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Gateway to the Future
Mimi Brooks, a presenter at this year's HR Technology Conference®, details what can be expected from the next generation of portals.
Few people, if any, are as knowledgeable about HR portals and the best ways to leverage them as Mimi Brooks, president of Logical Design Solutions in Morristown, N.J. Brooks, a former AT&T executive who founded LDS in 1990, will offer her assessment of, and predictions for, HR portals at the 2008 HR Technology Conference and Exposition® , October 15 through 17 in Chicago (www.hrtechnologyconference.com). In her presentation, "HR Portal 2.0: Best Practices for an Evolving Medium," Brooks will explore the evolution of portals from being simply tools for providing information and self-service to employees and managers to becoming enablers of talent management and workforce optimization, and a means of better aligning HR operations with corporate goals. "Instead of looking at [portals] as just self-service, [employers] are adding these components of exponential value that get to the heart of HR's transformation into a more strategic partner role," Brooks says. "I think HR professionals realize that they have to do more than just efficient service delivery in order to realize the visions that they have for their organization." In a recent interview with Human Resource Executive® Editor David Shadovitz, Brooks elaborates on this point and clarifies some of the misperceptions surrounding HR portals and her vision of what lies ahead. Portals have been around for some time now. Are there still companies out there that have yet to implement one? If you mean to use the term portals more broadly than the technical platform that some people associate with portals ... I think there aren't a lot of companies that don't have something that is a portal or "portalesque." What's not common is that they have a unified employee portal. People using online tools to communicate and for self-service? Yes, I think almost all companies have this. Unified employee portals that are smart and centralized and able to handle robust capabilities? No. So how would you define smart?
I think personalized and enabling. Enabling for people, employees and managers to not only [perform self-service] but to be involved in communities of practices that they are affiliated with and enable them to do their jobs better, faster, smarter and more competitively.
In the session you're doing at the HR Technology Conference®, I understand you're going to touch on what the next generation of portals is going to look like. What are you going to say? I think if we look at the evolution of HR portals, you could almost say that our early intranet sites were very content-centric -- HR policies and procedures, SPDs, those kinds of things. You saw those evolve to become sites that were focused on some kind of service-delivery models. Then, following that, we started using them for HR purposes, for manager self-service, which is clearly more complicated and required us to do things like process standardization. So from our perspective, when we look at where HR portals are going beyond service delivery and information, it's the idea of HR trying to use the portals to profoundly engage employees and managers in some important aspect of business change being experienced ... .
Has this already begun to take place? Yes, it has. Even though service delivery still needs to be accomplished via the portal, I think what HR is starting to realize is that it can do that while adding some of the other elements that we're talking about. It comes down to not only making the portals actionable for managers and employees, but also using them to help drive better decision-making and to make managers more aware and engaged. I understand you're going to touch on the idea of integrating HR systems with outsourcing services in your presentation. Can you explain what this entails? In the last few years, many of our clients have outsourced some component of their services to third-party partners. We'd like to think that when those business decisions were made, HR didn't think it was outsourcing its brand while it was outsourcing components of services. That's an important point, especially in terms of the role of the portal. We don't want people to have an affinity with the third-party partner that's providing their 401(k) program or their health-benefits program. We want them to have an affinity to the company that is providing that on their behalf.
Earlier, you mentioned "employee engagement." What are some of the ways portals can be used, today and going forward, to improve employee engagement? I think the concept of why employee engagement matters, why we need to have portals do something good about the issue of engagement, is first and foremost coming from what is happening in the business. As companies we work with expand globally, and as they try to put down a meaningful presence in emerging markets ... workforce optimization becomes top of mind for HR executives. Attracting people into the business, onboarding them early and quickly and assimilating them into our culture and into our strategy in a way that they have an early affinity to the company so they don't walk away with the knowledge they've gained, are huge challenges. What we try to do with the portal is to establish an early dialogue with the onboarded employees, making it easy for them to become part of the organization.
How do portals address some of the challenges of globalization? I think the challenge of portals globally is not really the challenge of globalization, but the challenge of localization in a global environment. One of the things that portals do particularly well is to provide a channel for us to deliver global-standard processes. Portals do a great job of that. They can deliver those processes optimally in multiple languages, at home, at work, wherever people are. But beyond that, what portals do globally is handle local variances that are so dominant in HR. Even when we develop global-standard processes, there's almost always local variances that must be supported, either because of regs, local practices or cultural differences. The idea that portals can seamlessly deliver, in a one-to-many way, this combination of global services and practices ... but also with the local variances based on something unique about the person, their role, their geography, their affiliation to a business unit ... is really powerful from an HR perspective. If you look at most of the HR systems out there today, they all come with some kind of portal solution. When you start to consult with someone who just did an Oracle or SAP implementation, what do you tell them? How do you approach the technology side of the equation? In all of the companies that we work with -- minimally from the CIO's perspective, and sometime even from HR's perspective -- there's a recognition that the company has spent a lot of money on the technology platforms that they're committed to. So we're very sensitive to that and we recognize that one objective of portals is to leverage the investment that's already been made in underlying technology. So our objective is to not create any unnecessary customization and to use those products in terms of their native capabilities as much as possible. We philosophically believe that and we operationally act on that. And while that's true, there are unique needs in every HR organization that need to be considered beyond what any of those product vendors produce out of the box. So minimally, there needs to be a branded user experience. Minimally, there needs to be content and communications included somehow in the site. Can you share your thoughts on some of the innovative ways companies are encouraging employees and managers to use portals more effectively? First of all, I think that most companies are starting to recognize that we need to solve the usefulness problem and then solve the usability issue. Most companies are making sure that what's being put out on their portals is useful to people. Even if we develop an elegant interface into that, it's not inherently, in that form, useful. I think we've stopped trying to chase usability design problems outside the context of usefulness. I think people are developing smarter, more productive portals -- more focused on what's really useful to people; things that people want, not things that HR wants to broadcast. In the context of that, I think we're doing a lot of creative things. We're using a lot more multimedia on our HR portals than before, in order to acquaint people with HR programs and new concepts that are being deployed. It comes down to not just good design, but design with a purpose. And then, within that context, how are we being innovative through multimedia and smart use of video? What approaches are companies taking to make sure they're getting the feedback they need to determine what should go into a portal? One of the things companies are recognizing is that this proxy voice of the user can only go so far. From an HR perspective, we're reaching beyond subject-matter experts, even global subject-matter experts, in order to get the opinions of people who are represented in those different user profiles. So as the sites become more global and there are more HR stakeholders globally involved, we're also finding a better balance of getting the voice of the customer and the voice of the user on a global basis, too. No assuming that North America speaks for all countries or that, similarly, a couple of representative users internationally somehow represents the whole international community ... . But that doesn't mean we need to be buried in user analysis. We don't need to add months to our project to do it. It's things we sprinkle throughout the life cycle that ensure we get this continual relevant feedback from people, as opposed to conducting a usability study every two years and saying now we know everything about what people think.
What are the most common mistakes companies make when implementing a portal?
In the HR environment, one of the most typical mistakes is they really miss the idea that a good portal causes change within the organization. People, employees and managers have to do something different in order for the portal to realize its return on investment. What companies undershoot most commonly is not understanding the degree of change that a portal imposes on an organization. They don't plan appropriately for that change. An example of that would be, a company launches aggressive manager self-service in order to reduce its overall impact of head count or time spent on all of these HR processes. But it has by default shifted that accountability, that responsibility, to managers who didn't previously have that role. The company somehow thinks that if it puts the portal in front of managers with the new policy, that people envision themselves in that role, that they get why they're supposed to do it and that they're motivated to do it. That's an example of under-estimating the magnitude of the impact of change that went along with the portal channel.
June 16, 2008 Copyright 2008© LRP Publications |
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