Research Report Summary: Employee Lifecycle Management

Incorporate structure and technology to improve the employee experience, from hiring to retiring

Human resources (HR) professionals often view various HR functions through a larger employee-lifecycle-management lens. This entails looking at the management of employees from the time they are first recruited to the time they leave the organization.

To help HR professionals better understand employee lifecycle management, HR.com produced this study in partnership with APS Payroll, a technology company offering award-winning human capital management solutions for mid-sized organizations.

The survey, called “The State of Employee Lifecycle Management,” ran in the December 2017-January 2018.

Three elements are considered most important for lifecycle management: hiring, performance management and continuing education. All three were rated as important by over 80% of the respondents.

Event tracking — which includes events such as pay changes, leave, disciplinary actions or any other type of employee record change — is considered important by about half respondents, while less than a third said retirement is important to them as HR professionals.



However, event tracking and employee retirement are associated with higher overall employee satisfaction.

This suggests that all elements of the employee lifecycle matter and attending to the whole lifecycle might increase employee satisfaction.

Lifecycle management only works well if all the requisite foundations—budget, the technology, the skills, and the time—are in place.

Lack of budget/funds was the top-rated barrier because this handcuffs HR. In particular, it prevents them from getting an up-to-date technology infrastructure that will make the processes more efficient for HR and more pleasant for other stakeholders (i.e., candidates, employees, and management).

The second most commonly cited barrier was a lack of focus on the employee lifecycle issue. This speaks to the common view that employee lifecycle management is merely an administrative issue rather than a lever for driving employee engagement. Lack of leadership is also an important barrier to effective lifecycle management.

Organizations with the least comprehensive technology systems were more likely to have low employee satisfaction than high satisfaction rates. Those with more comprehensive systems, on the other hand, were more likely to enjoy high employee satisfaction rather than low satisfaction rates. Moreover, organizations with higher employee satisfaction rates were almost three times as likely to make high or very high use of their human capital technology than organizations with lower satisfaction rates.

Among our respondents, almost 80% used a structured hiring process. Almost all the firms that are highly satisfied with the hiring process have a structured one (94%). A structured process improves the quality of decision making by ensuring no steps are overlooked. It also improves fairness, since all candidates face the same process.

More than half of respondents had an ATS (58%). Technology can be important in hiring due to the large volume of transactions. Without technology, a recruiter’s time often gets eaten up in administration rather than finding the best candidates. Technology also helps ensure there is a structured process which, as stated above, tends to lead to a better quality of hire.

Despite the obvious appeal of having a single integrated system, standalone solutions are reasonably common. For recruiting (ATS) and retirement management, more than half of respondents had standalone solutions. For the other elements of the employee lifecycle, 33% to 41% had a standalone solution.

There is a long-standing debate on the merits of integrated systems versus standalone ones. Integrated systems have the advantage of standardized user interfaces and shared data; standalone solutions often have more specialized features.

This study shows that for most elements of the employee lifecycle, there are no large differences in satisfaction between integrated and standalone solutions. The one exception is retirement management, where standalone systems were associated with higher satisfaction rates.



Following are a few more findings from the study.

Most organizations have structured hiring processes, but structured continuous education and training processes are much less common (46%). Likewise, only about a third of participants say their organizations have a Learning Management Systems (LMS).

These findings show that investment in a disciplined continuing education and training process is still not the norm. It is understandable that continuing education and training would sometimes be less structured than recruitment because it is inherently more varied.

Nonetheless, given the importance of employee learning, it often makes sense to bring discipline to the process. Of the respondents who were highly satisfied with the continuing education and training process in their organizations, 86% had a structured process. Only 33% of the less satisfied companies had a structured process.

Similarly, of the respondents who were highly satisfied with the continuing education and training process, 49% said their organization had an LMS; only 33% of the less satisfied companies had an LMS.

Performance management is a core pillar of the employee lifecycle, so it is appropriate to take a structured approach.

The performance management process can be famously labor intensive, so technology might be able to raise efficiency and effectiveness. In a manual process, a lot of the effort is likely to involve simply getting the process done, with less time left over to worry if it’s being done well.

Two-thirds of our respondents said their organizations take a structured approach to performance management. Almost all of organizations that are satisfied with the performance management process have a structured process (90%). However, only one-third use a performance management technology.

Likewise, 76% of highly satisfied firms have a structured process in event tracking, while only 35% of less satisfied firms also have a structured process.

One other element that leaps out as important is technology. Firms that are highly satisfied with event tracking are far more likely to have event tracking technology than their less satisfied peers.

Another factor associated with higher satisfaction is having performance management technology: highly satisfied organizations were much more likely to have technology than those that don’t.

Nearly half of all firms take a structured approach to retirement processes. If the number of retirements is low, then a structured process may not be necessary.

Over 80% of firms that are highly satisfied with their retirement process have a structured one, compared to only 35% of those with lower satisfaction.

We see an even more dramatic difference when we look at technology. Nearly half of highly satisfied organizations had technology (44%), whereas very few (12%) of the less satisfied organizations did.

This suggests that some organizations could potentially boost their satisfaction with retirement processes by developing a more structured process that is backed by technology.

There are no silver bullets for managing the employee lifecycle. Some problems won’t be fixable in the short term; that’s why you need to map out a longer term plan and get leadership to buy-in to the new technology. Be disciplined in determining needs and be careful in implementing change so the organization gets a process that delivers results.