A Day in the Life of an HR Leader
Human Resources plays a critical role in today’s enterprise. From sourcing top talent, to supporting managers and employees, HR is continuously working to create an environment where the employees are treated as their most important customers. Although we know the role of an HR professional goes beyond simply hiring and firing – what does the day-to-day of an HR professional look like? Let’s walk through a day-in-the-life of one of the most crucial roles in the enterprise.
10:00am | On-Board an Employee
Several new employees start today. For many HR professionals, this means requiring employees to complete a new hire packet that includes various forms including benefit forms, legal forms like W-4s or I-9s, and payroll documents. In addition to requiring new employees complete new-hire paperwork, it is likely that HR will need to help employees set up their workspace – this means assisting employees with a new desk setup, phone, and computer, as well as ordering peripheral devices like keyboards, monitors, or a computer mouse.
The Traditional Way:
If the HR department is no longer using paper, the digital versions of these highly confidential forms are usually passed back and forth via email or other methods of electronic delivery that do not protect privacy and do not provide a streamlined process from start to finish. Because HR controls the process manually, on-boarding new employees can be slow, and requires dedicated time and resources to complete. In addition, using disparate systems makes the on-boarding process more difficult, negatively impacting the relationship between the organization and new employees, and can fail to set new employees up for success in their new roles. In fact, Gallup has found that only 12% of employees strongly agree that their organization does a great job on-boarding new employees1.
The BMC Helix Way:
With BMC Helix Business Workflows, HR departments take advantage of a streamlined and automated on-boarding process. Manual processes from new-hire form completion to submitting a request for a new desk setup are automated. New employees can select the equipment they need from BMC Helix Digital Workplace, a one-stop shop that allows departments across the enterprise to offer their services, devices, and more. With BMC Helix Business Workflows and BMC Helix Digital Workplace, employees are empowered with an easy-to-use, self-service experience that allows them to place an order for their new devices with a few clicks. With a smooth and automated on-boarding process, new employees feel prepared to do their best work, and are empowered with the right tools to get their job done. BMC Helix frees HR professionals from cumbersome and time-consuming processes while enabling a an engaging omni-channel experience and driving employee productivity.
1:00pm | Deliver a Performance Improvement Plan
HR has been asked to help deliver a Performance Improvement Plan to an employee. Managing performance improvement can be an overwhelming and labor-intensive task for HR departments. Confidential information regarding employee performance will need to be collected and stored. Depending on the evaluation criteria, performance information will need to be reevaluated and the process repeated multiple times as an employee works to improve their standing. The process typically involves multiple levels of management with reviews and approvals at each stage of the performance management journey.
The Traditional Way:
Conducting performance management with manual and paper-based processes can become a deeply cumbersome and time-consuming task for HR departments, especially those within a larger enterprise. It can be difficult to collect and maintain employee evaluations, goals, and performance feedback as it often requires cooperation from various Lines of Business and HR leaders, as well as employees. Without automation, HR can prevent the organization from maintaining an effective goal-setting process and the ability to effectively track progress on performance objectives. Manual processes can also pose security, data privacy, and compliance issues when employee information is stored in spreadsheets or delivered via email.
The BMC Helix Way:
BMC Helix Business Workflows lays the foundation for powerful HR automation while providing a single source of truth throughout complex, inter-departmental processes, like those regarding employee performance. BMC Helix Business Workflows allows HR leaders to easily create workflows that unify tasks between multiple Talent and Employee Management Systems, enabling HR to maintain a straightforward and comprehensive management solution that drives alignment between HR and the rest of the enterprise. This is crucial and provides a way for HR to have a powerful impact on the business: Establishing an effective performance process that supports on-going feedback to employees can help increase employee productivity by 12%, according to Gartner2
3:00pm | Prepare for Open Enrollment Period
The open enrollment period for employee benefits begins today. And while HR professionals are tasked with benefits enrollment activities all year long, open enrollment often means an influx of benefit-related questions and requests. For HR leaders, this means their teams must be prepared and ready to answer questions and emails regarding any changes or updates to employee benefits. Keeping employees informed is of utmost priority, Aflac’s Annual Workforces Report found that 30% of employees say they need more information surrounding their benefits3. How does this get done?
The Traditional Way:
A large part of preparing for open enrollment is accessing and developing the HR team’s knowledge around benefits information and keeping them up to date as plans and details change each year. HR is also responsible for effectively communicating plan and benefit information out to enterprise employees and making them aware of open enrollment dates and deadlines. For many HR departments, email is the only channel that benefits information is communicated through, often leaving opportunity to reach employees in other, more effective ways.
The BMC Helix Way:
HR leaders using BMC Helix Business Workflows can effectively communicate and support their benefits open enrollment period. BMC Helix Business Workflows provides a central place for knowledge articles. Enterprise employees can quickly and easily search benefits information while intelligent technology recommends the right articles to employees. Enterprise employees can also engage with BMC Helix Chatbot via text, Skype, Slack, and online to answer their questions any time and on any device. Providing this flexibility to employees helps streamline a hectic enrollment process for both HR and enterprise employees, decreasing the number of calls to the HR hotline and preventing floods of emails. Making benefit enrollment information accessible on demand and from various channels can increase enrollment rates, helping HR to meet their annual enrollment goals.
Taking a look at a typical day of an HR professional, it is easy to see why HR has a huge impact on the rest of the enterprise. With such a crucial role to play, HR can provide value and drive innovation across the enterprise, while benefiting from streamlined processes and leveraging new technology to automate time-consuming tasks.
HR leaders can stand at the forefront to lead digital transformation in their enterprise by embracing new ways to complete their everyday work. Through a modern service management solution like BMC Helix, HR is empowered to deliver services, manage their own processes, and provide superior service to their employees.
Learn more about BMC Helix Business Workflows.
About BMC Helix Business Workflows
BMC Helix Business Workflows is an intelligent service management solution for HR that empowers business leaders to manage, automate, and scale service delivery to drive peak efficiency.
HR can leverage cognitive capabilities like intelligent case categorization and optimized knowledge recommendations. HR leaders can easily build workflows without writing code to streamline processes and automate tasks easily without the help of IT.
Chatbots recognize natural-language requests and deliver immersive experiences to end users with BMC Helix Digital Workplace and BMC Helix Chatbot integrations.
Additionally, BMC Helix Platform integration provides powerful customization, so each Line of Business can tailor applications based on their specific requirements.
Sources
- https://www.gallup.com/workplace/238085/state-american-workplace-report-2017.aspx, 2017 ↩
- https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/motivate-employees-with-ongoing-forward-looking-feedback/, 2018 ↩
- https://www.aflac.com/docs/awr/pdf/2018-overview/2018-aflac-workforces-report-employee-overview.pdf, 2018 ↩
