efficiency through hr-technology by Anna Pikhota

A directorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s guide Gaining efficiency through HR technology An information guide

consulting | software | solutions www.selecthr.co.uk www.theaccessgroup.com

Introduction The evolution of HR HR’s remit has changed a lot since yesteryear. While some HR managers are still expected to hire, fire, even offer tea and sympathy, most are predominantly focused on becoming business partners, pushing strategy, not paper. As HR has evolved from satellite function to central hub, HR solutions have evolved apace. The best HR software no longer operates separately from the daily running of the business but is strategically aligned with it. Greater visibility Today’s solutions – often referred to as HRIS (Human Resources Information Systems) are designed to give you visibility of every area of your organisation. Utilising the latest technology, they provide you with the accurate and timely information you need to lower costs and improve employee return on investment. And while you may know a fair bit about HRIS systems, it’s often a struggle to command stakeholder interest. This paper is designed to demonstrate how you can do just that.

About this guide

2. Signs you’ve outgrown your existing software

• Identifying the factors

• Identifying the impact

3. How to select a new HR solution

• The research process

• Partnering

• Choose your project team

• Choosing the technology

• Requesting a demo

4. Implementation

• Key stages

1. Key functions Legislation & compliance From the introduction of the ‘fit note’ to the knock-on tax and salary effects of anticipated public spending cuts, managing compliance in 2010 looks no less complex than in previous years. Indeed, the risk associated with managing increasingly complex legislation is a key concern for many organisations. Most regulations involve significant reporting requirements – mistakes could lead to penalties, fines, and at worse, lawsuits – all of which have time and cost implications.

This guide is split into four key areas: 1. Key functions p1 How today’s integrated solutions can help you better manage key areas of your organisation. Includes checklists to help you identify the functions of your ideal system. • Legislation & compliance

• Recruitment & selection

• Learning & development

• HR reporting

• Business intelligence

• Self-service

• Payroll

• Document management

• Health & safety

• Absence

The good news is that today’s HR solutions are designed to make keeping on top of your company’s legal obligations as straightforward as possible. Good vendors will keep you informed of changes in tax and employment law so you can determine what applies to your organisation. Software releases More importantly, they will release versions of the software that enable you to easily gather the information required for reporting. Most systems cover standard procedures, so finding the functionality you need shouldn’t be too difficult – but make sure that updates are supplied to you regularly and in a straightforward format, for example, downloadable via the internet or email.

While this list is not exhaustive, the following gives you an idea of important legislation that may be relevant to your organisation: • ISA Registration (Independent Safeguarding Authority – replaces CRM) • Immigration and Asylum • Fit Note • Maternity • Paternity • SIR (Further Education sector)

Recruitment & selection Hiring is back on the agenda for most organisations. Yet as you’ve probably experienced yourself, the fierce competition for places doesn’t make recruiting any easier. Compound the current job market with the complexities of the recruitment process – typically involving many stakeholders and far too much paperwork – and it’s no wonder that recruitment is often the most costly process within HR itself. Workflow and automation But it doesn’t have to be so. Today’s HR systems optimise the end-to-end recruitment procedure by automating the workflow around each stage of the process. By decreasing the time taken to get positions ‘out there’, and by making it easier for applicants to apply and recruiters to respond, you get to focus on the key attributes of the applicants and which recruitment methods yield the best results. A recruitment solution should fit with your organisation, whether responsibility is largely HR-owned or devolved to managers. In other words, it should enable all participants to interact with the software at the relevant stages of the process – and that goes for recruitment agencies and applicants too. Online recruitment Whether using agencies or not, an important consideration is the ability to advertise (and accept CVs) online. This not only enables you to attract the broadest audience, but reduces admin, cuts paper waste and ensures you can provide the fastest possible response to potential talent.

©Access 2010. E&OE. Version 1

Good HR software will enable you to:

• Training course administration

• Create vacancies

• Online booking

• Manage the hire process

• Ability to cater for CPD membership

• Enable applicants to apply online

• Integration with Microsoft Office (for diarising)

• Provide web access for agencies • Monitor success, costs and equal opportunities • Generate bulk correspondence by post or email • Advertise/retain details of speculative candidates

Learning & development Even in a period of economic recovery, there are compelling reasons to provide quality staff training – not least because your best talent will steer you through times of difficulty. If you are unable to provide the level of training they expect, then they’re likely to look elsewhere – a fact supported by the 2009 National Management Survey which found that 46% of staff blame a lack of training opportunities as a reason for leaving their organisation.1 Equally, you want to be sure that the training you’re providing your employees is strategically aligned with your business objectives. Some organisations for example provide free training on the basis that the member of staff stays with the company for a specified time period. Managing overlap The key to managing this effectively is choosing a HR system that gives you visibility of the linked areas of training, learning & development and performance management. As these areas impact each other, you can then see where the skills gaps are, closely monitor activities undertaken and maximise your knowledge of your employees’ abilities. A good HR system will give you detailed analysis of costs, attendance and effectiveness, all of which will help ensure you gain maximum ROI per employee. Some of the key learning & development functionality to look for includes:

©Access 2010. E&OE. Version 1

• Online appraisals (including competency models) • NVQs • Skills search and management

HR reporting According to a survey by talent management company Taleo, providing leadership with better management information and reporting is one of the top three-ranked challenges for HR professionals in 2010.2 The first step to efficient, pain-free reporting is having a system that holds all employee information in one place. This not only saves significant time pulling information from separate sources but ensures the information you’re analysing is accurate. Any system should give you complete visibility and straightforward analysis of all the following: • Personnel details (including diversity, work permits and employment checks)

Business intelligence One of the key drivers behind today’s generation of HR software is to deliver timely, accurate information when and where it’s needed. Closely related to reporting but going beyond it, Business intelligence takes many forms including Excel based add-ins, user-friendly report writers and most recently, web-based dashboards. Dashboards draw information held in your wider HR system and present specific KPIs such as headcount, turnover, training needs and recruitment analysis. The ability to drill-down into the source data ensures that decision-makers can quickly spot any issues and get to the root of any problems quickly. See what you need to The power of this type of reporting lies in its configurability and ease of use. For example, a good system would have the ability to provide different dashboard views to you, your HR team, your staff and management, all presented in graphical formats and updated in real-time. The following gives you an idea of the functionality to look out for: • User-configurable views • Real-time information

• Job and salary history (including multiple jobs, salary scales and bands)

• Information delivered via a range of graphical formats (charts, gauges, listings, rolling presentations etc)

• Employment details (including exit interviews and Ts & Cs)

• Ability for dashboards to incorporate information from external sources (e.g. RSS feeds)

• Disciplinary and grievance (including stage tracking and documents) • Skills and competencies (linked to training and appraisals) • Absence and holidays (including work patterns, LOS, part-time calculations) • Health & safety (including accident reporting and medicals) • Benefits, pension, fleet management, P11D • Salary modelling • Organisational structure (e.g. by employee, department and division, headcounts and turnover).

Self-service Over the last few years, demand for self-service functionality has grown significantly – understandably, given its ability to help organisations do far more with less. Self-service works primarily by saving time. It takes information held in your business system and makes it easily available, both to view or to edit – typically via a web browser for anytime access. Useful for both staff and managers, self-service can be deployed across your organisation and can be made to fit with your existing ways of working, for example, as an extension of your company intranet.

Manager self-service Manager self-service cuts down the time taken to carry out administration such as approving staff holiday, timesheets and training requests. It can also show this information via easy-grasp formats, enabling managers to view KPIs relating to their department’s turnover, sickness, headcount or budget spend. Self-service for staff For employees, self-service reduces administration within the HR department, dispersing tasks out into the wider organisation. For example, this would enable your staff to enter their own training requests, self-certification forms and holiday bookings. With the responsibility for entering information into self-service lying with the employee and not HR, it’s easy to see how self-service can speed the flow of accurate information into the system. What’s more, the ability to access information that’s important to staff such as payslips, P60s, holiday, training, and appraisals, is a powerful way to improve communication and empower employees. Good software providers will provide a wide range of self-service specific processes. However, some of the most common ones include: • Holiday/planned absence requests and authorisation

Seamless data transfer Payroll systems obviously vary but the good HR providers will enable this information to be transferred seamlessly between the two areas of the business. This stands whether the payroll is held in a separate software package or via an electronic interface with a payroll bureau. Integrating with a payroll from the same product family as your HR solution has the advantage of linking dynamically, including for example, a full workflow for the authorisation and update of HR information to the payroll. For advice on selecting a payroll solution, click here. Just some of the information you should be able to share with payroll include: • New starter/leaver information • Employee names and addresses • Job/organisation details • Bank and salary details

Document management From training documents to CVs, spreadsheets to correspondence, HR is packed with documents, paper-based and otherwise. As your business grows, the ability to store these documents centrally is therefore key to the overall efficiency of your operation. This not only reduces paper and waste, but enables fast retrieval, however many employees you have.

• Training requests and authorisation • Online appraisals • Sickness self-certification • Vacancy requests and authorisation • Timesheets

Payroll One of the key drivers in HR software is the ability to share common information with other departments – payroll in particular. Aligning these two systems will smooth out spikes of work associated with, for example, the ‘onboarding’ of new starters and updates to employee information, reducing duplication and improving accuracy.

Some of the functions to look for include: • Ability to support all standard file types (e.g. PDF, Word, Excel and image files, as well as scanned hard copy documents) • Ability to locate documents by individual and content • Search facilities by category, author, date range • Search CVs by keywords (e.g. applicants and employees) • Ability to hold non-employee specific documents (e.g. policies and job descriptions)

Health & safety Whether you operate out of an office or a factory, no business can afford not to maintain up-to-date health and safety records. But timeconsuming, paper-based administration often means information is recorded long after the event, leading to inaccurate or incomplete records. A HR solution makes the process much simpler by providing you with a web-based accident book. Via selfservice, staff and managers can go online to enter the information required, capturing all the information needed in just a few minutes. Health & safety reporting Good systems will enable you to slice and dice this data any way you require, enabling you to report incidents by, for example, type, employee, and department as well as providing specific Health and Safety analysis such as Riddor reporting. This way, you have the complete visibility of information needed to reduce and manage risks within your organisation.

Absence Reducing the cost of absence is perhaps the key priority for any organisation investing in a new HR solution. But before you can make a dent in absence figures, you of course need an accurate way to record and monitor absence-related information. Key issues Research by IRS for XpertHR suggests that this is problematic for a substantial amount of companies. In a recent survey, 36% of respondents experiencing problems with absence records and of those, ‘inadequate absence information recorded’ and ‘inaccurate records’ came in top with 74% and 66% of employers encountering problems respectively.3 Absence self-service The priority of a good HR solution therefore is to make collecting this information as easily and costeffectively as possible. Self-service is ideal for this.

©Access 2010. E&OE. Version 1

Via a web-based interface, this technology enables staff to request absence of any conceivable type (e.g. holidays, doctor’s appointments, hospital visits) and for managers to quickly record sickness and other unplanned absences. Being webbased, staff and managers alike can access the system easily, at any time, helping speed the flow of information into the central system. Authorisation All good systems will provide an authorisation workflow to ensure that all absence requests are approved prior to updating your HR solution. Requests should be able to pass through as many levels as required and take a precise route around your company – even if an approver if on holiday themselves! (see below for more about workflow). Analysing absence The ability to view this information visually (for example, as a calendar) is another highly useful feature. Seeing at-a-glance who is in the office for the days and weeks ahead is invaluable when planning workloads, and during the absence authorisation process. Ultimately you need this information as a report and a good vendor will be able to accommodate what you need to see and how you need to see it. For example, if Bradford Factor analysis is important to your HR strategy, you should be able to get this data on-demand, whether via standard reports or user-friendly Business intelligence tools. Workflow As we’ve seen with self-service, today’s HR software enables us to re-engineer our existing processes and make them work how we want them to – not how they’ve always been. Workflow technology plays a key part in this. For example, using workflow tools, you could create a series of steps to ensure company-specific processes always take place in a certain way. Appraisals, for example, might involve the HR manager, a line manager and the employee.

Workflow would allow for the required information to be captured, authorised and followed-up according to your organisation’s specific policies and schedule. Flexibility Good systems enable you to incorporate any number of steps and for processes to take place in parallel. This last point is particularly useful during the authorisation process, since it will automatically divert responsibility for approvals to another person in the chain – for example, if the main approver is on holiday. When choosing a HR system, ensure that it gives you the freedom to design workflows yourself without the need for additional consultancy. A system based on the Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF) is ideal, since it lets you design processes using Windows’ familiar and intuitive ‘drag and drop’ tools.

2. Signs you’ve outgrown your HR software Identifying the factors All organisations, however small, rely on some form of system to manage their HR operations. And as you may have discovered yourself, the time comes when this existing system no longer measures up. For some companies, it’s business growth that drives the change from a paperbased system to an electronic one. For others, it’s the lack of functionality that’s the catalyst behind a new modern system. The previous section should have given you some ideas about how a modern HR system can help you overcome any challenges that you currently face. But to help you further, we’ve summarised a list of questions to help you understand where your existing software may be holding you back: • How much time is spent maintaining personnel records, recording timesheets, running payroll, appraisals, maintaining a corporate training curriculum etc?

• Can your system deal with flexible working/part time staff (e.g. automatically calculating pro-rated holiday) • Are you relying on spreadsheets/pulling information from multiple databases to run the reports that you need? • Can you easily report on the information required to fulfill your legislative requirements? • How much re-keying is being done to maintain multiple systems (e.g. HR, payroll, recruitment and training databases?) • What would the bottom line benefits be if real-time data was available throughout your entire organisation?

Identifying the impacts Once you’ve identified that your existing HR system is no longer fit for purpose – the next step is to work out the tangible impacts of not changing. To get you started, here are some you may want to consider: • Manual recruitment processes tie up key employees on recruitment tasks, meaning a loss of efficiency elsewhere, increased time to hire, greater internal resource and limited visibility of recruitment effectiveness • Poor systems to manage absence can mean limited visibility on absence days, leading to higher number of lost days and no way of spotting frequent offenders • Insufficient process for employee training and development may lead to lower productivity, lower output, loss of skills and knowledge, higher staff turnover and an increased requirement for recruitment • Lack of integration between HR and payroll means time is tied up in duplicate tasks e.g. processing employee information such as personnel updates, new starters and leavers. Information is never in sync, leading to inaccurate reporting

• Personnel information e.g. appraisals, learning and development documentation is held separately to personnel records, meaning lack of visibility, communications and reporting across all areas of the organisation • Days (and costs) are consumed in HR as staff spend their time performing mundane, manual tasks such as entering personal details and recording sickness, when they could be adding value to the business • Too many manual processes, duplication and re-keying of data which is costly from a process perspective, causes errors, and means there is no “single view of the truth” • Bottlenecks in the HR process cause delays in workflow, e.g. holiday requests, impacting staff engagement • Risk is increased without an easy way to collect all the relevant information required for legislative reporting and compliance Conduct a cost analysis Based on the inefficiencies identified above, you can begin a cost analysis of current processes. This will help to determine time intensive activities built into the current HR system and weigh these against the bottom-line benefits of a new system. While many time-savings are usually the easiest (and most compelling) benefits to clarify, your case should also include an assessment of intangible benefits. In fact, most of these may turn out to convert to the bottom line – for example, an increase in staff retention through the provision of stimulating and targeted training. Your cost analysis can also be used to benchmark the success of your new HR system – an exercise that you’ll need to undertake on a regular basis as your system and needs grow and evolve.

To help you in your search, we’ve come up with a list of questions to ask. It should give you a good idea of which vendors should be on your shortlist – and those that definitely shouldn’t! • How long have you been in business? Check that you are dealing with an established vendor • How many HR installs have you completed? A greater number of installs means a higher likelihood of encountering and fixing a broad range of customer issues • Do you develop your own software or resell on behalf of a software author? The former has the advantage of a ‘straight through’ line to the software developer but check how this support will be provided • Do you serve other organisations in my industry? Any provider worth considering will be able to provide a range of customer case studies/testimonials • Do you have a reference site in my sector? The ability to ask existing clients about their experiences with both the system and provider may prove decisive in the final stages of negotiation. Some of the questions to ask include: • Was the implementation completed on time and within budget? • Would you recommend the product? • How was the vendor at explaining technical issues? • Were you delivered what was promised? • What do your users like most/least about the software? • What training do you offer? However well-designed, there will be an inevitable learning curve as new users get to grips with the software. Satisfactory answers to the following will ensure that this process is as pain-free as possible: • Does you offer full product training?

• What support methods do you offer? A hotline is the very minimum you should expect. Ask about opening hours and response times as well as the ability to provide remote (internet based) support and on-site consultancy for those more complex issues. • What’s covered in the cost of my annual licence? How are updates charged for? • How do I ensure my software stays compliant? All suppliers should comply with the legislation available at the time of release, but it’s important to check that these updates are made regularly, and in an accessible format.

The importance of partnering Partnering with the right vendor is key to ensuring that your HR implementation is a success. Understanding the limitations of your existing system – and quantifying what you want to achieve – is a great step in the right direction. A good vendor will not object to being thoroughly interviewed about how their proposed solution can effectively reach your company’s expectations. Include HR administrators and managers in the process to increase buy-in and personal responsibility for the overall decision. This process will make it easy to see if there are any gaps between the expected benefits and actual software capabilities.

Choose your project team Involving a cross-section of people is key to the success of your implementation. After all, your aim is to implement a solution that benefits your entire business – not just the chosen few! This means involving a mix of primary users - that’s you, your HR team (if you have one), finance and IT, as well as secondary users (management and staff). Your aim is to find willing representatives from each division who will become product champions, playing an active role in shaping the solution as your organisation evolves.

3. How to select a new HR solution

• Would you be able to provide training at our site?

Choose the technology

The research process

• Can you tailor the training to meet different end user requirements? How would you go about that?

Choosing the right platform for your new solution will depend on many factors, not least your size, your business processes, your users and your budget.

With many suppliers offering seemingly similar functionality, it can be difficult to know where to start. 6

Simply, you have the choice between server-based solutions (where the software is installed and maintained on your site) or hosted (software accessed and maintained via the internet). Depending on the functionality you choose, you may require a mix of the two. Both have their pros and cons; a good vendor will talk you through what’s right for you. Whichever option you go for, ensure that the system is easy to maintain, since this will reduce your ongoing cost of ownership. For example, a web-based, .NET solution gives you significant flexibility, allowing you to shape your solution in-house without extended consultancy.

Request a demo By now, you should have a good idea about which vendors to shortlist. The next step is to schedule a demonstration of the software so that you can see it in action!

Phase 1 – pre-project planning Ensures stakeholders and project team know exactly what’s required and when. • Assign consultant • Establish deadlines and requirements • Determine approach Phase 2 – configure & install The system is configured to match your required business processes. • Install software • Map data • Identify reporting & security requirements • Cleanse data and convert Phase 3 – training Exposes key users to the software and ensures requirements listed in the selection process are met. • On-site user training • Supply support documents & workbooks • Go live

Asking vendors to demonstrate examples of your more pressing issues will help you compare systems sideby-side; the best suppliers will recreate these scenarios so that you get a real feel for how it’ll work in real life.

4. Implementation Having chosen a vendor and signed that all-important contract, the next stage is to get the implementation underway. While software is obviously a vital tool for your business, ensuring that the project is delivered on time and to budget requires professional project management. The following covers the key stages of a typical implementation plan so you know what to expect; a good vendor will be able to scale this up or down according to the size and scale of your project.

Phase 4 – support Ways to ensure you continue to gain a return on your HR investment. • Account management • Personal helpdesk support • Remote support • Ongoing consultancy • Optional user groups and training • Regular correspondence e.g. newsletters

About us Access will give you the advice, tools and clarity you need to make effective decisions, quickly and with certainty. As both a business-focused consultancy and a specialist software developer, we combine our innovative software with practical experience to deliver a solution that’s exactly right for you and your business.

You can rely on us to provide you with a solution that’s simple, proven and relevant to your company. We have over fifteen years’ experience of developing software here in the UK and our regional consultants have tailored and implemented this software all over the UK and in Ireland. The expertise we’ve gained gives us an unbeatable ability to accurately assess your needs and deliver maximum impact with ease and confidence. We believe your solution must be ready for the future, as well as right for today. Because your business will constantly evolve, we provide a software solution that grows with you. Our modular software covers a complete range of business, financial and administration processes and can be flexed to give you the precise view of your business that you need at any time. Our supportive consultants combine their first-class software expertise with in-depth industry knowledge to constantly improve and simplify your business processes so that your solution delivers maximum value and a continual return on investment. With Access, you can be sure you’ve got the clarity you need to reach your business goals. We hope you have found this guide of use. You can find out more about our HR and payroll solutions at www.selecthr.co.uk. For further details on Access, please contact Matt Newman on 0845 345 3300 or keep up-to-date by following Access on twitter: www.twitter.com/theaccessgroup. References 1 Spellman, R. Carry on training. The HR Director. Issue 64. p16. 2 Woods, D. Challenge of doing more with less. Human Resources. February 2010. p12 3 Personnel Today. 16 February 2010. p23

consulting | software | solutions