Your Checklist for a Successful HR Shared Service Center

The move to Shared Services can increase productivity and efficiency, saving significant time and costs. But there are several critical things to do in order to make sure your HR Shared Service Center is a success. We’ve put together a checklist to help you organize your priorities and guarantee that your HRSSC runs smoothly and effectively.

 Set Goals and Standardize Measurements

Tracking KPIs like Service Level Agreements can help you understand how your HR Service Center and your individual HR reps are performing. Making sure you have measurement capabilities in place that make it possible for you to track your achievements and challenges, and give you in-depth insights into trends over time. Without standardized measurements in place, how will you be able to define what success looks like? How can you show that your project was a success? And how can you ever drive continuous improvement?

 Drive Continuous Improvement

Analytics add value by guiding business decisions with meaningful and precise data. Insights into HR’s performance based on metrics like SLAs can also pinpoint inefficiencies and bottlenecks within processes. They also show when SLAs are being missed and how often, and how fast requests are being resolved. When HR leadership is armed with this kind of information, they can make fully informed decisions about allocating resources, updating processes to remove bottlenecks, and strengthening applicable content in the knowledge portal. By continually optimizing, your HRSSC will be able to provide better and better service to employees while reducing time, resources, and costs.

 Streamline HR Processes

As you shift to an HRSSC, taking the time to examine all of your HR processes gives you the opportunity you identify inefficiencies and eliminate unnecessary steps. Streamlining processes can save valuable time and help HR resolve requests much more quickly, especially when processes can be automated. And within a Shared Services model, processes are standardized globally to ensure consistent services are delivered to employees - while of course accounting for any local variations. Making processes run more smoothly helps your HRSSC achieve predictable and reliable results across the organization, delivering real business results.

 Ensure Consistency Across HR

We’ve all heard stories about employees getting different answers depending on who they speak to in HR, which at best is a bad and frustrating experience for employees, and at worst puts you in risk of noncompliance. In an HRSSC, it’s critical for HR reps to give the consistent answers to your employees - of course personalized for each employee’s circumstances. By centralizing HR policies and processes into an HR-facing knowledge portal, and by templating answer responses, HR reps can provide employees with the right answer, the first time. When all of your HR reps have access to the same, accurate information, they can pass along consistent information to your employees across the organization.

 Go Digital

Going digital in HR is a game-changer, helping you gain real efficiencies. When employee files are digital, HR can centralize the documents, making them easy to search for and send. In addition to giving HR a full view of the employee, it also reduces the potential for errors, misplaced documents, and lag-time between sending a document and receiving it back. Centralized, digital employee files ensure that all HR reps have access to critical up-to-date files at all times.

As you mark off the final check in your HRSSC checklist, it’s important to remember that technology is foundational to every aspect of your service center. Consumer-grade technology is a critical underlying component for improving and increasing the efficiency of HR services. From digitizing communications and files to streamlining processes and driving continuous improvements, technology is at the very heart of what makes your HRSSC a success.