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Q&A: Ensuring your technology delivers for all your people
02 May 2023 HR Tech and Data
April’s webinar from The HR World brought together Toni Turunen, Manager, Customer Onboarding from webinar sponsors Sympa and Amanda Chinnery, Head of Digital HR, Fujitsu Europe.
Together they addressed the task of introducing and maintaining effective HR technology within an organisation.
The webinar was highly informative throughout and below we’re including two more questions posed during the session:
Q: I’m looking at introducing a new system to my business which will affect everyone from finance to the individual employee. It feels like I need to pitch the project differently to everyone affected. Do you have any ideas as to how to make this easier?
Amanda Chinnery: I would advise you to adopt a classic change management approach:
Identify all your stakeholder groups – Finance, Employees, HR etc
Think about how your new system impacts each group individually
Prepare tailored communications/briefings to each group based on their impacts/interests
This will require a little more effort up front but will give you a much better chance of landing your project with each group successfully. A generic pitch that is not directly speaking to their interests will not land well.
Toni Turunen: It might also be worthwhile to start with the broader picture and then narrow it down to the specific groups.
Before pitching to the individual interest groups, start with the shared vision: How will the new system benefit the entire organisation, and how it will help achieve strategic objectives? This type of a viewpoint is especially important on the leadership level – when as for example the business unit VP’s might want to hear the benefits it brings to each of their areas. This could help in creating a sense of shared purpose.
Q: Is there a tipping point where we should stop adding to and updating systems and carry out a major reinvestment? How do you know when you’ve reached that point?
Amanda Chinnery: Very hard to define precisely but it is dependent on the time, cost and quality of outcomes. If you keep adding and adding to an existing system, it can become difficult to maintain, where even the simplest update in future requires re-writes of major parts of the system. And because of the complexity of the system, the end result may not really deliver what was needed. When you get to the point where future changes are hard/difficult/expensive/not really achieving desired outcome, you have probably reached that tipping point. You can assess this more formally by doing a cost-benefit analysis of each option.
Toni Turunen: I’d add the importance of paying attention into how the roadmap of your software vendor(s) aligns with your organisations’ long-term objectives. If these are not aligned, and there are already some inefficiencies or need gaps with such systems, it might be worthwhile to start looking for alternatives.
Sympa have also published some useful resources online:
Business case for a new HR system
How Sympa uses Sympa
HR system implementation guide