When you have thousands of employees geographically spread across hundreds of kilometers in the country, a single consolidated view of all employee data can seem utopian. Unless organizations are willing to be left behind, they will have make a decision to find the best HR solution that makes the most sense, for its business evolution as well as its people. And that’s exactly what ABFSG did.
Aditya Birla Financial Services Group is part of one of the most respected diversified-business groups in India. An NBFC that offers solutions in Lending, Insurance, Wealth Management etc., ABFSG realized that the same process was being handled differently at different locations, which meant that customers weren’t getting a uniform experience either. The need was to find an HR technology solution that will create a business model within HR to ensure that all the business lines got a consistent experience.
The challenges were, however, many:
- On-Boarding experience needed to be the same across the board as the company was scaling at a rapid pace, adding almost 300-400 new employees a month
- As it is with hiring in large numbers, attrition was high too.
- With myriad products offerings, they had to ensure compliance to different regulators.
- Seamlessly integrate multiple HR systems on to a single one within HR.
With so many factors to take into account, the biggest priority was to enrich employee experience, so that the employees are able to transfer the same experience forward to customers.
ABFSG- PeopleStrong partnership
- The employee himself who handled around 15% of total processes (Do-It-Yourself or DIY category)
- An existing Shared Services Delivery Centre that handled about 50% of total processes
- HR BPs who handled about 35% of total processes.
As part of their role, HR BPs needed to partner with the businesses while also contributing to the bottom line. However, in the current scenario they were spending almost 35-50% of their time in ‘employee transactions’. To resolve this, PeopleStrong determined the top 6 key areas where HRBPs spend maximum time. These were:
- Human Resource Information system (HRIS)
- Onboarding
- Employee life transition
- Payroll
- Helpdesk
- Exit Management
We decided to automate all these processes to enable a 3-tier model. Here is how it works:
- Standardization- Since there was no uniformity in transaction management across multiple entities in multiple locations, a comprehensive standardized HRMS solution was developed which encapsulated all processes. Each and every entity was to follow only module irrespective of which part of their country there were in. This immediately resulted in a systematic, uniform transaction management.
- Automated processes- The plan was to push most of the transactions in the above 5 areas to the DIY category, so that the employees could do them on their own. When this idea was suggested, there was apprehension among the leadership team that the employees may not be happy doing these transactions on their own. From our perspective, we wanted to empower employees and make it easy for them to access HRIS where they don’t need HR involvement.
- Simplify employee work-life – Once the 5 areas were identified, we wanted to centralize all data so that the HR team as well as the employees could have easy access. We to put all workflows on a platform called PeopleStrong Alt, which ensured that an employee was able to manage almost 40% of transactions on his own though mobile app. HR shared services continued to handle 50% as they did earlier. However, the actual change happened for the HR Business Partner, where from a 35% of workload, it came down to a negligible 10%.
ABFSG mandate was very clear: For these transactions, employees had to have complete mobile access as well. Here, we provided mobile app that allowed DIY processes like geo-tagging for attendance management, letting new employees upload their documents before joining at the time of onboarding, or trigger automatic back-end activities when an employee received a transfer etc.
The PeopleStrong Impact
- One of the biggest impact of implementing this project for ABFSG was on Ease of experience –through HR on-the-go and DIY HR technology.
- Working on an integrated HR SaaS solution so like PeopleStrong alt, the organization was able to provide a consistent, standardized experience across 1500 locations, process accurate payroll, etc.
- Improved speed and TATs significantly; the system secured 100% background verification for all new joiners through system integration, 100% new employee IDs were created on day 1 and 100% Full & Final processes completed on time through online HRMS solution
- Enormous increase in Efficiency: Response time reduced to 60-70%, and governance and tracking improved by almost 65- 70%
- Easy & 24/7 access via mobile app: Earlier, completing a single transaction would take a lot of time because there were multiple systems and multiple people involved. Now with a unified view of work-life, transactions could get completed in matter of minutes.
- Once all workflows were automated and the platform got adopted, the HR Business partner’s role also got reinvented. Earlier an HR BP was spending time on processes where his involvement wasn’t necessarily required. In the PeopleStrong Alt era, the HR BP ‘s role became refined to being just an ‘escalation point’ or a ‘decision point’, enabling them to use all the freed up time to pursue more productive options.
Conclusion:
In a technologically changing environment, organizations need to be constantly outward looking. ABFSG always tries to keep in synch with the changes in the market and accordingly adapt so that their employees experience continues to be better with HR SaaS Solutions. PeopleStrong was chosen as a partner because they appreciate that we operate not like a vendor, but like their own extended HR team, completely comprehend the firm’s business challenges and understand what it will it take to transform.
We are right here when you decide it’s your turn next.