• HR Strategy
• Organizational Design
• HR Audit
• Process Redesign
• Employee Self-Service
• Technology Analysis

HR Strategy

To achieve your business goals, it is essential that your employees understand exactly what you are trying to achieve. If they get mixed messages or are unsure what role they play, more often than not, they end up doing nothing at all. This can mean your workforce gets lethargic and management gets frustrated, leading to inconsistency and even conflict within the company.

All it takes to develop your strategic style, culture and people practices is careful thought and planning – Hewitt's Culture Track model can help you do this. It investigates your approach to issues such as increasing performance, developing points of view, involving your employees and addressing change. Working with the model can help you assess and prioritise any areas of conflict, identify how you can achieve company goals, and develop a plan of action.

To read more about the Culture Track model, click on this link: Culture Assessment.

HR Audit

With the pressure to reduce costs also comes with the pressure to increase value-added services. HR leadership is in a difficult position. Many businesses are reducing budgets or holding them flat to improve operating profit but at the same time HR is being asked to provide more value-added services and to play a more strategic role. HR transformation involves both cost management strategies and changes in the capabilities/roles of HR professionals. The critical challenge facing HR leaders is how to balance and integrate both efforts. The lack of integration of these efforts typically leads to a lower ROI. The HR role transformation will not occur unless HR clearly identifies what activities it should stop doing and what activities it should spend more time on and communicates this to customers and to HR. In order to achieve this Hewitt developed the HR Analyzer. With this tool, you can quickly collect, analyze and compare HR costs, resources allocations and delivery channels. It is an activity-based costing tool used to capture information about how HR professionals spend their time. It consists of five areas of analysis (a.o. process efficiency). For each area you get key issues and insights, benchmark data, detailed financials … It provides detailed recommendations for reducing costs, improving delivery efficiency and aligning resources to better support the business strategy. This tool is very useful as it provides a baseline of the current state of HR resources and cost allocations and an objective fact-base to guide decision making and to overcome organizational resistance to change. It provides data to clarify the HR role and to better align resources to the business strategy.

Employee Self-Service

Over the past years, integrated human resources information systems (HRIS) have become more important. Technology-based (web-enabled) self-service is a key method for improving the service level to employees, enhance communication between the organization and its employees, to reduce the workload of HR and the line-managers. Other advantages could be: it allows to reduce the amount of paper in the offices (and the place needed to store all the papers), it makes information available to employees whenever they want or need it (e.g. shift workers, representatives), employees can update their information easily whenever they have time and it is easy to make overviews or reports (e.g. time-off overview).To make a employee self-service successful it is crucial that employees first of all know about the system. They need to be aware that the system exists. Secondly, it is important to remove as many barriers as possible, so they can easily access it. Another driver for success is to make it approachable. Through an efficient interface design, it must be made easy for the employees to use it and navigate it. Beyond usability, it must be useful, the content, features and functionalities must have value. And last but not least, it must be credible, it has to work, the information available must be accurate. Hewitt can help you build an integrated HRIS and develop a web-enable HR portal.

Technology Analysis

Faster. Cheaper. Better. This mantra applies to all aspects of business today and the Human Resources functions in no exception. For many companies, the cost, resource requirements and overall effectiveness of implementing HR technology and processes is unknown. Most companies use HR technology to support very basic functions (e.g. HR data, payroll, compensation administration). It is mostly used for efficiency and cost savings, not for strategic planning, e.g. human capital planning, support of growth initiative, succession planning, job evaluation. One of the reasons why HR is stuck in the middle, is because of the suboptimal use of technology. Companies are often faced with integrating a broad array of point solutions with an expensive HRMS platform that is typically underutilized. The difficulties of maintaining and integrating these systems and the expense involved have led an increasing number of companies to outsourcing solutions. Hewitt can help you with building a global HR technology task force in order to review HR technology and to create a blueprint for the future, to leverage systems across regions, business units and employee groups, to focus on how to use the technology and data in order to provide strategically valuable information to the business.