How does a successful HR team focus on services delivered, increase efficiency, and improve the employee experience?
The Human Resources function is heading towards a future in which routine tasks are automated, and the roles of HR professionals will gear towards developing different projects or programs. By re-organizing, centralizing, and automating repetitive questions coming from employees, teams can focus on developing the transformational projects within their organizations, and act as advisors in projects that aim to improve things like workplace culture and capability, leadership coaching or employee well-being.
Employee experience has gradually and delightfully reached equal attention to customer experience. Nowadays, organizations see employee experience as a key competitive advantage and factor in retaining people within a company. One decisive factor in creating a positive employee experience is ensuring that dealing with basic tasks doesn’t require huge amounts of time and energy. Today, employees expect dealing with tasks to be easy and that it doesn’t require additional usernames or passwords. They are used to utilizing applications like Airbnb, Uber, and Foodora and expect enterprise applications to be as smooth and simple as booking a flight. More often than before, employees work remotely and want to run their routines even when on-the-go. They greatly benefit from a self-service portal that acts as a 24/7 one-stop-shop where they can complete their basic requests and approvals like claiming travel expenses, agreeing on targets, or booking time for health care. In case more help is needed, the user can always ask through ‘Ask HR’ button or chat.
One of the greatest things with the self-service portal is the ability of an HR team to reorganize and focus on subjects important to the people and the company. When an employee can’t find the answer they were looking for, they send the question to HR through the self-service portal. These questions can be easily accessed and centrally dealt with by the appropriate person in HR, based on availability and expertise. Since all correspondence is visible for all members, if a team member is on vacation, others can take over. The chatbot can assist in dealing with the simplest questions, which leaves time for HR to answer the more complicated and urgent requests. A well-trained chatbot can work as a friendly face and give answers to the most frequently asked questions, e.g. how to report your time or claim your travel costs. I know, at least our team would be happy to welcome such a teammate onboard!
As the chatbot takes care of routine tasks and a part of the team focuses on solving the more complicated questions coming from employees, the other half is free to spend more time on transformational, project-like cases, such as organizational changes, culture transformations, leadership coaching, and role-based capability development. A more efficient division of tasks enables the HR team to be at the core of the organization, ensuring that the employee experience keeps up with the transformation.
Based on the topics of the questions that the HR team receives through the self-service portal, it is possible to construct a wider understanding of subjects that require efficient guidance and informing. If, for instance, 20 % of the questions concern the number of remaining vacation days, the team can increase its proactive communication around this area. Based on user data, the services will start to anticipate peak hours, which will help schedule the HR team with the right amount of capacity.
Rapid growth in the number of requests to HR can predict the overload and stress levels of an organization. By monitoring this, HR can address potential problems proactively and prevent for example burnouts. The next phase with automated services will be through machine learning, which means that systems can predict employee needs and offer solutions before they have even asked the questions. Keeping also this aspect in mind, the HR organization should start systematically collecting data from all interaction with the personnel.
Due to Efecte’s growth, we had to think about how we offer HR services to our employees and how our HR team manages these services. We have been able to improve our employee experience dramatically through the self-service portal, automation, and more structured work planning. Our HR team was able to shift its focus towards things most important to the employees and our culture. At the same time, we built a path towards a better employee experience – a path on which employees can focus on core business, and where service experience doesn’t fall behind what people are used to in their free time.
If you want to know more about the modern world of HR and about Efecte’s solution for HR Service Management, please listen to our “People Analytics meets HR Service Delivery” webinar recording here.
You can also download HR Service Management factsheet for more details about the solution.
VP Culture & People at Efecte
September 9, 2024
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