HR is changing, and technology is a big part of that. When preparing to implement cloud HR in your business, it’s essential to anticipate the impact that this new technology will have in your organisation so you can better adapt and transition to these changes.
Cloud HR can be very people-focussed, for example, automating transactional processes and allowing your staff to work remotely and more independently; this will affect the way you deliver HR. Therefore, you need to think about how your service delivery model will look like in the future, post-cloud implementation, beyond how it’s currently being done.
Moving away from the bottom heavy triangle of HR
When you think about the traditional HR triangle/model, there have always been several operational people at the bottom with fewer strategic people up top.
At the base there are HR admins, who usually take care of transactions and processes, followed by advisors, who advise the business on things like employee relations, performance management, disciplinaries, etc., and then business partners who provide strategic input on things like where your workforce needs to be deployed, the sorts of qualifications your organisation needs to move forward, and how you might want to categorise people into talent pools and form succession plans.
However, as your organisation embraces newer technologies such as HR cloud, you begin to get a healthier model that’s less of a triangle, and more concentrated around strategy.
What does this look like? Well, your bigger population becomes your advisory population, who ensure things like compliance, that you have a healthy people strategy implemented and deployed across the organisation, etc.; and at the lower, operational and transactional level, there won’t be as many people because your new technology will supplement most of those activates–your employees will be changing their own bank details, address, absence, and managing performance management without the need for an administrative middleman.
The true role of HR
The HR service delivery model post-cloud implementation takes the HR function back to its original, intended role of driving business performance through strategic people programmes.
Take performance management, for example; why was HR ever involved in performance? Originally, HR was only involved as a police function to make sure you’ve filled out your performance management form. The way it should work is as a tool that we all use to understand how we as employees are performing and how our managers are going to help us get better at what we do, helping us have these conversations, track them, and record the actions that are agreed upon.
What we’re seeing now is managers and employees starting to take over (via technology) a lot of the activities that HR used to do. Because of this, it’s important to understand how this will impact HR service delivery before you start your project so that you don’t end up with several of your staff without anything to do post-implementation!
Payroll is another example. Today we enter information into HR and someone in payroll picks that information up and enters it into the payroll system. However, post-cloud implementation, we won’t be doing that anymore because when we enter that information into HR, it will be sent to payroll via automated interface.
The result: we now have an issue with our payroll person who suddenly has nothing to do post-implementation! This is why it’s important to address this at the start. Don’t leave it till the end to tell someone they no longer need to do a certain activity, because that might be all they do! Understanding how people’s roles will change once your project has gone live is very important.
The right fit for the new role
Another reason why it’s important to define your HR service delivery model pre-cloud implementation is that once you go live with all these new roles, you want people on your team who have both expertise in the solution/product and in how this works for your organisation.
You won’t have consultants hanging around for the next ten years, so you need to transfer that knowledge during the project so you’re left with an in house team who can drive forward any future changes.
Because you know the sort of people you want to manage and keep the system working well, you can bring in those people at the beginning of the project to work on it with you. Redeploy those people frmo their existing jobs to work through the life cycle of the project, so they can move into a role where they can maintain the product /solution going forward.
Good luck!
For more information about HR service delivery model post-cloud implementation or implementing Cloud HR technology, please get touch.