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The HR department was seen mainly as an overhead that did not directly generate revenue in the past. Back then, HR professionals had to justify their budget needs to C-Suite executives. However, things have changed dramatically since then. Today, HR’s budget is a given. Management has come to realize the importance of human capital management and its overall value in driving business profitability. HR is now no longer considered to be a cost centre. Infact, its role has evolved into one of a profit centre, where it now makes strategic decisions that drive company’s growth and profit.

Here are three key factors that have driven this change:

1. Realising that it’s all about the people:

A company needs people, no matter what the business is. Human capital is the driving profitability force behind any business. Without passionate employees working for the right job, a company is practically nonexistent. HR plays an important role in keeping employees positively engaged.

 

Practices such as helping new employees to adapt, celebrating high achievers, and training low performers are some of the ways HR has helped improve the effectiveness of the company. By doing all of this and more, HR creates an opportunity for the company to seek out new business opportunities and grow its revenue.

 

 

 

2. Knowing that a well-developed employee is a profitable employee:

A business is only as strong as its employees. Hence, employee development is crucial in driving company growth and profitability. There are various positive outcomes to the different types of employee training out there. For example, training programmes in service can lead to better customer service for a com pany in the hospitality industry.

Another type, leadership and management workshops, can help employees to grow and move up within an organizatio

n, resulting in time and money saved from looking externally. Training in the ever-evolving IT technology equips employees with the knowledge and capability to stay on top of the industry, leading to better productivity and increased revenue.

A company that doesn’t believe in training and growing its employees runs the risk of losing out in the long run. Not only does training increase morale and productivity, it also positions the organization well in the industry, which leads to profitability and attracts higher quality people in return. HR plays a vital role as direct managers of a company’s human capital by keeping employees positively engaged through strategic learning programmes. A company with access to the very best talent enjoys the benefits of the direct impact on business profits and growth. This profit generation comes from the innovative management of human capital.

3. Acknowledging HR’s transformation and influence in a company’s bottom line:

HR transformation is coming. Organizations are heading towards a lean workforce. Essentially, this is a situation with a smaller core workforce supported by a larger remote (or virtual) workforce. Technology has created new ways for employees to work and contribute to the business’ bottom line.

As technology guides us towards a re-imagined workforce, HR will be a key player in successfully managing this transformation to ensure a company’s continued growth and profitability. With a technology-receptive and social-ready mindset, HR helps generate value by lowering business costs while hiring the right talent who can generate profit for the organization. Instead of being seen as a cost of doing business, HR now holds a vital seat at the management table, one that directly influences the profitability of any business.

Should you have any HR Transformation queries/requirements, please feel free to Get in Touch.

The major issue large organisations experience within the HR department is managing transformation. They’re either working with legacy systems that don’t effectively operate together or they’re fighting an old employee mindset hesitant to change. With attracting and retaining talent vital for success HR plays a major role in driving business growth.

Robinsons & RSH Group of Companies

Robinsons & RSH Group of Companies is part of the Al-Futtaim Group, a large conglomerate of diverse subsidiaries operating in the Gulf and Asia region. Robinsons, acquired by Al-Futtaim in 2008, operates three retail entities – Robinsons, John Little and Marks & Spencer – in Singapore and Malaysia. The RHS Group is a marketer, distributor and retailer for over 50 sports, golf, active lifestyle and fashion brands in the Asian region.

Scattered HR Processes

AI-Futtaim took over the Robinsons Group of Companies in 2008, and invested in RSH Group of Companies in 2012. The HR problem Al-Futtaim discovered when they took on such a range of different subsidiaries was the different systems and the resulting scattered process within the department. They also found roadblocks with the HR mindset; they were hesitant to move from a paper based to online system. To integrate all their different parts Al-Futtaim required a single, simple solution across the entire HR life cycle.

Finding an HR Transformation Partner

To integrate their different subsidiaries, Robinsons needed a single solution across the entire HR life cycle and an expert HR Transformation partner to replace their existing scattered process. Rolling Arrays was recommended to Robinsons as Asia’s premier HR transformation company with more than 100 successful HR Transformation projects to its credit.

Moving HR to the Cloud

For 4000 employees across Singapore & Malaysia, Robinsons & RSH Group needed integrated solution for:

• Core HR
• Payroll Management
• Time Management
• Performance & Goal Management
• Recruiting Management

Rolling Arrays analysed and re-designed the existing scattered processes and map them to system functionalities using SAP SuccessFactors for an integrated solution. Rolling Arrays recommended a phased roll out approach (16 weeks) instead of original plan for a Big Bang roll out of SuccessFactors to ensure Robinsons & RSH Group of companies has sufficient resources to support the project. Rolling Arrays provided a simple solution for Al-Futtaim’s HR complexity by its consultative approach and strong knowledge of the HR processes, functions, software and HR best practice.

The Outcome:

The results for the Robinsons & RSH Group operating in Singapore and Malaysia were immediate. The user-friendly system got buy in from users, integrated all the teams on one system, streamlined and aligned procedures and processes while achieving synergy in delivering results. The business can now generate more analytical HR reports that are meaningful and drive business growth. The next step is to roll out the solution to more countries in the region. “Rolling Arrays strives to meet our expectations with the necessary skills and professionalism. The team members are capable and responsive to our requirements. Rolling Arrays displayed high level of commitment. ” – Chee Nian Tze, Group Human Resources Director, Robinsons

How Streamlining HR Processes affected the Business?

As Group HR Director of Robinsons & RSH Group, Chee Nian Tze said, ” The implementation has positive impact on our businesses in Singapore and Malaysia in the following areas:

• Integrated the teams on one system
• Streamlined and aligned procedures and processes
• Achieved synergy in delivering results

The most surprising results is the ability to generate more analytical reports compared to other HR solutions and to set up more reports that are meaningful to better support the business.”

Evolving Role of HR

A need for superior HR processes – is growing within organizations and can only be achieved by creating high quality work environment through consistency. HR processes are often tedious and cumbersome rather than taking a dynamic approach to creating a meaningful dialogue with employees and making effective decisions about talent.

Experienced HRs have an idea of what it takes to make a good quality work environment but it all boils down to strongly accepting methods to sustain more productive conversation and talent decisions. One such example is using cloud technology for talent management as it is flexible, easy to use and accessible from any corner of the world. Cloud computing works in a similar fashion as the GPS system, giving clear directions to the leaders at the right time in the format required to help them make better real-time decisions. Cloud computing helps HR professionals to make use of the information hiding behind spreadsheets and tons of data by streamlining into goals and actions while complying to all business norms. The only way to sustain business success is through consistent development by the right people focusing in the right direction.

HR’s new role is to contribute to the business through 2 basic functions of personnel management and business execution.

• Personnel Management – Takes care if all legal and law enforcement issues are covered. These are more administrative functions like payroll, healthcare benefits, annual and sick leaves, all legal documentation of the employee from the time they are interviewed to the time they exit the company. Even though personnel management is essential for a company, yet it is never given the due importance by business leaders till it does not work. But, automating these processes gives room to HR professionals to think strategically and business like rather than stay indulgent in sorting administrative work.
• Business Execution – relates to talent management processes that help foster business results from the workforce. Get the right people at the right jobs and retaining them by keeping their employees engaged. Business execution usually gets ignored by HR professionals in light of being caught in administering day to day functions.

Business Drivers

Each business driver will have a different effect on your business depending at which stage you are of your business cycle. One or more factors will play their role in business success at any given time. Developing HR processes to address these six drivers is critical to maintaining long term performance.

Alignment – The top management needs to spend time in defining their organizational goals and objectives with the Human resources to align each department’s goals and purpose with that of the organization. When employees are aware and aligned with the organizations strategic goals and successes will push employees to work harder and motivate much more and learn more.

Efficiency – is achieved when the right people are fit in to the right jobs, resulting in quick response time, and achieving individual and departmental goals with fewer resources. Therefore, organizations that excel are the ones who invest the most on employees and quality talent as they will be the most valuable to the organization in the long run.

Scalability – Businesses need to be flexible in order to shift their strategies around according to market trends. When organizations are scalable, they rely on their effective systems to locate and deploy resources as and when needed. In an aggressive business market, reallocating internal resources efficiently is also categorized as scalability.

Productivity – is all about the gap between what you need to do and what is actually achieved. Employees are responsible for bringing the results which the organizations set out for them to achieve. In order to evaluate productivity, incentive and reward systems are developed by the human resources to evaluate performance of employees and motivate them to keep working harder.

Sustainability – every business at the start focuses on achieving results but overlooks the unplanned losses that the organization bears by not being able to sustain key talent that is the focus of achieving strategic goals. In order for organizations to be sustainable, they need to develop systems, which can easily predict, manage and control the employee turnover.

Governance – is all about creating processes to guarantee that employees are not excluded from organizational opportunities, preventing them from gaining short-term results through unfair means, prevent unethical, or unsafe behavior. Companies need to use consistent and well-defined processes to hire and manage talent based on values and beliefs. Good corporate governance is on a constant watch-out for legal changes to business rules and employee rules and obligations.

 

Rolling Arrays is Asia’s premier award winning HR transformation company, headquartered in Singapore with offices in 6 countries. Since its inception in transformation projects for more than 50 blue-chip clients across Asia. A consultative approach to HR processes, HR functions and HR software is Rolling Arrays core expertise and the primary catalyst for its success.

The human resource department is still struggling to be known as a business partner entity within an organization. It started in the early 70’s as administrative roles of hiring, firing and managing compensation and payrolls. Business leaders still think HR has still not pulled up its socks and is a reactive department than a proactive business partner helping the organization and its people grow.

The misunderstanding is further aggravated as most tasks completed by the Human Resource Department are not built on number games; like the speed of hiring people; training a certain number of managers; completing performance reviews etc.

The new role of human resources that business leaders want to see is that of the H.R. Business Partner, that goes against the stigma of ‘Human Resource Department’. In order to do so, HR professionals need to think like business minds and not just HR. It would be good for HR professionals to get hands on training under a business unit for understanding the business philosophy, tricks of the trade and the psyche of the numbers.

Organizations in today’s global business world want their HR departments to actively take control of building the organization by:

Redefining the Organizations Purpose

The one distinctive instrument for the top and bottom line management growth is ‘corporate purpose’. Companies need to very clearly define, or redefine their purpose of existence. Just like every individual re-evaluates his purpose of life, similarly organizations need to embed that purpose in its people. Working merely for a paycheck shouldn’t be the purpose of working for a particular organization.

In order to achieve that purpose, organizations need to be inspired. They must have done something to be so proud of…being that inspiration. To achieve all of this organizations need to:

Define: Every single employee of your organization must be clearly able to say why their organization exists?

Align: Understanding the purpose and how it connects to your job and department is the next important thing. Aligning the purpose to a collective effort with tools and systems will align the purpose of the organization.

Result: What are the business results achieved by aligning the organizations purpose?

This should reduce the organizations turnover rate and costs while increasing productivity and profits.

New Talent that will simply love your organization

Employees are usually taken aback and lose trust in the organization they work for, when organizations fail to deliver what they had promised. The company’s market image is harmed if employees are not living up to their EVP (Employee Value Proposition). Prepare a survey to find a good fit while conducting new hire interviews to understand what kind of a person best suits the organization environment.

Build Employee Potential

For a human resources department it is imperative to hone employee strengths and bring them to perform. Use strength effective tools to find out about your employees, or for new hires the quality of questions will determine if the candidate is a good match.

Once the strengths of employees are highlighted, then the HRs can work around and develop on overcoming the weaknesses for turning employees into top performers.

Aligning Organizational Goals

All employees and leaders need to work as a team to achieve the collective goals and objectives. Human resources are responsible for building an effective reward and incentive system, which will tie in the employees’ goals to the organizations objectives and purpose.

Measuring Return on Investment

To create an effective and accurate system to measure return on investment, all departments should be able to answer how they are contributing to the top and bottom line, and how can their departments impact be measured effectively? How is this information going to contribute to the overall success of the organization?

Creating a tracking result system will give an exact picture of the organizations achievement of goals and objectives.

The overall role of Human Resources has changed and in order to attract the best talent as millennial are taking over, the human resource needs to start thinking like a business thinking partner for the organization.

 

Rolling Arrays is Asia’s premier award winning HR transformation company, headquartered in Singapore with offices in 6 countries. Since its inception in transformation projects for more than 50 blue-chip clients across Asia. A consultative approach to HR processes, HR functions and HR software is Rolling Arrays core expertise and the primary catalyst for its success.

In today’s constantly growing and unpredictable business environment more business organizations are opting for office management and HR solutions that could automate their processes, reduce the risk and time consumed in manual documentation to lower their own stress level as well as improving productivity of their department.

Organizations and agencies too are on the road to reaping the benefits of implementing the best HR practices within their organization. Organizations  feel the need to be ever more productive in their day to day challenges fire fighting their way to be valuable and productive with every fiscal input as well as efficient.

Agencies have been able to not only reduce costs, but also purge on consumption, ineffectiveness, along with improving productivity, employee engagement and the services which they originally offer. Some of the practices that have shown positive results are:

Optimizing Human Resources – Automation of HR processes has reduced the unnecessary work load off their employees and personnel are working to their productive level thus; thus reducing the operating costs by streamlining their operations

Secure Data – The data is out of reach and out of bound from employees and people who are not allowed to access it. Accessing rights can be assigned with limitations according to HR personnel and their work requirements

Reliability of electronic storage – Reduces the risk of any loss of document or application etc. This organized form of managing allows HR to concentrate on more strategic business needs of organizations instead of grappling through a manual paper work environment. The value of HR can be seen more and more in organizations than just a department managing all administrative tasks

Integrating Learning Solutions – Shifting from manual course centric learning and development organization to creating a learning environment by using multiple mediums of delivery and source.

Use of Technology – mobile technology is a key indicator for government agencies to improve their workforce productivity by working agile or from any remote location as well.

Increased Return on Investments – Large-scale transformation, budget cuts and managing change is an upheaval task for any organization. But to manage it effectively has helped agencies reduce their operating costs associated with the change along with overtime and third party costs.

Improving Human Capital Performance – Identifying with critical skills requirement, cost effective staffing and talent mix helps in designing a cost effective organization with workforce optimization. Use of data analytics for employees has helped in determining retention strategies and learning opportunities for employee development

Improving Leadership and Employee Engagement – When employees are engaged with their other team members it reduces the workload on one individual, and with sharing of ideas more can be achieved effectively, reduces absenteeism and pushed employees to take up leadership positions.

 

Rolling Arrays is Asia’s premier award winning HR transformation company, headquartered in Singapore with offices in 6 countries. Since its inception in transformation projects for more than 50 blue-chip clients across Asia. A consultative approach to HR processes, HR functions and HR software is Rolling Arrays core expertise and the primary catalyst for its success.

Performance Ratings and the Potential Ratings of an Employee is definitely a very important input for any holistic talent management review exercise. When the Performance Evaluation and the Potential evaluation of an employee happens on one single system where eventually the talent decision making happens, it eases the whole problem of data consolidation.

However what I will be discussing in this post is particularly important for scenario where a customer is adopting the SuccessFactors Talent Management and want to run the Talent process on the system while the process demands the inputs from previous years in terms of performance and potential ratings or evaluation. This is also relevant for customers who run the potential evaluation on a different system while having the Succession planning on SuccessFactors.

Before we get into the Details of the various scenario, I would like to point the readers towards the “Normalization” of Ratings that SF does in case where the source scale is different from the target scale (Note: Normalization is typically done, when the calc-type = “avg”). The following formula is typically used when the Ratings are Normalized:

(((rating – original min)/(original max – original min)) * (new max – new min)) + new min

e.g. a Rating of 4 on a scale of 1 to 5 for a Performance maps to Rating of 2.5 on a scale of 1 to 3 : (((4-1)/(5-1))*(3-1))+1 = 2.5

Scenario 1: Performance evaluation conducted on SuccessFactors and is the sole input in addition to Potential rating for a 9-Box evaluation and calibration. This is a standard implementation and SuccessFactors is designed for such a typical scenario. The Performance Scale (any scale used for rating) will be automatically normalized to the 3 point scale and the employee placement on the 9-box shall be correspondingly represented. No hassles here.

Scenario 2: Performance Evaluation Conducted on a different system and Succession Planning and Talent evaluation (9-Box placement and Calibration and Development planning) happens on SF. Since the Ratings are available and can be consolidated, the Required Rating can be directly imported into SF via the “Performance Portlet” or “Performance – Manager Only” Background Element. The data fro this table shall be the input for the process.

Scenario 3: Consider the following example: Employees have undergone performance evaluation for past 2 years and the current year performance evaluation happens on the new SuccessFactors system. Surely the previous evaluation records especially the Performance Ratings are to be ported to SuccessFactors system for consideration. In such a scenario typically, you would want the Average Performance rating to be the input for your talent considerations.

When we get into an implementation for SuccessFactors or SAP or any other product for that matter, we generally follow the prescribed methodologies – BizXpert, SAP Launch, Empower e.t.c and most often we get so involved with the execution that we do not realize what questions to ask at each step that will lead us in the right answers during the implementation.

Edward Bono, an expert on study of how people think, developed the “six thinking hats approach to allow individuals and group to attend to all parts of the problem. He took the “Let’s put on our analytical hats” analogy one step further and if we take this analogy, I believe each of the points mentioned would make the implementation seem like perfect pieces of puzzle that will eventually come out to be a worthy piece of art.

The Six thinking Hats DeBono has identified are:

White Hat: Deals with Facts Figures and Objective Information

• What’s the timeline?
• You missed a crucial piece of information in your analysis?

Red Hat: Deals with Emotions and Feelings

• How do you feel about this approach?
• What Level 2 impact will it have on people on our team?
• Am I comfortable with this approach?

Black Hat: Deals with Logical errors in thinking

• Have you thought through the implications of this on Timelines and Quality?
• You missed some important details in the second section of the proposal?
• Risk Management Plan?

Yellow Hat: Deals with Positive Constructive thoughts

• I like this idea! What are the potential benefits if we take this approach?
• Can I bring in the Customer Delight with this approach?

Green Hat: Deals with creativity and New ideas

• Here’s another angle we could take on this proposal.
• What other ways might we consider to build support for this idea?

Blue Hat: Deals with control of other hats and thinking steps

• Now that we’ve looked at this using all the hats, what should we do next?
• What stands out to you, now that you’ve heard all the opinions and reactions?
• Let’s integrate the ideas into a coherent plan.

We, most times unconsciously put on few of the hats during our implementation approach, and one should also realize that each of the hats provide crucial information.

For an implementation, I believe every team member needs to put on each of this hat through the project and do remember that always wear the Blue Hat last and learn from each experience.

 

Rolling Arrays is Asia’s premier award winning HR transformation company, headquartered in Singapore with offices in 6 countries. Since its inception in 2009, Rolling Arrays has successfully delivered more than 100 HR transformation projects for more than 50 blue-chip clients across Asia. A consultative approach to HR processes, HR functions and HR software is Rolling Arrays core expertise and the primary catalyst for its success.

During Talent Management discussion with various customers and the SF Talent Management implementation experience, there was one common question that each one of them had – “How exactly will Talent Search Help us ? ” and their approach to using the Talent Search was more as a Search tool which according to me defeated the whole purpose and philosophy behind the functionality. Yes, it is a Search tool, but the buck does not stop there, and its utility lies in how well the processes are designed “before” and “after” the search activity.

The Central Idea if I may put it for the Talent Search is “Find the Best of the Lot”. It is not only about searching the employees or candidates based on your criteria, but it also about streamlining the process around choosing the best one.

So How does “Talent Search” help ?

In order to streamline the search and “Select the Best of the Lot”. I would put across just 3 Pre-Requisites

1. Consolidate the Information – During the implementation, I think the customer should think ahead in terms of their process to understand “What Information do I use to identify a Talent either internal or external” and the same should be incorporated into your system to ensure these details are captured from the candidates and the employees and are made available readily.

2. Have we completed a Talent Review process – Most organizations consider Performance Review as their central process for identifying talent, however I believe that performance being mostly retrospective in nature does not give you a right baseline to identify your talents. “Potential” being forward looking, is a much better indicator for your talent identification process and should be used in conjunction with the Performance reviews to identify your “Stars”.

3. Competency Based Evaluation – Talents are all about behaviors and skills. Yes, Goals and Targets are required however in order for anyone to achieve them, the employees should be exhibiting the required skills and competencies. Hence without an appropriate Competency evaluation for present and future roles, the identification process again goes back to next available option which is performance which again only tells you how good an employee was but extrapolating the same for future talent identification might not be giving you the correct data. This also applies to the Hiring Process i.e. the candidates are evaluated on the Competencies and skills rather than just their achievements.

With the above 3 processes in place, I believe one can extract the full potential of the Talent Search functionality.

1. Create Criteria using vast amount of information captured i.e. the Competency Rating range, Experience, Talent Flags e.t.c. With Talent data now available form the review process and the competency evaluation done, build the right criteria using the competency score, data and required weight against each criteria. This is important since without this, it comes out to be just a search tool as good as an Excel, and the talent identification goes back to being filtering an excel to find out the right person.

2. Understand the Search Result Page

Based on the Criteria and Weight provided for each criteria, the search result provides the results and ranks them based on the match %. In addition to that the Talent Review result (9-Box) is provided on the search result page for quick view. I would emphasize again on the step 1 here because, Without proper criteria, the search results just churns out name just as in a directory!

3. Analyze

The Analysis tool is the most important step in the talent process where one can have the Side-by-Side view of the selected employees and it gives you the option to compare on all the data attributes that are captured or the performance and Potential attributes of the employees.

Lastly I would say

Without the right tool, any process can become tedious and error prone. With the right tool not being used in the right manner, the process can be made much more tedious and error prone. Hence it is important that one understands the philosophy behind the tool and use it the right way and in a way it was designed to be used.