Future-Proofing People Services in Higher Education

The UK’s higher education sector is currently at a pivotal crossroads with student enrolments dropping for the first time in a decade. Nearly half of UK universities may run deficits in 2025-2026 so many are merging services, cutting courses, and reducing staff to cope with shrinking revenues and find ways to increase efficiency.

University HR functions are in the spotlight to identify people and HR-related technology savings, whilst also delivering modern employee experiences and people services that enable both productivity and retention in a highly competitive talent market. To make the situation more complex for HR, many of the common HCM vendors such as MidlandHR and SAP are removing support for their on-premise products. This forces universities to plan and initiate large scale, complex HCM implementation programmes.

However, there is a silver lining. This is a prime opportunity for the education sector to transform the HR function and employee experience in a significant way. Veran has partnered with universities to plan for and deliver this transformation within HR, with and without new technology, and we have observed some common themes (and challenges).

This blog outlines these themes and provides tangible recommendations to get universities thinking about and mitigating these issues ahead of, or during, your HR transformations.

Setting a Standard for Faculties

It’s common for faculty leaders to expect bespoke, high-touch HR services tailored to their local contexts. The result? Fragmented processes, variable data quality, and HR stretched thin under the weight of ad-hoc demands. This decentralised structure drags transformation programmes into endless customisation cycles—over-designed and under-delivered.

A key stakeholder group for university HR functions is the faculty leadership. They expect an HR service tailored to the perceived specific needs of each faculty. This results in an extremely “white glove” HR service per faculty, significantly reducing standardisation and efficiency in HR. For example, in recruitment, some faculty heads and managers prefer to manage the full screening, interviewing and selection process with minimal HR involvement. As a result, HR is unable to offer a standardised service across the university and instead must respond to the needs of each individual faculty, reacting on a more ad hoc basis. While the timeframes for delivering HR processes may align across faculties, how the processes are completed and the quality of data, can vary substantially. This limits HR’s ability to be a strategic and operational function, (enabling the university to grow and thrive through centralised and complete people insights). Instead, HR becomes transactional and reactive, helping the university to stay afloat through manual firefighting and sparse, often localised and incomplete people insights.

This is not an easy issue to solve, but is a ‘must have’ consideration for a university HR function aiming to transform and/or adopt new tech. Without mitigation, this issue can lead to significant programme delays and unexpected cost due to never ending design, but also significantly cap value and return on investment following delivery.

Mitigation of this issue should involve taking a service-led approach to HR.

1.      Define what services the HR function should provide to the university to make it clear what faculties can and cannot request (e.g., create a service catalogue).

2.      Work with the faculties to ensure a common understanding and service which works for all.

3.      Identify exceptions and deviations across faculties and truly question whether these are needed; challenge if they’re not based on legislative or compliance-based requirements.

Clearly agreeing and documenting how HR services are delivered is a crucial first step in transforming HR in universities (digitally or non-digitally). This should happen before the selection and design of any tech or processes that may take place.

Key Areas we typically see which would benefit from centralisation and standardisation across faculties include:

• Recruitment and hiring

• Employment contracts and terms

• Workload allocation

• Performance and appraisals

• Onboarding and induction

• Mandatory training

• Leave and absence management

Empowering Employees and Managers in HR Processes – Make it easy

As with many sectors, adoption of self-service is a challenge in higher education. Academics would rather avoid the lengthy processes and focus their time on research and contributing to their fields of interest.

As a result, HR functions often do not receive the data they need to efficiently process requests and deliver a good service. This can cause a range of issues, such as sensitive data being sent over email (which increases compliance risk) and inefficient use of HR time. For some organisations, this goes further: HR often steps into the role of a manager, attending to more difficult management conversations such as performance improvement and goal setting, because managers see this as an HR task. Again, this threatens the value realised from any digital or non-digital HR transformation, where increased manager self-sufficiency should be a key benefit.

One way to combat this is by ensuring a clear understanding of what the HR service includes in order to prevent issues and ensure employees and managers know which HR tasks are part of their roles. Furthermore, leadership buy-in on the service definition and catalogue is key to promoting the identification and resolution of undelivered responsibilities within faculties, before HR need to start chasing.

However, it’s not just about understanding the service and their responsibilities. Employees and managers must have the means to complete their HR responsibilities. This involves ensuring that the supporting technology exists, promotes self-service, and provides a simple user experience. Additionally, is there appropriate training in place, or available user guides and FAQs, to support end users in the use of self-service tech? If, like many universities, we are struggling to get a clear view on absences taken because many employees are getting off-system absence approval and not entering leave on system, we need to examine the usability, simplicity, number of clicks, workflow visibility, user guides, training, and communication of self-service technology we (should already) have in place.

We have also found that swapping terms like ‘self-service’ for ‘direct access to your own data’ changes the perception of this enablement of colleagues to do more for themselves.

Resolving Complex, Industry Specific Painpoints

UK higher education has some industry-specific challenges where standard solutions do not meet the requirements of the majority of the industry. We’ve listed three in the table below.

University HR functions typically adopt highly manual processes, off system spreadsheets, relying on one or two SMEs to deliver and retain the knowledge to deliver these processes. This creates significant inefficiency and frustration within HR teams and the very significant risk of leaver knowledge loss. When undergoing transformation, (especially digital) these types of issues often block design and result in both programme delays and continued manual working.

Sharing knowledge within the industry is key for enabling universities to adopt the right technical solutions to help resolve these painpoints. The use of modern Out of the Box (OOTB) HCM technology can go a long way, however, best of breed or even university-built solutions are often needed if a full solution is to be put in place. However, without communicating how some of the more successful solutions within the sector have been designed and delivered to address these issues, organisations that are in the dark are unable to progress. To get readers’ brains churning, the below table summarises three niche requirements we’ve seen and some of the solutions available:

Pain point / Requirement	Solutions Used
Right to work checks and ensuring labour compliance for casual workers	Integrated digital right to work verification tools (e.g., TrustID, Yoti) Onboarding platforms (including mobile access) to mandate self-service upload of correct documentation, with automated data validations Compliance dashboards to compare eligible vs worked hours and flag compliance issues, integrated with core HCM and timesheet data
Collation of multi-faculty and cross-functional data required for HESA reporting	Data warehousing and analytic capability, integrating multiple source systems across departments into a single data repository, with reporting and querying possible (and automated) through analytics HESA data collation templates, automatically validating data submission from departments and faculties to reduce errors (both vendor-offered and built in-house)
Complex payroll caused by casuals, highly variable contract T&Cs and pension schemes (e.g., USS, TPS and LGPS)	Application of complex payroll rules within more sophisticated HCMs Mandated use of self-service time sheeting (with mobile app and integration to payroll) Position and contract-based costing (e.g., use of cost centre and funding codes to split costs for grant-funded roles)

The higher education sector faces several significant HR challenges which can block transformation ranging from fragmented faculty expectations and limited manager and employee engagement to industry-specific complexities. While these issues can slow transformation and dilute return on investment, universities that clearly define their HR services, shift the mindset and culture toward self-sufficiency, and adopt the right mix of modern HCM and sector-specific solutions can unlock significant productivity, efficiency, compliance, and data-insight benefits. This is key for enabling university resilience in a period of decreasing student numbers and declining budgets.

Veran has partnered with universities across the UK to design and deliver HR transformation programmes that address these challenges head-on. If you’d like to learn more from these case studies, contact becky@veranperformance.com.