The Importance of an HRMS to Any Company
Posted in General by Tina
Human Resource Management Software (HRMS) is an important tool for any company, whatever its size.Think, first, what you company needs to do just to keep its head above water:
Management everywhere needs to be able to communicate effectively and efficiently with its workforces, so that a dialogue which helps sustain company culture is created, maintained and exchanged;
Remuneration needs to be paid on time and accurately;
Time and labor needs to be managed correctly, so that maximum advantage can be obtained from the resources available;
Company benefits need to be administered productively, so that workforces not only see an added value in sticking by their current employer but are also prepared to actively advocate to others the potential advantages of working for the company in question;
Finally, employee skills matrices need to be set up and tracked in order to better predict and understand future training and employment requirements;
A lot of balls to be juggling simultaneously?
Yes, if you do it the hard way. In fact, some companies seem addicted to old ways of doing things. Helping an addict isn’t always easy – especially when they don’t want to be helped.
However, whilst a good company with good people used to be able to get by with many a manual procedure, these days it’s hardly going to be enough. The competitive edge modern business demands means every procedure and process needs to get it right first time – and for far less than it cost in the past. This competitive edge can only be achieved through software systems whose intelligent implementation leads not only to greater automation and the benefits this brings but also to a digitalization of the intellectual property which constitutes a traditional HR department.
“Start as you mean to go on”
This is why a properly and wisely implemented HRMS is just as important for a company in its infancy as it is for a transnational corporation with tens of thousands of people. An HRMS implemented early on in the business cycle means the company is primed and ready for the challenges of growth from the very beginning.
Let’s imagine, however, for a second, the alternative to the above approach. Just contemplate the trauma you might encounter when, after several years of early and head-turning growth, you suddenly discover that profits seem to be taking a tumble. No one seems able to work out the reason, so – as an idea which comes out of one of a series of exploratory board meetings – you decide to carry out a company-wide opinion survey to see if some common thoughts can’t be extracted.
The survey has to be outsourced, of course – you simply don’t have the resources to carry out the task yourselves in what has clearly become (at least as per their initial reaction) an overstretched HR department.
The survey takes place over a four-week period. Personnel are all informed the results will be entirely anonymous, and that the results will be promptly communicated to all interested parties.
Unfortunately, the message that seems to get through is that anonymity will be anything but guaranteed. The survey is a disaster – everyone responds how happy they are with everything, and no one is prepared to suggest that anything at all is amiss in any way.
To cut a long story short, it would appear that in HR the message you want to get out to your employees is changing as it goes down the line.
Crunch time
One weekend, you decide to have a face-to-face with all the HR department. You invite them to a neutral conference facility and make it plain no one will be leaving until the truth is revealed and uncovered. Little by little, as people see there is no alternative, everything that has gone wrong in the past year becomes patent:
Communication is unclear – no one knows how much the workforce need to know or when;
Too many wage slips have had to be recalculated recently as new legislation on pension contributions has turned the system upside down – this has led to innumerable calls from colleagues wanting confirmation of when and how the situation will be resolved;
People in different departments are doing the same task but for different pay; they even take different periods of time to carry out the activity. This is causing friction as staff begin to believe that favoritism has begun to play a big part in how the company is managed;
As share prices have become volatile, trust in the company benefits scheme has shrunk. Many people wonder whether it is sensible to participate in such schemes, especially as they see that bonus arrangements appear to reward one’s place in the hierarchy and not one’s results;
Employees have bombarded the HR helpline asking why promised training paths have not been put in place, or why courses which did exist have now been pulled indefinitely from the matrix;
In short, an overstretched HR department is in the process of undermining all the goodwill which less than five years of astonishing growth had helped to generate.
The solution
So what’s the solution? What can you do to dig yourself out of the hole you’ve ended up in?
Anticipate the next five years of predicted growth by digitalizing, now, the whole HR department and its procedures and processes;
Give them the HRMS tool they require to get on top of the day-to-day chores – implement it intelligently by taking your time, in order to get it right first time;
By doing the above, you will release overstretched staff from the drudge of mainly manual procedures, so that they can do all the other value-adding activities which involve face-to-face and telephone support for people who will surely be in need of real people;
For good change is as challenging as bad change.
Just make sure the change you put up in front of your people is the good kind and not the bad.
Imogen Reed
England
