could spend your life evaluating, selecting, and implementing technology only to fail to gain the functionality you were pursuing. Literature indicates that approximately 70% of IT projects fail. No blame but no gain.
Now for something completely different! The best way to automate labor intensive HR tasks is:
Define your most time-consuming processes
-
- Ask your HR team, managers and employees what they find as time and pain points
- Look at the numbers – time to hire, interviews per req, reqs per recruiter, reqs per manager, turnover per manager, system usage time per HR employee by level/title, audit reports on changes to records in the systems and more
Look at the technology you own
-
-
- Review contracts and what is included
- Bring in your vendors customer success manager or enterprise resource manager for a thorough review of what you have and what you use
- Ask the vendor or a third party to do a functionality utilization review for or with you
- Ask the vendor to do a demo for you and your team of the latest and greatest functionality with the products
- Ask you internal subject matter experts what they use, don’t use or don’t know
- Look at the past upgrades to the software and evaluate what might be turned on or off (most upgrades are delivered turned off and someone at the company has to turn it on to use it)
-
Make a plan to close the gap between what you pay for and what you use
-
-
-
- Start small and be successful in making a change and then move on to larger impact items
- Work with the vendor to figure out the timeline and resources needed – negotiate how they can provide resources to support this effort as, potentially, it was something from the original implementation that did not get done
- Assure your people that this is not a headcount reduction project
- Reward your people for making progress
- Engage a third party to manage the project to make sure things do not slip through the cracks again
-
-
Success Launching Software from the shelf!
We worked successfully with a small healthcare organization to fully launch their scheduling application. They had been paying for the software for 4 years but had never used. They were able to communicate to employees on schedules better, fill shifts more quickly and without phone calls, and make employees happier with flexibility and by allowing them to have more control of their schedule. Reducing overtime and admin time to fill schedules while helping employee to become more engaged in their work.
Use what you pay for
Implementing functionality in software that you already paid for is a great way to spent less and utilize more. Most vendors want you to stay with them and continue to pay the monthly per employee fee. Encourage them to help you get more out of what you already have. They will probably be interested!
This is a real-world way to automate labor-intensive HR tasks and activities with low cost and high impact!
And here is the HRExecutive article for other ideas! Contact Morris@HRComputes.com for more info!