Canadian HR Reporter

Credit: Sentavio (Shutterstock) By Christa Degnan Manning W ith the advent of the Internet, web-based access to enterprise software solutions ushered in a new era of business computing: Employee self-service. is has led to both individual contributors and managers gaining ubiquitous desktop access to traditional back-offi ce operational systems. And, thus, they are enlisted in en- tering data and processing business-related transactions in their day-to-day jobs. is approach has become particularly prevalent in human resource-related areas. In most cases, individual employees actual- ly have fi rsthand knowledge of the informa- tion or task to be completed, or they would have had to manually create paperwork to document the issue anyway. The business case for organizations to adopt these solutions came from the time or cost savings that can be gained by offl oading much of the data entry and transactional processing tasks from human resources or business administration. e savings calculations are fairly straight- forward. If an HR department, for example, has 10 people working 1,600 hours each year processing new hires, making an average annual salary of $60,000 a year, transferring half the workload of processing those hires to employees and managers involved would save the department 8,000 work hours. If the positions were actually eliminated, it would save the company nearly a half-a- million dollars per year ($480,000). At the same time, many organizations wanting to further streamline operations have established shared service organiza- tions that centralize remaining back-offi ce responsibilities and administrative tasks. Often, these teams are designed to operate alongside employee self-service software solutions, performing data entry quality assurance, help-desk and exception pro- cessing support tasks. Some fi rms look to reduce costs even further by establishing those centres in countries with lower wage costs or by en- listing third-party outsourced service pro- viders that could bring effi ciencies through focused expertise and scale. us, the re- maining work could be done for a fraction of the current labour cost. Self-service stalled While elegant in design, by and large, the employee experience of executing these strategies has not been excellent. Self-ser- vice adoption has not been immediate, user interfaces are often not intuitive and tele- phone trees to connect workers to appro- priate staff are impractical and impersonal. ese disparate and disconnected sys- tems and service centres have left many employees frustrated with the support they receive from their employers and with far less time to focus on meaningful work. And meaningful work — both for the business and for career development — is key to em- ployee retention and engagement. In addition, workers report being over- whelmed and isolated during events that in- volve any kind of complexity or uncertainty, such as role changes or relocations. Tasks and transactions, even within the same sys- tem, can seem cumbersome and irritating when changes to one piece of data or activ- ity status do not cascade to eff ect changes in other parts of the system relying on the same data or person to execute or approve. Remote service centre staff have typi- cally been unable to understand these more complex issues. In the time and cost- savings calculations above, few fi rms asked themselves what happens to the 8,000 ad- ministrative hours — or, more precisely, where does that time go? While automating data collection and processing does bring effi ciencies to the work eff ort, most fi rms did not overtly plan for the 15 minutes here, 30 minutes there that self-service responsibilities brought the average employee. Multiply this across not only HR func- tional areas but other business processes as well, such as booking travel, fi ling expenses, requisitioning new hires and supplies, ap- proving invoices and accounts payable — it adds up. e aggregate time the average employee spends — and particularly managers tasked with documenting approvals — can take hours every week. e interrelated roles and rules they invoke can easily lead work- ers exponentially astray from customer- driven business activities. Take, for example, a global product manager who supports a $10-million line of business. If she spends 20 hours a month on administrative tasks and eff ectively has 1,600 productive hours per year to off er her employer (given average work hours in her region and paid time off benefi ts), she is sacrifi cing 15 per cent of her time on in- ternal issues and work when she could be supporting customer requests, sales pricing analysis or supply chain partner inquiries and troubleshooting. Now add in any event of complexity that involves the employee understanding poli- cies, procedures, regulations, even external sources of information and capability, and self-service breaks down. at average one hour per day of administrative self-service can easily double. Time effi ciency Back in 1748, Benjamin Franklin published the adage "Remember that time is money" in his paper "Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One." At the time, Frank- lin was trying to educate a day labourer about the value of his time at work in addi- tion to the costs of doing things other than productive work. Economists now refer to this concept as "opportunity cost" — the calculation of lost value of a foregone option when someone chooses between mutually exclusive alter- natives, given limited resources. More than two-and-a-half centuries lat- er, Franklin's advice holds true for today's worker as well, but while he was concerned about the costs of workers' deliberate di- versions or "idleness," companies need to examine the cost of workers' unproductive time in the workplace today. Economists have been stumped since the last fi nancial crisis as to what will raise workforce productivity and sustain busi- ness growth and expansion. Automation and outsourcing drove the last great wave of productivity — perhaps a more intelligent approach to workforce support services will drive the next. Working hours and labour productivity in the modern era are complex topics, but the economic calculations around time can be relatively simple. What the workplace and workforce need today is new thinking and new tools to address a more productive employee experience. It is time for companies to consid- er where they may find and support improved productivity and progress for their fi rms. Looking at the systems, ser- vices and staff they already have is the place to start. Christa Degnan Manning is the founder and principal analyst of workforce support research fi rm Eudemonia in Boston. She can be reached at christa@eudemonia.work or follow her on Twit- ter @ChristaDegnan. For more information, visit www.eudemonia.work. 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