What are best practices for an HR shared services department?
To help you with HR shared services best practices, we asked HR leaders and CHROs this question for their best insights. From punching your weight to continuing development of your employees, there are several HR shared services best practices for you to follow.
Here are seven HR shared services best practices:
- Punch Your Weight
- Unify Your Front
- Centralize and Automate Your Data
- Understand Your Employees’ Needs and Goals
- Have a Collaborative Business Model
- Provide Feedback Through Integrated Services
- Continue Development of Employees
Punch Your Weight
If you’re not careful, HR shared services can become the dumping grounds for an endlessly growing wish list of activities. But more doesn’t always correlate with value.
Like other HR centers of excellence, shared services should resist the temptation to overpromise.
Instead, develop a specific menu of offerings and then define service-level agreements that clarify customer expectations. Champions come in all weight classes. Once you build yours, be sure to step in the right ring.
Tim Toterhi, Plotline Leadership
Unify Your Front
By having your HR shared services department all on the same page, you’ll improve both your employee and customer satisfaction and increase both your employee and customer retention. For example, a unified front will promote a “total solution” approach to all HR issues and discrepancies, leading to a more straightforward and smooth experience for all involved. Whether achieving this unified front requires increased correspondence or additional training depends on your business, but it will overall bring about better quality services.
Trey Ferro, Spot Pet Insurance
Centralize and Automate Your Data
By centralizing and automating as many of your HR tasks as possible, you can create a more efficient and cost-effective HR department that delivers better service to your employees. Centralizing your HR tasks also makes it easier for employees to do business with your company, and enables HR personnel to focus on providing better advice and service to employees. A best practice in designing a centralized HR department is to use software that can be used by all employees.
Ammad Asif, Stream Digitally
Understand Your Employees’ Needs and Goals
A best practice for an HR shared services department is to make sure that the department is always focusing on improving and innovating. The HR shared services department needs to be proactive in its approach, as well as innovative and forward-thinking. This is important because it will help to ensure that the company stays ahead of the curve, so it can meet its goals of providing excellent service and keeping employees happy.
Chad Rubin, Profasee
Have a Collaborative Business Model
Human resource departments can benefit from using a collaborative business model to offer services to workers more quickly and effectively. It provides a chance to decouple the functional from the conceptual, allowing each division to focus on providing the best possible employee engagement.
Its advantages and disadvantages, as well as best HR service and business practices, can then be discussed.
This opens up more opportunities to assess HR’s success, using indicators that link the department’s achievement to the organization’s objectives. It is vital for HR to contribute to the formulation of the company plan as a real business partner. It guarantees that the institution’s business plan prioritizes people administration and good worker engagement.
Robin Roy Krigslund-Hansen, Formula Swiss
Provide Feedback Through Integrated Services
Instead of sticking to payrolls, HR shared services departments should look to incorporate integrated services that include providing feedback. Leveraging the full potential of these services within an organization can help with HR solutions, recruitment, transactional services and talent management. These services, in turn, help the department provide the best feedback, and reward employees who have attained different milestones.
Gisera Matanda, WeLoans
Continue Development of Employees
Like any other functionality in the workplace, the use of HR shared services keeps advancing and evolving. As such, organizations need to invest in the development of people tasked to work in HR shared services.
These employees need to be regularly updated, trained and informed on any development of the services, so as to sharpen their skills while using them.
It gives them a clear digital road map, so those employees are able to adapt to future paths that the technology can take.
Leah Wanjiku Gathoni, NearbyMovers
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