As lifestyles have become more fluid - and as the dreaded Gen-Y’ers turn up for a bit of work when it suits them - staff turnover has increased, company loyalty has plummeted and yet more management effort is being consumed on keeping staff happy and cubicles filled.

If you are lucky enough to have a dedicated HR team to track candidates, interviews, reviews, objectives, bonuses – not to mention paying the right wages - it may be less of a headache for you, but for those that don’t, and for the HR team themselves, it is a struggle to rise above the clutter and look at HR more strategically – and deliver value back to the business.

HR has moved over time from an administrative function where forms and policy manuals were king, to contributing more to the delivery of business strategy – and building and maintaining an organisation’s culture. To enable this strategic shift, there is a need to provide processes and systems that take care of the day to day administration, and provide robust data to base decisions on.

1. Know who’s working for you
You’d think your payroll system would have the answer, but does it? In an effort to rein in costs, senior management often implements an employment freeze but, in order to deliver on specific projects, may hire a consultant. This meets the need to keep headcount down and it gets the project done, but the business is paying at least twice as much for a consultant as it would pay for a contractor or employee.

The answer is an integrated human resources information system (HRIS) to collect, track and report all your HR information – not just those people on your payroll. Any person who requires access and security – or paying – is tracked through an on-boarding process. “The advantage of having the complete employee lifecycle covered in one product in one place makes all the difference to productivity.

HRIS systems utilise workflow and email technology to ensure the right tasks get done by the right people at the right time,” says Bruce Sullivan from Enterprise Support Group. An HRIS gives you vital information on how many people work for (and with) you, where they are and what they are doing so you can manage them.

2. Consider outsourcing
An increasing number of businesses are turning to business process outsourcing (BPO) as a way of reducing costs from their HR budget and allowing them more time to focus on core business, says Susan Hamilton, A/NZ senior sales manager for human capital management at Oracle.

BPO can provide organisations that are perhaps too small to afford to implement and maintain a tier-one solution in-house with access to such a solution, she says.

“It’s an attractive way for them to get worldclass software without the huge expense. It used to be that BPO typically provided just one sort of process – just payroll or just recruitment – but now they can have access to the full richness of an integrated HRM suite. The benefit of that is that they can have completely integrated systems.”

Oracle offers BPO models through its PeopleSoft and Oracle E-Business Suite.

3. Manage staff reviews
When a valued staff member resigns you’re likely to lose at least three months of productivity – and more likely six to nine months before a new recruit is up to speed. Wouldn’t it have been nice to know they were planning a move, and to have a successor trained up and ready to step into their shoes?

Ranald Hendriks from Starf.net says the solution is to manage your reviews. “While a resignation is a good opportunity to review your business goals and check that your people are strategically aligned, you are much better off having an ear to the ground so you can plan your recruitment needs, rather than just reacting after the fact,” he says.

Hendriks and his team at Starf have developed a unique product that involves offline recruitment and performance management training for managers, backed up by access to STARF, an online tool that dynamically manages customised job descriptions, recruitment documents, contracts and performance management. Taking a step back to review is the backbone to strategic recruitment and retention.

4. Put your HR policies online
The key to minimising the likelihood of prosecution is for your policies and processes to be above board, transparent and understood by everyone in the business.

While having a great big policy manual and reams of forms helps, it has limited effectiveness because it relies on everyone having access and keeping them up to date.

Putting the HR policy manual on the intranet is not much better as it is usually a dump of the paper based documents and, unless well indexed, makes searching even harder. So, we need something that is easily updatable, easy to understand, searchable and can hold all the information we need. Ivan Seselj, director at Promapp says that while documenting processes is common in other disciplines, it is an emerging area for HR.

“By having your HR policies and processes online, you immediately meet the three principles of process management - simple, available and improving,” he says. “And because it is online, rather than on paper, you can be absolutely sure that everyone is looking at the latest version and following the same process and the latest procedures – essential when employment law has changed.”

5. Recruit the right people
With the tightest labour market in years, finding the right person for your vacancy is getting even harder. You need to move fast – wait a week and you’ll lose a great candidate to the competition.

To really understand candidates, the right assessment tool can provide you with researched and validated data around the competencies and abilities you’re seeking.

Julie Cressey, national manager - organisational development at Madison Recruitment, says: “Assessment is a piece of the puzzle. It gives you further guidance on where to probe at the interview and when taking references. And because you can’t always get the best-fit candidate for your role, understanding their learning potential and areas for development up front means you go into the employment relationship with your eyes open and can tailor training to meet their, and your, needs.”

Cressey is a keen proponent of using a fully integrated recruitment process. “We have a number of clients who have seen assessment dramatically increase retention and performance because we recruit competencies that have proven and validated correlation to success in their environment,” she says.

6. Learn to retain your best people
The next step on from recruitment is to hang on to your best people.

Mike Carden, CEO of Sonar6, explains it like this: “Let’s say your organisation has 6 competencies. If you have 20 employees, that’s 120 individual ratings you have to remember.”

Making strategic decisions based on objective data becomes very difficult, if not impossible, if you don’t have the systems and data at hand. Put like that, you can see why Carden and his team developed Sonar6. With a graphical interface, Sonar6 is intuitive and simple to use with roll up reports that let you see exactly where your talent lies and where there might be problems.

Carden also talks about the importance of making a system engaging and easy to use so that people want to use them.

Giving your stars opportunities to contribute at a senior level in the organisation, selecting them for awards, appointing them to high profile projects – all add to the person’s sense of self worth and belief that the company is listening to what they have to say. It also allows you to test how the individual responds to these situations, and tailor your plans accordingly.

7. Engage with staff
The closest thing to a crystal ball in human resources is understanding how engaged your employees are with your company, vision and goals.

The more engaged your people are the more willing they are to go the extra mile, the better they will perform and the longer they will stay. By measuring elements of engagement, you can see what you need to start doing, what you need to stop doing and what you should keep doing.

By increasing employee engagement levels, research shows you can reduce staff turnover, increase customer satisfaction, and ultimately improve your bottom line. Heather King, General Manager of JRA (NZ) Ltd says “With attraction and retention being such a hot topic for just about every organisation, more and more effort is being put into working out how to create a great place to work and increase levels of employee engagement. Survey-online.com enables an organisation to collect data efficiently via the internet, report back results instantly, ‘slice and dice’ the data themselves and then work out what in the organisation are the handful of things that are really driving employee engagement. This means an organisation can base their HR planning on concrete data and respond to real issues in a targeted and timely way.”

For more information visit the HR, e-recruitment Research Pavilion for exhibits, case studies, white papers and downloads including the 2008 iStart Human Resource IS Solutions Guide from a range of New Zealand’s leading Human Resource, e-recruitment Solutions vendors.

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