HR Process Improvement

Our client, a leading mid-tier legal firm was seeking to review their employee lifecycle processes in order to evaluate new HRIS technologies.  The current HR systems were nearing end of life and current business processes were not standard across each state office. In order to retain their market leading position as an employer of choice, an end to end review was required of the employee lifecycle (Hire to Retire). To create a seamless experience for employees across each office standard processes needed to be defined and agreed.

Over a period of time the firm had expanded their operations into several states.  While the firm had worked hard to establish a national IT infrastructure there was variation in the way HR processes were managed across the states. There were several key challenges the firm was looking to resolve as part of the employee lifecycle review.

Standard processes – Each state had developed their own processes and procedures for managing parts of the employee lifecycle. A specific example was the way each state was managing the recruitment process.

Operational inefficiencies – There were gaps and inconsistencies in business processes. This was increasing the transactional costs of HR services and was impacting the employee experience depending on where they were onboarded.

Technology – The current HR systems in place to support the employee lifecycle were not well integrated, aged and inflexible.  This was increasing the total cost of ownership.

A high-level employee lifecycle architecture was defined with the senior HR executives and program leads.  This was focused on developing a clear view of the end to end processes to form a basis for workshops with key stakeholders.  Each office identified key subject matter experts who would contribute to the design of new processes across each phase of the employee lifecycle. This included representatives from People & Culture, Information Technology, Finance and Facilities. To reduce travel costs all process workshops were delivered via video conferencing.

Our approach in the current state AS-IS workshop was to utilise design thinking principles to gain an understanding of the following key areas:

1. How does the process currently work at each office?
2. What are the priority issues that need to be resolved?

By starting out understanding the key pain points in each process we were able to quickly work with participants to form a view of the key priorities that needed to be resolved.  We then moved everyone’s thinking to describe the current processes.  As everyone was not co-located it was easier to document the process outside of the workshop and circulate for review once we had established the process flows.  Each group of subject matter experts would play back the current state process designs to the rest of the team so they were able to discuss and agree on what the priorities were from a collective viewpoint.  This helped us form a baseline of current employee lifecycle processes across the national practice.

This baseline was reviewed with senior executives to understand and agree on the approach for establishing a future state employee lifecycle. We adopted the same approach for the definition of the future state TO-BE processes with subject matter experts.  We utilised design thinking principles to understand the following key areas:

1. What ideas do people have to improve the current process?
2. What are the priorities that need to be implemented short, medium and long term?
3. What non-value adding activities can we remove from the current state processes?

The workshops enabled us to agree standard TO-BE processes and to develop a robust list of business requirements for the evaluation of new technologies. We then worked closely with the P&C and IT team to evaluate new technologies.  The intent was to provide a recommendation to the firms executive that would outline options to deliver an integrated, scalable platform that would underpin the firm for its next growth phase.

The employee lifecycle evaluation provided a robust basis for executive decision making.  The key outcomes from the project were:

Key pain points defined and prioritised – Key issues from across each business function were documented and prioritised. This enabled quick wins to be identified and implemented across the employee lifecycle.

Formal process documentation – The development of standard process documentation that could be used by all states provided a basis for operational improvements.

Strategic technology evaluation – The TO-BE process designs and detailed business requirements provided a solid basis for the review and evaluation of HRIS platforms with vendors.

The review enabled the firm to move forward with decision making in a critical area of their business.  The work provided a basis to:

• Develop a centralised, dynamic knowledge base for referencing current policies, processes and procedures
• Review and evaluate new cloud based technologies against the business requirements provided that enable the firm to retain their market leading position as an employer of choice
• Develop a strategy for change to underpin the implementation of new technologies across the employee lifecycle