Housing group puts down foundations for digital HR
- Summary:
-
Digitizing HR processes frees up time for staff at Walsall Housing Group to work on strategic issues.
If anything changes, one of our first questions to ourselves is: can we get it online?
So says Mike Sutton, HR manager at Walsall Housing Group, which manages, rents and repairs roughly 19,000 social housing properties in the Walsall area of the West Midlands, UK.
The HR department has gone through a major transformation to digitally enable its HR processes for its 670 employees. Sutton expands:
This wasn’t a business problem so much as getting more value for money and getting more lean and using technology a lot more. There were a number of strands of HR and finance where we were looking to put in more automation where we could.
One element of the digitization process was to shift its paper-based expenses process to the cloud-based Expenses system from Software Europe.
Previously, employees had to fill in paper forms to claim their expenses, attaching any receipts. Managers then had to approve those expenses and check they matched company policy (which relied on managers actually remembering the policy on things, such as the maximum lunch allowance that can be claimed). Then the form was forwarded to finance to check and organize payment.
Although the amounts claimed were generally quite small, it could be time consuming to deal with pages and pages of small journey fuel claims. There were also plenty of opportunities for human error, says Sutton, which could slow the process down:
There could be hold ups with the system – people go on holiday, paper goes missing – it was quite an elongated system to get through.
With a fully automated system where receipts have been scanned in, the whole process is much faster. If a claim doesn’t meet with policy or something needs checking, such as making two identical cab claims to the same destination on the same day, which could be entirely justified, then this is flagged up immediately.
Adopting the system has bought finance and HR closer together. Before the automation, expenses was the responsibility of finance, but HR pointed out that implementing new software-as-a-service expenses system meant that HR could take over the service. According to Sutton, this has enabled finance staff to work on other more strategic tasks:
It’s costing us less in finance and HR to run those systems and people are freed up for other projects.
HR has also reduced the number of people in the team in a bid to deliver more savings, but this was done before the digitization process began. This not only “forced our arm”, notes Sutton, to look hard at gaining efficiencies where they could, but it also meant that employees did not feel that it was the digitization process itself that was the cause of a slimmed down department.
Gradual process
Rather than go digital overnight, the housing group chose to gradually digitize HR processes with its chosen core HR cloud supplier, CIPHR. First HR process to go online was the annual leave booking. This gave some of the less technically-able employees time a chance to begin to familiarize themselves with working online.
Sutton notes that it would have been a much harder sell to begin the digitization process by putting something like appraisals online at the beginning:
People would have seen that as pushy without having done the other things first and bought into it early on with expenses and annual leave.
He adds:
Because people trust expenses and trust annual leave, they’re quite happy to put their overtime online.
Alongside annual leave, expenses and overtime online, e-learning and job applications are also online. The next phase is to add onboarding, so the association can start engagement with new staff before their start date. Sutton adds:
More capacity for workforce planning and succession planning and talent management is also something we need to look at.
The team has just opened up talent folders on its recruitment software, so that it can keep details and keep communicating with good candidates who were unsuccessful with a previous application.
There is also work going on to connect all the different systems, so that if someone hurts their back and has time off work, this information is captured through its outsourced absence management partner, FirstCare, and then that information will be automatically forwarded to the occupational health advisor who could arrange physio within 48 hours. Quick intervention can hopefully speed up recovery time for staff.
The whole digitization process has given staff the opportunity to question the way things have always been done, removing unnecessary parts or entire processes to improve efficiency.
While HR has put as much as possible online, there’s a wider channel shift elsewhere in the organization to deliver services to customers online too.