No joke: There are companies that pay employees who have not been employed by the company for over ten years. This is not uncommon, especially in global companies. This always happens when HR departments have little overview of their international HR processes. And it is by no means the only problem. Christina Haury from Haury Solutions explains in an interview what can help here – even for SMEs.
Good HR processes are a competitive advantage. Why?
Due to the increasing demands and complexity of HR work, it is becoming increasingly difficult for HR managers to keep track of things. There used to be a pay slip, an employment contract and a reference when you left – HR wasn’t much more than that. Today, many other topics are added, such as diversity, workation, talent management, employee experience and much more. The result: HR is increasingly concerned with itself.
What problems do companies have to contend with as a result?
Due to duplication of work, broken processes and a lack of time for important HR projects, the right talent is not found quickly enough. Managing talent effectively, retaining it successfully and developing it adequately takes time.
What is the reason?
Lack of transparency about HR processes. But especially for companies with multiple locations, it is essential to have an overview of global HR processes.
You have developed a completely new product for the HR market…
Yes. Our SaaS software TraSy is a game changer for HR processes. It makes HR processes measurable and enables companies to independently identify their cross-location processes, measure the HR maturity level, analyze process breaks and optimize them using a roadmap – in line with the company’s needs.
“With our structured approach, we have managed to reduce the collection time for HR processes by 80 (!) percent.”
How did you come up with the idea?
I have been responsible for various positions in HR for many years and have seen how difficult it is, especially in multinational companies, to get an overview of the individual locations. At an HR trade fair in Asia, I heard about a company that was struggling with its cross-location HR processes and had been using an international staff of consultants for four years for an HR transformation. As a rule, companies have neither the time nor such a budget available. This gave me the idea of digitizing this process and developing software for analyzing HR processes.
How have the analyzes been done so far?
Since there is usually a lack of capacity and knowledge, external consulting companies are often used. The consulting market is huge. We are talking about a volume of almost 30 billion US dollars – in Europe alone. In such a setting, however, data and process sovereignty lies with the service provider and these are lost to the company after the end of the project.
However, HR software is a dime a dozen…
That’s correct. But software alone does not make a process. In HR, many topics are still handled manually, without a software solution. The first problem that decentralized companies have is that in many cases they lack an overview of what is happening in the individual national companies.
Can you give an example of exactly which processes are that are not mapped in conventional software?
Let’s take pre-boarding, re-boarding, on-boarding and off-boarding. Everyone is familiar with on-boarding. While pre-boarding focuses on the time before the first day of work, re-boarding refers to the time after parental/care leave or a sabbatical. If someone has given notice, there is usually no professional off-boarding. Often these phases are not consistently represented in systems.
This means that if the HR processes are not clear enough, valuable employees are lost before the first day of work…
Yes, exactly, because if there is no good pre-boarding, future employees can easily be poached by other companies, as they are “outlawed” in the time between termination and starting in the new company. If your company does not manage to maintain contact with new employees or establish contact with them in a timely manner, then the talent will quickly disappear before they have even started the job!
A lot of money is also burned in “unclean” HR digitalization…
Absolutely. A real-world example: A company that spent double-digit millions of dollars failed to get an HR suite up and running globally. Burnout, fluctuation and frustration were the consequences. The problem: Large corporations are often faced with the challenge of a fragmented HR IT landscape made up of on-premise solutions, cloud services, paper documentation and Excel spreadsheets. The complexity increases when the company consists of several subsidiaries, each with their own structures. In such a scenario, headquarters often cannot even collect a simple head count for the group. In this worst-case scenario, many talents are lost forever. The same applies to smaller companies.
How do companies get the necessary transparency about their HR processes?
With so-called HR inventories. Companies can carry out an HR process survey completely independently along the employee lifecycle using a template that is suitable for their industry. Individual templates can also be put together, which, for example, only consider a sub-area of HR.
What areas are we talking about?
For example, a template for personnel development can be put together to find out how the processes in the area of talent or performance management are currently running. In this way, you can determine why employees leave the company and how you can retain these valuable talents. Because employees who can be retained do not have to be expensively recruited again. The maturity level of the HR processes is then displayed on a heat map.
“An HR knowledge base, fed with internal best practices, is a goldmine in a time of high HR employee turnover.”
What role does a central knowledge database play here?
An HR knowledge base plays a very central role in making knowledge available to everyone. At the same time, all HR competencies for the respective HR categories are recorded and mapped here. This gives companies an overview of where in the company the HR experts are located on the respective topic and can draw on these synergies. Valid real-time data and original documents enable benchmarking across locations. TraSy lays the foundation for the harmonization of HR processes.
Do you have a practical example?
Yes. A company discovered in a survey that there was an employee manual in a national company. Nobody at headquarters knew about it. A task force was quickly formed, the employee handbook was translated into all company languages and then digitized. This meant that a piece of the puzzle could be quickly inserted into the onboarding process and the process could be improved. Through harmonization from the grassroots level, the HR team was always highly motivated on board.
How can companies use TraSy?
On a dashboard you can easily see which HR locations are good at onboarding using a competency map. Here you can go deeper and deeper and see what exactly is being done at the individual locations. It is very important to use what is already there, that is, to make the synergies that are already there transparent and to think about what could be added.
How can companies then successfully implement the values determined?
A transformation roadmap is created that provides initial approaches to optimizing HR processes and contains concrete suggestions on what can be done and how it can be done. Companies retain full autonomy over their HR data and have a sound basis for making decisions about HR transformation. A person once said to me: “Without TraSy, every personnel measure I implement is like flying blind in the fog.”
“Without TraSy, every personnel measure I implement is like flying blind in the fog.”
(C. Salgado; HR-Director Kayser Group)
Will the national companies agree to such a solution?
Experience has shown that this joint work, cooperation and participation at all HR levels, i.e. locally, regionally and globally, has brought with it increased acceptance of changes in the HR area. Our tool relies on participation and learning together (from each other).
The exchange in the CyberLab was great. With Nico we had a great consultant who was always available for us to contact on a wide range of topics. The CyberLab is also a great network that you can access at any time. No matter whether you need tax advice, financing or a contact, you can raise any topic and get an answer. It also helped us to exchange ideas with like-minded people.