Article: HR leading digital transformation: Evalueserve's story

Technology

HR leading digital transformation: Evalueserve's story

Thinking of taking the first step towards HR transformation. Read on to know Evalueserve's story.
HR leading digital transformation: Evalueserve's story

Today, organizations are grappling with a multitude of challenges, of which the primary being the onset of the digital era and the consequent confusion with regards to organizational adaption. The HR function has been the most affected by this change. From process and project management, the HR function is chiefly evolving into a people-management one. Applications which were offline and required heavy investment in in-house physical infrastructure are now light and cloud-based. In an environment which is both challenging and rewarding, how does the HR ensure that the employee experience is uniform and seamless across territories? A cloud-based software could be an answer to all these questions, especially the one that helps manage the employee life-cycle from hire to retire.

And what is good is that organizations have also realized that the benefits of digital transformation are immense. The primary one being that organizations who have successfully transformed themselves can be part of the digital economy and reap the benefits in terms of better engagement, faster and much more efficient process, and this can be true for both internal employees and external customers. Evalueserve provides specialist services for research, analytics and data management. They partnered with SAP SuccessFactors with an agenda to make performance and learning experience agile and seamless.

This article has been curated from the session, ‘How HR at a global professional service provider is leading digital transformation’ by Puja Kapoor, VP HR, Evalueserve.

HR digitization was part of the larger organizational transformation

The digitization of the HR processes was an outcome of focused group discussions across the organization with a cross-section of employees from different levels. It was found that weak user experience and lack of flexibility of the HR processes at a business unit level were a cause of low engagement. With a focused approach to redefining employee experience for its people, Evalueserve decided to invest in people technologies. As part of the larger picture to transforming the organization, it was realized that HR processes needed to be completely digitized.

Objectives for HR digital transformation

Evalueserve identified the following objectives

a. Improve efficiency

b. Improve employee connect

c. Build flexibility in processes

d. Improve user experience

“We started with a raw vision, and after several conversations and conducting focus group discussions within the organization we realized that we wanted HR to become completely paperless,” said Puja Kapoor, VP HR, Evalueserve.

Approximately 18 months from today, Evalueserve was not paperless and Evalueserve realized then that their people processes prevalent in the organization were preventing them from adopting paperless experience. 

Steps followed by Evalueserve

  • Feedback from internal users on HR tools
  • Identification of the vendor
  • Gathering information on requirements
  • Implementation kicks off
  • Development of the modules
  • Development of the core HR ERP which was built in-house
  • Testing of the tools
  • Implementation in phases 
  • Rebrand internal HR tools
  • Education of change to different levels of leadership and stakeholders
  • Identifying ambassadors for change adoption
  • Launch the tools

Impact

The two tools which were used by Evalueserve in partnership with SAP SuccessFactors were Performance and Learning. To enable a meaningful recall of new tools when launched, the new HR tools were branded under the name of Lighthouse HR. Lighthouse just as it means, it throws the spotlight on different data and career aspects be it performance or learning or core HR.

Lighthouse Performance: About 80% of the employees completed their goal setting on the new tool. The feedback received on the tool was largely positive with words being used ‘intuitive’, and ‘improved user experience’. The pluses were that it had ‘flexible goal categories’ and ‘flexible performance templates’. Over the period of 12-18 months, it helped enable continuous and year-long performance management, apart from enhancing organizational productivity.

Lighthouse Learning: The module had around 80% unique users in the first three months. The positive of using the platform were the ‘well defined structured learning paths through curriculum structure’. In the 12-18 months, it was found that program enabled a culture of ongoing learning by providing forums for discussions, mobile learning, bite-sized learning chapters and anytime anywhere new hire orientation.

Things to keep in mind

Puja Kapoor during the session also provided the audience with Evalueserve’s learning. 

  • First and foremost, always deploy a new technology in HR only if it is a simplifier and if it has an ability to impact employee experience.

  • Second, while choosing a cloud-based software to assess the extent to which the application can be customized and can sustain change in performance models in the future as well.

  • Third, the firm needs to identify a good implementation partner. In Evalueserve’s case, the implementation partner was a tier 1 partner who has extensive experience of the product from the design of the SAP SuccessFactors product. The implementation partner must have a thorough knowledge of the software. It is important to stress test the partner on the tool's ability to adapt to organizational need and it is incorporated into the contract.

  • Fourth, most cloud-based applications come with regular updates. Once the organization has completed its market research and chosen a partner of their choice, they should develop in-house capability, and which just be one technical administrator who understand the software in an out. And when the application receives the updates, he can choose which ones to accept and which ones to reject.
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Topics: Technology, C-Suite, Strategic HR

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