Originally posted on: hrtech.sg
By Benjamin Croc , CEO & Co-Founder, BrioHR
Being at the forefront of HR digital transformation allowed me to interact with thousands of HR professionals in companies across geographies, industries, and development stages.
Those discussions were not only enriching on personal and professional aspects but also gave me a clearer understanding of the key factors to consider for a successful HR digitization process — from the definition of the needs and objectives of such digitization to the key processes to have in mind, up to the post-implementation phase.
What we realized at BrioHR by managing a large number of companies in Southeast Asia and beyond is that the foundation of successful HR digitization initiatives lies in 3 key practical areas:
- The current state of your company’s HR digitization
- The pain points you face
- The employee adoption potential
1. The current state of your company’s HR digitization
It is good to start with where you are today — by reviewing your current processes and the software you use if any. Simply start by listing down the main processes and activities you perform and the additional ones that you’d like to put into place if any.
For instance, most companies will handle payroll by themselves (some will outsource it). Most, if not all companies will recruit, onboard, manage leaves, keep track of employee records, maintain an organization chart, process expense claims, communicate with employees on company news and/or important matters, track KPIs, and perform employee appraisals.
Listing them down in a simple table and indicating if it is currently software-enabled, manual, or hybrid is a good and easy first step. Then you can add a column rating how painful it is to manage these processes, from 1 to 5. This leads us to the second key area.
2. Identifying the pain points
Every part of the job can be tedious and difficult (with hopefully many enjoyable ones too!). However, there are activities that are more prone to time-wasting and human errors, and others that can be easily “automated”.
The processes mentioned above are the more apparent ones. They can be time-consuming, and often frustrating for HR Teams. Take performance management for example, the major part of the job is to chase everyone in the organization several times before they complete their tasks, and then there are dozens of documents to be compiled. Not to forget there are also some hidden ones!
The use of multiple tools for different processes brings in a lot of extra work — synchronizing and reconciling user lists between your payroll software and the google sheets for appraisal, or looking for documents in many places (old emails, multiple shared drives, and so on).
These are usually the scenarios that will hold you back even though they are not attached to specific processes. Do keep them in mind when defining your needs.
3. Employee adoption potential
Finally, what often holds back HR digitization from being a successful one is that the solutions implemented are simply not used. Contrary to popular belief, this is not always a matter of training, this can transpire from reasons such as:
- if the interface is old, clunky, not modern enough, is a painful process to log in and find the information you need
- if it is not employee-friendly — although you may have pretty much what you need as an HR, if employees struggle to do anything with ease even if they have access to it, it’ll only end up giving you more work
- if there are multiple software to log in to, or too many spreadsheets to remember and fill up, then there’s always going to be a new learning curve that no one would really want to take time for
From Day 1, we have worked hand-in-hand with our clients and partners at BrioHR, and what consistently came up in discussions was what led us to develop a platform that was good-looking, easy-to-use, in addition to centralizing all the processes.
Having discussed these 3 key areas, you will now have a very practical view of what you will need for your HR digitization efforts, which will largely trump that purely focusing on cost or on having thousands of “gadget features” that won’t be used.
You can find BrioHR on hrtech.sg Marketplace & the 2021 Singapore HRTech Marketmap.
hrtech.sg is a Singapore-based HRTech Market Development & Analyst firm, that helps Enterprises in identifying the right HRTech solutions to support the CHRO’s transformation agenda. With more than 100 service providers, our HRTech marketplace is the largest curated HRTech marketplace in Singapore.
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