Son & Co.

After spending extensive time in consulting, my current role in the industry was a bit of a paradigm shift. While I had the right skills to solve problems, the approach to solving the problem had to be uniquely tailored to meet our internal needs. These days, most companies have already migrated to cloud solutions or are well on their way in their transformation initiatives. However, there is always a big gap between what is possible and the ground reality from a tech perspective: most companies go with a bare minimum to get started and can often stagnate. Having been cloud-enabled for a few years already, my role’s key responsibility was to revamp and improve the user experience and thereby increase adoption through an agile, continuous improvement approach.

WHERE WE STOOD

The first thing we tried to do was find out where we stood; our target was to start working on the items with higher volumes; for example, we have a lot of weekly hiring. We then started to quantify important metrics: how often are employees set up in the system late, how often do transactions stay unapproved, etc.? Now that we had an initial target in mind, the next thing we did was find out what we could do to solve the problem or mitigate our issues. We bucketed our problems into three categories.

The first category was 'People' - Are the newbies sufficiently trained? How do we give them additional support? What can we do to simplify? Quite often, companies look at tech problems only from a tech lens instead of a more holistic approach. Studies have shown that positive reinforcements have had a bigger impact than negative ones, so we started rewarding business units which were doing better. Another approach we started was running quiz completions instead of regular training - we gamified training!

The second category was 'Process' - Is there a gap in the process? Are the right stakeholders informed/consulted in the process? How do we address the gap? This is one of the items which were harder for us to solve on account that our business units are vastly different from each other. Our approach to solving this was to try and pick the best process among our sites and then cater to nuances.

The last category was 'Technology' - is the system connecting the dots for the whole solution? Are there ways to make the system bulletproof? How do we ensure we don’t let people go awry? Once we got a better understanding of what we were looking at, we finally started to tackle our improvement areas. When handling internal projects, we are often challenged with balancing time. To best handle this, we tried to establish equilibrium- 20% time learning, 20% time improving/fixing and the rest of the time trying to stay afloat with day-to-day support. Companies often avoid the second category of improving, and that is what can cause stagnation, not because they don’t want to, but because the day-to-day support is taking too much effort.

LOOKING AHEAD

A year into the approach, we started to see significant measurable improvements. These improvements gave us the confidence to start looking at widening our scope; we feel that we still have several avenues to discover. This year our focus has pivoted to building a connected ecosystem for each process, something we want to leverage with the Oracle ME employee experience platform -

1.  A checklist journey which ensures all stakeholders are looped for the process and everyone is cognizant of their role in the process

2.  Our learning content should be highlighted during the transaction instead of having them redirected to courses

3.  Our knowledge content should also tell the same story and augment the learning content

There are many HR technology solutions out there, each with pros and cons - but the approach to solving problems is tech agnostic. Companies now understand that the expensive selection and implementation of the solution was just the beginning of the journey.