If you feel like human resource management has become more of an exercise in managing resources than humans, you might be right—and you’re certainly not alone. The types of requests you may get within HR can be vast—from recruiting for open positions to onboarding a new employee to working on a change in benefits…the list goes on and on.
Navigating these processes and changes can be stressful and time-consuming for all involved, so having a way streamline processes can help to minimize the stress for both those making the requests and those managing them. And a great way to streamline this all is through Enterprise Service Management (ESM).
With many businesses and organizations looking to embrace a single-platform approach to service management and delivery – ESM makes sense. With the right codeless service management tool – everyone from IT to HR, facilities to marketing can set up their own customized portals and workflows with automations to handle requests – whether that’s for a name change of new hire onboarding in HR, or a new work order or maintenance request in facilities for example.
Here are four areas where ESM can really shine when it comes to HR.
Service Requests and Workflow
With an ESM tool, you can get out of using email for requests and instead use an online portal with dynamic forms to submit requests. Employees can come to your customized, branded portal and select a specific service and the platform will automatically route the request in the right direction—things like requests to onboard/offboard a new employee, to initiate an FMLA request, name changes or even employment verification can be entered and managed through the portal.
Knowledge Base and Documents
HR comes with a slew of forms, documents and procedures all of which must be well documented and stored in a centralized location with varying degrees of access.
With a knowledge base built into your HR portal, employees can go to one location to download files or access information. In addition, compliance guidelines and other standard information can be shared in a centralized knowledge base with sophisticated search capabilities as well as an iterative feedback loop. And permission settings allow you to control who can see or access sensitive documentation.
By having all of these forms and documents readily available and searchable, you can cut back on the number of questions your HR department receives around things like, “What are the company holidays? Where can I find our benefits? What’s the PTO policy?” and more.
Compliance
When it comes to compliance and reporting, it is critical that employees have the appropriate avenues to submit a case and have it reviewed appropriately. By offering detailed information on the portal and giving employees an access point for reporting, HR can benefit from having a clearly documented process in place.
Project Management and Supercharged Service Management
There’s never an end to the projects that arise in an organization. They arrive in all shapes, sizes and maturity levels. When you use ESM software like TeamDynamix that includes ITSM/ESM, Project Portfolio Management (PPM) and enterprise integration and automation (iPaaS) on a single platform, your HR project leads can ensure novices aren’t overwhelmed and experts aren’t underwhelmed.
TeamDynamix project management tools are powerful enough for complex needs, yet intuitive enough for individual team collaboration. With the single-platform approach, you can:
- Prioritize projects and optimize the project portfolio.
- Plan projects and manage the execution of approved projects.
- Manage the supply and demand for project resources.
- Manage the lifecycle of request ideas through project completion.
- Integrate with the service portal and workflow.
In addition, by having the ability to automate and integrate your systems – both within HR and organization-wide – you can save time and resources. Name changes and even onboarding or offboarding can be completely automated using your supercharged ESM platform with iPaaS.
iPaaS (integration platform as a service) allows you to build codeless integrations using a library of connectors to systems you use every day – such as Workday, Oracle, your IT service management (ITSM) platform, Salesforce, the Active Directory, Azure, and hundreds more, as well as any APIs – and manage them in a single hub. With all systems connected and data points now secured in one spot, end-users can leverage the platform to move data, transform data, and build out automation and workflows using a visual flow builder that can be triggered from a field change, form fill or any number of actions.
So – how can the onboarding process be expedited? This is often a highly manual process – everything from creating the user in the Active Directory to provisioning the software, creating user/group permissions, establishing security settings and more. Imagine you go to the service portal, you click a button that says “Onboard” and you enter the details of the new hire – or even better, you can build it so that HR receiving a signed acceptance of an offer letter triggers the workflow automatically – all using enterprise integration and automation through iPaaS.
With iPaaS you can make a workflow that tells the system to create the user, the email, and the groups they need to be in, provision all of the software or make software requests and even send out notifications by email or text – you can text the hiring manager to say the process has been completed for example, or you can text the candidate to say welcome aboard. All this can be put into a single workflow that executes automatically in a matter of minutes vs. the days of manual processing it normally takes.
Learn more about a single-platform approach to managing HR projects and processes.