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Let's Return To the Norm
In human resources, as in every major business function, there is a need to concentrate on what gives us unique, competitive, long-term advantage. The modern corporation is a combination of talent, technology, capital, services and products. But what parts of those resources contribute to our bottom line and what parts diminish it? All elements of HR service, whether owned or outsourced, need to be judged against that standard. We face the prospect of choppier, more treacherous markets and we have to meet those challenges with a workforce that will be changing rapidly. The retirement of baby boomers means that, inevitably, we will replace experienced resources in HR with less-experienced people and more automation. In addition, job sharing, partial retirements and global sourcing of jobs will lead to more complex service delivery. Against these changes, we need to examine every workforce practice and plan. We have to ask ourselves whether uniqueness serves us or hurts us. Many colleagues, both within the HR profession and in the outsourcing world, have asked whether Round 2 of HRO will be very different from Round 1. There were some glaring failures in Round 1: global payroll on a single-instance, single system for organizations with as few as 200 employees; attempted "full" automation of expatriate services; and self-service for everything, even when that was highly inefficient -- to name a few. But those problems should not blur the fact that hundreds of thousands of daily transactions in HRO are executed flawlessly. Many of the Round 1 problems have resulted from a lack of uniformity and standardization. Both providers and clients have failed to realize how hard it is to standardize HR processes across divisions and branches, and both must now be part of introducing new disciplines around this area. A major American manufacturer grew by acquisition and left the eight pension plans it acquired largely alone. The company never consolidated the pension trusts, the plan administration or any of the terms of the plans. The consequence was to need many more people to calculate benefits, to deal with plan changes and benefits, and to produce an array of summary-plan descriptions and annual reports. What did those differences add to the bottom line? Only cost and complexity. The new HRIT architecture that is gaining traction is software as a service, and a primary requirement of SaaS' cost optimization and efficiency is standardization of process and data. On the human-interaction component of HR services, we need to see standardization of processes as well. Every single HR process needs to be tested to see what differences exist between departments, divisions, subsidiaries and business segments, and every deviation from a company's best-practice standard needs to be reviewed and justified or replaced with the standard. Doing that takes an immense amount of work, but those who start now will find less inconsistency in the treatment of employees and better, less expensive services than they knew before. Lowell Williams is executive director of HR Advisory Services for EquaTerra, a BPO consulting firm based in Houston. He can be reached at lowell.williams@equaterra.com. March 1, 2010 Copyright 2010© LRP Publications |
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© Copyright 2012 LRP Publications. All rights reserved.
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