by Gareth Cartman
Once upon a time, HR were viewed as fluffy people, or at worst, pen-pushers who took your holiday forms. Today, apparently, they’re a faceless department, a phone number, a web portal… HR as we knew it has been killed off by the service center, and the only people to blame are… HR.
The attractions of the shared service center are manifold. IDC recently underlined the massive rush towards HR outsourcing in its shared service form, with the benefits of centralized data, actionable metrics and cloud technology all to the fore. HR is, so they say, clamoring for help, and outsourcing is the answer to all of their problems.
Yet HR is more than a phone number or a web portal. And there is a growing feeling that it’s time to revisit the original arrangement. With internal HR functions “cut to the bone”, the onus has been put on line managers, who do not have the specialized training of HR professionals, to deal with grievances, disciplinaries and the like. Even recruitment is being carried out without HR input, in many cases.
Peter Cappelli, the author of Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs, claims that the emphasis has moved from advice to information – from the qualitative to the quantitative. From the personal to the technological. We have a problem at home? We Google it. We have a problem at work? We leaf through some online documentation.
The problem isn’t the technology; it’s in our dependence on it. The technology has always been an enabler, but we’ve seen it as a crutch. All that ‘good stuff’ that we’re getting out of the shared service centers means nothing if we don’t have the skills and knowledge in-house to analyze and interpret the data to obtain clear, actionable metrics that can actually have an impact on business performance.
Geraldine Sangalang CHRP, HR & Payroll Technician at the BC Public Service Agency, and blogger at Coffee Shop HR, says that the raw data HR collects affects so many different elements of an organization, it would be folly not to pay attention to it.
“One of the most interesting pieces of advice I’ve heard from a senior HR executive is that when you’re asked to build a new team, it’s best practice to hire people who can do the jobs you simply cannot do yourself. In this case, she was referring to finance and business analysis. The joke among HR people is that although soft skills are innate, analytical and financial abilities are learned. But as HR metrics, and the way HR carries out its business, changes over time, it’s become a necessity for human resources people to analyze their data.
“It goes without saying that data is valuable, but to be able to analyze that raw information into meaningful statements is simply gold. I’ve worked in project teams where our use of HR data has meant the difference between proving that our intentions were valid, and showing us that we needed to take another path. Having said that, if you know that your strengths lie in your soft skills, and your weaknesses lie in being able to criticize trends related to data, I would take that senior HR executive’s advice further to say that if you want to excel in HR, you need to learn how to work with the data that’s so readily available to you.
“The raw data collected through HR processes affects so many operational facets of a business that it’s silly to ignore it. This is especially true in contact centers where performance management can be directly driven using the analysis of HR data. Another clear example is the distribution of salaries over time; reflections on how compensation has changed within a company can signal where changes were made, and where changes ought to be considered in the future.”
Peter Higson, Account Director at Ceridian, puts the emphasis on the word “partnership”, and believes that service centers should be centers of expertise:
“The most successful HR outsourcing is built on the focus of cultural ‘fit’ during the process of vendor selection. A partnership based on trust and relationship building is critical in the delivery of HR services. The outsourcer or service center should be centers of expertise for technology and processes, leveraging the most out of technological enhancements i.e. the growth in self-service opportunities and continuous improvement methodology in improving the employee lifecycle processes.
“The focus should be on a quality service and focused HR outputs. The main objective of in-house HR is then to communicate these benefits to the organization and increase HR’s involvement in strategic business decisions.
“The remit of a successful outsourcing partnership or the establishment of a credible HR shared service function is to improve the service it delivers to its customers in its administrative expertise, leaving and allowing the retained HR function to add strategic value to the organization allowing them to focus on the core business.
“Management of the outsourcing partner and/or shared service function is crucial towards success having the balance between empirical and perceived measurement of the service delivered.”
It may be, then, that in rushing towards a shared service environment, HR has done too much of the right thing. If perceptions persist that HR is a call center or a web portal, that’s not the fault of the service centers themselves: it’s the fault of those who outsourced for not appreciating that partnership element – the idea that without one, the other has less value. The takeaway, therefore, is that without the shared service center, HR adds less value. But without an in-house, retained HR, the shared service center itself adds less value.
See the outsourcing partnership as an enabler and, all of a sudden, HR offers more, and delivers more.
Gareth Cartman is a digital marketer with a background in HR and payroll outsourcing.
Article originally appeared in Outsource Magazine