Turn your HR experience into a celebration
Essential to a successful HRIT transformation is the enthusiasm of your employees. After all, they are the users of the system, your data, and your processes. Supporting a good employee journey with an HRIT system has become even more important in the current labor market. In this blog, Vera Berends, Business Consultant at SuccessDay, explains how to turn your HR experience into a celebration.
SuccessDay believes that when, as an organization, you design and optimize your processes and implement a new HRIT system, you should always do it from the perspective of the end users. In this case, your employees are the customers. Here, a good employee journey is a must. Everyone is talking about it, but what does this actually mean? And why is it important to start with this before rolling out a new HCM package?
Employee journey originated in marketing where people started using customer journeys several years ago. The employee journey is the “journey” that employees take within an organization. “In our view, this already starts with the candidate journey, i.e., all the contact moments candidates have before and during the job application all the way to onboarding, continuing all the way to the moment someone leaves employment. From hire to retire, in other words,” Vera clarifies.
During the employee journey, there are different touchpoints and milestones, and you can ask for feedback about working at an organization at several moments. For example, this can be about the induction process, cooperation within a team, getting a promotion or job change, but also about important organizational topics. “ It is not only in your private life that you have milestones to celebrate—within your work, organizations should make this more possible,” Vera states. Even getting a new laptop or changing your address are important employee touchpoints.
Employee Experience
Personal touch
By starting with the mapping of the future employee journeys and Moments that Matter you ensure a great employee experience. You also align processes and know what you are doing outside the system. When we are done, you will have mapped out your future Target Operating Model. By giving all processes—and where possible the HRIT system—a personal touch, employees feel like people rather than numbers. This makes them less likely to leave the organization. Vera: “And that’s nice, especially in the current labor market. Bonding and engaging is more important than ever.”
Nevertheless, not all organizations are aware of the importance of the employee journey in an HRIT implementation. ” They often only realize it once they are in the process of implementation, I know this from my personal experience. You get all kinds of questions from the implementation partner and think, ‘Oops, I hadn’t thought about that one yet.’ But at that point you’re already in a pressure cooker because the system has to be implemented within a few months. If you don’t have a central starting point by then, you’re really too late.”
Also, the system often pushes best practices but does not align at all with how you want to be as an organization. Two real-life examples:
- A client valued trust and being agile. Yet every vacation day had to be approved by four people.
- Another client was growing strongly in a tight market. The system was set up so that when you applied you got an automatic email: “Thanks for your application. If we’re interested, we’ll call you.” That saves recruitment lots of time, but it’s not really the experience you want to give a candidate.
End-to-end
SuccessDay supports medium-sized and large international organizations in devising and implementing employee journeys and moments that matter and elaborates this into future end-to-end processes. The focus here is on the end-to-end employee journey. “We look at both the technical side, the HRIT system, and the functional side,” Vera explains. This is done in what is known as Phase 0, where the route from the current situation (“as is”) to the desired situation (“to be”) is established. Process standards are established according to the desired employee journey. Where possible, as much as possible is standardized so that the organization becomes truly unified, and the company’s values are reflected in the system.
When optimizing your employee journey processes, you go through the following steps:
- Connect your brand to company values.
What does the company stand for? Your mission, vision and values are the starting point of your HR experience. - Map the employee journey
Here there are different phases, such as Join (recruitment), Develop (training & development of your staff), HR self-service (e.g., request leave yourself, call in sick, et cetera) and Leave (resignation/retirement/et cetera) - Design Principles
Design Principles should also be clear prior to implementation. This helps in getting all stakeholders on the same page. Establish where you want to go, ensure consistency in your processes, and make it easier to make decisions during implementation. Examples of Design Principles are simplicity, accountability, and standardization. Agree when to go global and when to go local, determine how many decision layers there are for approvals and agree for which part HR or management is responsible. Vera: “Here it is important that all stakeholders, including the steering committee, agree. Everyone commits to ’this is how we are going to do it,’ so that you have equal starting points for the implementation. That saves you endless discussions further down the line.” - Map out the key elements
From the four previously mentioned stages of your employee journey (Join, Develop, HR self-service and Leave), you then elaborate on the elements, processes, steps, tasks, and responsibilities. - Define the moments that matter
Reach consensus on the Moments that Matter: what are the moments that matter within an employee journey? Again, find a connection to the organizational values. At Join, for example, this could be the job interview, but also the very first contact point. Usually the job offers, promotion or training also fall under Moments that Matter. Vera: ” You have to make choices, because otherwise you make everything a milestone and you end up with overkill.” - Making IT happen
Only in the very last step do we arrive at the HRIT system. We then look at who needs what from his or her role for the Moments that Matter and how we can facilitate this from the system. “Some things, by the way, are better done face-to-face, especially if you want to keep it as personal as possible. The system is never an end in itself and it is always supportive.” Again, company values are embedded as much as possible.”
Once you have gone through all the steps, you can support and surprise your employees at all the important moments. And that is ultimately what HR is all about. HR is thereby developing into a strategic partner that puts the employee experience at the center. This leads to drastic changes in roles and procedures within the organization. SuccessDay helps organizations with this transition and continuously involves users in the optimization of HR processes. After all, the success of an HRIT implementation is determined by managers and employees embracing the new software and processes.
You should preferably do this before you start your configuration. The advantage is that during the configuration phase you no longer talk about local differences. By starting with employee journeys, you agree on what “customer experience” you want to provide. A logical progression would be future processes. Incidentally, SuccessDay also often deploys Phase 0 with customers who have been live for a while but are not satisfied with the HRIT implementation.
