Standing at the forefront of HR delivery

With HR constantly evolving, many off-the-shelf solutions are no longer meeting professional needs. HRD speaks to Mike Ellis of Synchrony Global to discover how the company is offering something new to the market

HR departments have undergone drastic evolution since the old days of ‘Personnel’. Once overseeing day-to-day tasks such as payroll, hiring and firing, the present and future of HR is more closely aligned with driving workplace culture and helping develop staff to their full potential. Consequently, changing times demand changing technology. Yet digital HR tools have traditionally been a mixed bag, offering some core features while frequently lagging behind the current needs of the wider industry.

For Mike Ellis, chief commercial officer at Synchrony Global, developing a more effective tool was driven by a desire to better the HR workplace, along with simple necessity. With more than 18 years in the industry, he’s seen first-hand how radically the HR space has shifted, and personally experienced the reasons why HR professionals need the appropriate digital tools.

“In the past, companies tended to run their HR departments off spreadsheet-based programs,” Ellis says. “That was fine for storing data, but it didn’t offer much for compiling holistic information – something that was increasingly necessary as the demands of the industry changed.”

At an individual level, businesses tend to have a myriad of reasons for requiring more effective HR management systems. New legislation can also play a role in the adoption of new technologies. For example, the Budget Savings (Omnibus) Bill 2016 made Single Touch Payroll a legal requirement for organisations in Australia. Accordingly, numerous organisations found it necessary to reassess their payroll platforms. Given the new reports and greater transparency required, many Australian businesses recognised the benefits of integrating payroll with core HR on a single platform.

In other cases, changing technology has been a keen driver, with many businesses eager to move to cloud-based storage. Reducing costs, shrinking office space, streamlining processes, improved security and an overall desire for the business to appear ‘current’ can be key influencers on this front.

Making shifting priorities

Whatever the specifics of your business, Ellis proposes that HR departments rethink their priorities beyond simple process improvement and compliance when selecting a management system. With the HR landscape changing so rapidly and the demand for skilled workforces increasing, organisations need to invest in solutions to identify, attract and manage their talent; create efficiencies through digitisation and automation; and increase employee productivity by providing consumer-grade experiences.

“We felt that best practice talent management shouldn’t just be something for large, tier-one organisations,” Ellis says. “Every single company should be able to focus on their most important asset – people. But the best technology wasn’t available at the time for the SMB space.”

The end result was Synchrony People + Payroll – a flexible and modular solution that offers functionality to manage every single point in the employee life cycle.

“Once you hire a new employee, you need to ensure you get early engagement with them. It’s generally accepted that you’ll know within the first 30 days if an employee is going to be productive or not,” says Ellis. “Of course, that’s really based on the way you onboard a new employee, so there are huge practical benefits to having a proper HR management system in place.”

The underlying technology is powered by SAP SuccessFactors. Synchrony People + Payroll aims to harness the breadth of technology and options that SuccessFactors offers, while removing the time, complexity and cost of set-up by providing preconfigured templates for SMBs as well as large, complex and enterprise organisations. All of these templates are based on industry best practice, while these shortcuts reduce delivery costs and time frames by up to 90%, in addition to being substantially more user-friendly.

“Best practice talent management shouldn’t just be something for large, tier-one organisations. Every single company should be able to focus on their most important asset – people” Mike Ellis, chief commercial officer, Synchrony Global

It is currently localised across 44 countries to attract, identify and manage talent with leading technology and best practice processes. Importantly, it offers flexibility and scalability for businesses of any size. While the out-of-the-box version includes comprehensive tools for people management, additional modules can be added as an SMB grows and changes – an “adopt and adapt” process, as Ellis describes it.

“We found that businesses were often a bit lost trying to implement these big changes themselves,” Ellis says. “Those vendors or partners gave it to IT or HR and said, ‘Here, this is your problem’. We knew that what we were doing could make a big difference.”

By working with SAP, Synchrony felt it could develop pre-packaged solutions built on best practice, tools and templates that could be implemented quickly and provide enterprise-grade tech to SMBs – all without the usual barriers to entry.

Future trends in HR delivery

Working with its customers, Synchrony has already been able to identify specialist requirements and customise Synchrony People + Payroll for industries such as health, aged care, retail and hospitality, manufacturing, mining, and government and the public sector. Synchrony will also continue to proactively evolve and optimise the product to be at the forefront of both industry and technology trends.

“Working with a tool like this in Australia is really fantastic,” Ellis says. “As we also have o ces internationally, we’re able to pick up on the trends here, take them into other parts of APAC and then into the wider world.”

In the future workplace, HR will be a split function; HR leadership will provide strategic functions driving corporate strategy, rather than simply responding to it. In turn, the delivery of HR solutions will be closely aligned to IT. Accordingly, Ellis is of the opinion that organisations will need to start building HR teams that partner with IT and digital transformation teams. This can then be used to better enable information-sharing on the latest AI products and services, as well as on how other functions such as IT or marketing can embrace AI to drive growth.

“Identifying new job roles to leverage the full potential of AI in HR should be a major business concern for organisations today,” says Ellis. “They need to develop expertise in how AI will impact HR.”

Chatbots and other self-service tools are likely to be embedded into future products to enable managers and employees to perform a larger number of tasks themselves, minimising the need for large service centres in the process. Ellis sees them as relieving HR sta­ of the burden of relatively mundane but frequently time-consuming tasks such as leave requests, updating staff details, and potentially even exit interviews. The benefits aren’t necessarily limited to the HR department either; employees will be empowered to make their own changes to the system as necessary, streamlining their own roles and reducing wait times in the process.

Ultimately, the trend towards AI and automation is aimed at removing much of the grunt work from the HR department and employees alike. Departments will have more time on their hands to optimise workflow and drive high-quality employee experiences, which in turn can onflow into increased profitability for companies.

Yet digital transformation in HR is more than the simple implementation of self-service platforms and technologies for HR; rather, it carries the potential for new discourse about HR operations. Providing new ways of streamlining HR tasks related, for example, to employee learning, training and performance will lead to better employee engagement, innovation and motivation.

“You’re enabling more of your business partners and your HR staff­ and C-suite to really act as strategic HR partners rather than focusing on and being bogged down in transactional work,” Ellis says.