Employee-Centric HR

Building processes around your people

As consumers, we’ve never had it so good. The exceptional, design-led experiences offered by the likes of Instagram, Airbnb and Amazon, are seamless, intuitive and satisfying. They work so well because they’re designed around the unique needs of individual customers, and these brands have taken great efforts to ensure the customer experience is frictionless and personalized.

 

Now, let’s consider the equivalent of these services in the workplace: HR processes. For the most part, these are still unwieldy and built primary around the needs of the HR department rather than the employee. And that was fine in an age where people had nothing to compare it to and the talent pool was overflowing. However, today the expectations of workers have changed at the same time as industrial skills gaps have emerged. HR teams are therefore under pressure to deliver better employee experiences to match those offered by digital consumer services. The implications of not doing so are simple: you’ll fail to recruit the employees your business needs.

The imperative facing businesses is therefore clear: the traditional, function-oriented HR processes of the past need to be reimagined as consumer-type digital services. Employees, meanwhile, need to be treated like consumers. And just as any business worth its salt starts out by asking ‘what matters most to my customers’, HR teams need to consider the questions that matter most to their employees.

Let’s take an example: maternity leave. This is a hugely important part of an employee’s life and she will, of course, have a wide range of questions that she will need to ask HR. These include how much time she can take off work, how much she will be paid while she is away, how she should book her leave, what happens to her benefits, and what the process is once she’s ready to return.

As it stands, finding answers to these questions would be fairly onerous in most organizations. The employee would need to contact HR on at least five occasions; and no doubt there would be a different rep answering her call each time. So, there would be five calls and five repetitions of the same information; hardly a seamless process.
 
In an employee-focused model, however, the process would be very different. HR would anticipate her questions and would provide answers proactively through an end-to-end support system. Not only would the employee feel relaxed and informed about her maternity leave, the employer would benefit too, as HR could help ensure that the employee’s productivity is optimized before her leave starts.

As soon as we start thinking of the employee as a consumer, many of the lessons of consumer marketing come into play. One such is the idea of ‘moments that matter’: key occasions in the customer journey where brands can make a lasting impression. HR can also look to capitalize on moments that matter in the workplace to boost employee satisfaction. The very best of such approaches would see the HR team deliver concierge-like services to their employee-consumers during these key moments.
 
What exactly are these moments that matter? Every business is, of course, different, but there are at least five moments that all organizations will have in common:
 

 
During these moments, employee will respond positively to a personal approach that anticipates their needs and may require HR to coordinate across multiple back office functions to deliver a strong experience. And let’s not forget that this approach is also good for the employer: it allows the business to offer more engaging and satisfying employee experiences that foster positive perceptions of the company, produce meaningful outcomes and exceed expectations. As a result, employee satisfaction increases as HR’s workload decreases (repeat calls for the same issue are typically reduced by more than 70 percent through service-oriented models).

Balancing Tech with Touch

Seamless employee services can only be deployed through a fully-integrated operating model that coordinates multiple processes and systems across both digital and physical channels. This model provides for a balance between the hi-tech and the hi-touch and enables services that meet the unspoken expectations of employees.
 
If these services are to be fit-for-purpose, they must mirror the Amazon-like consumer experiences people love. This means they must be highly personalized, context-aware, intuitive and available to employees on-demand. And, of course, these services should be available to employees over a wide range of channels and devices, so they can engage with them on their terms – not HR’s.
 
Additionally, in order to focus on the moments that matter, HR teams need to simplify and automate transactions. Manual intervention must be eliminated wherever possible, using robotic process automation, virtual assistants and artificial intelligence to handle high-volume, otherwise-manual transactions. This frees up HR talent to focus on more value-add services, including the moments that matter.

Data-Driven Services

Another key element to delivering service excellence in those moments that matter is data and analytics, which should be used to better understand and anticipate the needs of employees. These needs can be simple, such as recognizing that if an employee changes his personal address, he might require benefits changes, or it may have implications on tax withholding. However, the needs revealed by data analytics can be more profound. For example, data analytics can reveal previously hidden insights such as whether employee attrition increases after three to five years’ tenure without a manager title.
 
By bringing these insights together with a service-oriented model, HR can take on a new and elevated role as a trusted advisor. Data analytics provides HR with a much more comprehensive understanding on an employee’s motivations – both spoken and unspoken. This allows them to base their advice and actions not only on what the employee is telling them, but also what the data is telling them. This means that HR can address the core employee issue and not just the symptoms.
 
Such interventions are hugely beneficial. Not only can employee retention be increased, but such insights can help increase productivity across the workforce; having a measurable impact on the bottom line. It also may make the difference in attracting talent in today’s competitive landscape.

Four Points to Consider

All businesses need to start modernizing their HR processes if they’re to secure the talent they need to grow. Through our experience with customers, we’ve found that there are four starting steps to successfully HR transformations.
 
First, most HR teams will benefit from starting small. Incremental steps allow you to realize value progressively and with low risk. Our advice is to focus on the areas that matter most to your business as you work up to full-scale, concierge-like services for the moments that matter.
 
Second, it’s important to remember that the idea of a trusted advisor in managing the moments that matter is offered in addition to – not a replacement for – enabling technologies. For successful HR modernization the two must go hand-in-hand.
 
Third, and related to this point, HR teams need to consider the fact that technology empowers the trusted advisor as well as employees and managers. Capabilities such as integrated case management help drive positive outcomes, engagement and make a high-touch approach more effective.
 
Finally, HR teams need to keep in mind the fact that moments that matter are relevant for all generations of the workforce. While tech-savvy millennials are comfortable online and are happy to get on with self-service platforms, they nevertheless also prefer high-touch services for moments that matter. 

Author Bio

Jill K. Goldstein is Talent and HR Business Process Services Lead at Accenture Operations. She has been helping leading global organizations deliver exceptional experiences for their employees for the last 6 years. Connect Jill Goldstein Follow @JillKGoldstein