Providing Consistent HR Service Delivery – Can you Achieve Perfection?
Perfection. A laudable goal to strive for, but one rarely achieved. As I was reading a blog post by SystematicHR (Wes Wu) last week concerning HR Service Delivery, Global or Regional: HR Service Delivery Should Always Be Perfect , my first thought was, “How could Wes think that HR Service Delivery could ever be perfect?”, but as I read further I realized that Wes was just using the goal of perfection to speak towards continual improvement in your HR Service Delivery with the real goal of providing consistent HR service delivery for all employees.
Wes and I agree on the goal; we even agree that you need to capture important information to increase the chances of providing better service delivery. The problem with Wes’ suggestion is it assumes that your HR Service Center can first identify the information you want to capture, and then actually collect it. This is a problem that occurs frequently within HR: the inability to capture the important metrics that help you improve your service delivery and drive towards Wes’ hoped for “perfect” service.
So how do you record these all important data points to improve service delivery? First, you need to determine the key metrics in your organization. Really, no surprise there. But how? If you are fortunate to have experts in house who understand business processes, you may already have a good start. If not, there are many resources in the marketplace from consultants to best practices, even a conference devoted to HR metrics. Dovetail will be contributing to this subject by be conducting a pre-conference workshop at the upcoming HR Shared Service Summit in May in Chicago, titled The Holy Grail of Metrics: Defining the Quality and Efficiency Metrics for HR Shared Services.
After you determine the key metrics you want to measure, technology can help you capture the information you have identified, specifically HR case management software. It allows an organization to manage and track employee interactions with HR, regardless of the channel or location. All employee accessed documents, email interactions, notes and phone calls are stored in the system, providing a complete audit trail of employee communication with HR. Most importantly, the right HR case management system will have the reporting capabilities to capture the metrics you have identified. If it doesn’t, you probably picked the wrong software.
Now, with your metrics defined and good HR case management software operating in your organization you are well on your way to providing consistent HR Service Delivery and towards Wes’ goal of Perfection.
Until Next Time,
Stephen
