Following on from the first and second posts in this series, this third post explains the steps that should be taken early on to understand the problems that need to be addressed by HR Service Management.
The prime directive for any improvement initiative is to lead with a focus on value. If your employees do not get value from the services you provide, they will not use them. If your processes cause delays, or force your employees to repeat themselves, they will typically circumvent them to get the outcomes they desire and the HR service experience suffers.
Service Delivery teams often make the classic mistake of starting an improvement initiative based on their view of the world. This inside-out approach may, for a while at least, improve conditions for the team and enable them to do their jobs more effectively. However, if these improvements are not delivering value from the employees’ perspective, they will go unnoticed. The approach must be outside-in, starting with employees, managers and HR Service Delivery teams.
Getting feedback may sound like an easy task, but people are swamped by email and sick of surveys, so you need to be more inventive and explore several approaches to solicit a decent response. C-Level support is strong incentive and a timely email from an executive, asking employees to provide feedback to support your improvement initiatives, usually works wonders. However, emails and surveys alone will not deliver the best possible response, so consider holding open days, lunches, or coffee mornings to solicit feedback. Most importantly, talk to your employees, because the best feedback is often received at the drinks machine, or when walking the floor and taking an interest by asking people how things are going.
If your organization uses a collaboration tool, open a public workspace, where people can read about your initiative, view comments, provide feedback, or vote for ideas and comments from their peers. Collaborative workspaces promote trust through transparency, visibility and openness, which makes everyone feel included and valued in a way that conventional surveys cannot match. You can also set up private workspaces where service delivery teams can collaborate, share knowledge, information and ideas to support your improvement objectives.
To simplify the feedback process, ask representatives from different business units to give you some insight into the challenges they face when dealing with HR. You’ll get varied answers, but common threads usually surface, especially from recruiting managers. In my experience, they typically fall into the following categories:
The next blog post will describe some useful techniques to prioritize your requirements and create a project brief to outline what good looks like.If you’d rather not wait, download the Smart Guide now to help your organization - Deliver the HR Service Experience your employees deserve.