A New Age of Enlightenment for HR in Universities
If you’re an HR Director or manager at a university, I’d like you to take a minute or two from your extremely busy day to imagine this…
Your employees are happy, productive and supporting the university’s growth agenda. All your workforce, including admin staff, temps, professors and researchers, are getting the training and mentoring they need to meet all regulatory requirements and to deliver your strategic priorities.
You have a much lower staff churn rate and are attracting and keeping the best talent. You are also meeting, even exceeding, the expectations of your highly diverse student body. Your payroll is fully digitalised and automated so that everyone gets paid easily and on time, and your HR staff are freed up from unnecessary admin to deliver more value.
Does that sound like a fantasy? I can assure you that it is already a reality for some universities. More are starting to wake up to the possibilities of bringing their HR and Payroll system out of the dark ages and into the age of enlightenment. Traditional HR is dead. Long live talent management!
A full ‘hire to retire’ talent management suite is what successful organisations in the private sector have been taking advantage of for years. For example, the market-leading SAP SuccessFactors, HxM suite is a Cloud-based HR system which makes it far easier to manage a diverse workforce. It harnesses the power of modern advancements such as AI (artificial intelligence) and machine learning to help you drive innovation, cut costs, and hugely improve the employee experience.
I’m seeing universities struggling to manage a disparate (and now mainly home-working) workforce. With so many staff and an HR team already bogged down in manual processes and error-prone, disconnected spreadsheets, how can you possibly keep on top of your workforce? You do your best to juggle, but how can you truly know how they are, for example, if anyone is struggling with their mental health and needs HR support? Do you know how people feel about an imminent ‘return to the office’ where personal desks have become hot desks and health and safety guidance is continually changing? Oh, and can you be sure everyone has done the relevant H&S Covid-19 training before they come back in?
Employee wellbeing has been hitting the headlines for many months now, and rightly so. 2020 was stressful on so many levels. And many universities are planning to continue with at least some remote working, often with a mix of ‘back to office’ too. The increasingly blurred lines between work and home life and managing feelings of isolation and ‘zoom fatigue’ on top of any concerns about the virus itself can be a perfect storm for mental health issues.
A global study at the end of 2020 by experience management company Qualtrics, discovered that wellbeing is one of the strongest drivers of employee engagement. In fact, we use Qualtrics online survey software, integrated into SAP SuccessFactors, to help HR Directors to keep an eye on their thousands of employees. 99 of the top 100 business schools also use Qualtrics as a trusted research platform. It can automatically send out wellbeing (and other) surveys to your staff, collate the results and even handle any ‘first level’ responses. It can flag if any specific employees have fallen into a longer-term dissatisfaction, or worse, and alert your team to take any appropriate action.
HR and payroll technology has advanced so much in recent years and has been thoroughly tried and tested by the most complicated organisations. I think you’ll be surprised at what’s now possible. Worried about budgets and timescales? We have developed templates specific to Higher Education which means you can be up and running much quicker than you’d expect – and for a fixed price.
You might like to take a look at our video and infographic outlining the features of NTT DATA’s it.talent managementR2R for Higher Education. This is an SAP Qualified Partner Package that combines SAP SuccessFactors technology with our 30 years of experience in successfully implementing HR systems rollouts and our industry knowledge from our partnerships with over 30 universities. Higher Education capabilities are built into the solution as standard, including:
- Multiple employment contracts
- Complex payroll administration
- HESA reporting
- Staffing and managing temporary posts
Making things easier for you, your students and your employees are what we do best. But we do realise the constraints you have and the many hoops you need to jump through to get new processes and systems approved. We have a lot of experience in helping HR and Finance executives to make a business case and can support you in gaining approvals at every stage.