According to the 2018 HR Systems survey published by IT service management company Sierra Cedar, just over a third of all organizations had a regularly updated HR system in place. Over 28% of organizations had no plans to deploy a system while nearly 11% of them rarely ever updated their technology. In short, very few organizations find value in implementing robust HR systems for their organizations.
So why exactly is this the case? According to a guide published by NewToHR, the task of selecting, deploying and operating HR systems have typically been entrusted with IT teams. There is thus a knowledge disconnect between the HR teams that use these systems and the people responsible for managing these tools.
But this is not all. A number of HR systems continue to be non-intuitive for the average user. In other cases, legacy system providers take up a significantly long time to build and deploy their software applications. Not surprisingly, the failure rate from such implementations disincentivized the adoption of HR systems.
That is however changing in recent times. Businesses, including small businesses with an employee strength of under 100 have taken up to HR system adoption in the past few years. A major reason for this is the rise in the usage of cloud-based software applications. Such applications make implementation of HR systems extremely straight-forward and intuitive.
Also, since a number of these applications are SaaS based, they do not require massive capital influx for deployment. Legacy systems often demand tens of thousands of dollars in investment that can ruin working capital; especially for small and medium businesses. With SaaS though, businesses only spend a few hundred dollars each month, and such systems are thus extremely affordable.
So what are the mistakes that still contribute to HR systems failure? Here are a few pointers.
Relying on a vendor
Hiring a third party vendor to handle your HR systems is quite common. In fact, very organizations have their own in-house HR systems. But while outsourcing your product to a third party is perfectly alright, it is important to pick a vendor whose visions and objectives align completely with yours. For instance, if you are a local business offering janitorial services, it is important to work with a vendor who has a product that is targeted specifically at your niche. Adopting a generic service provider and hoping to make the product work for you may fail more often than not.
Project planning
Like we mentioned already above, it is perfectly alright to pick a vendor to handle your HR systems. But before you do that, it is important to plan the project like you would had the product been built inside. An exhaustive project requirement analysis helps you identify the needs of your business and also lets you benchmark the various service providers you may be interested in.
The biggest advantage of a cloud-based implementation is the flexibility it offers with respect to integration. A project planning tool that does not exhaustively cover all your needs does not necessarily have to be discarded. You may always integrate this product with other third party APIs that enable you to execute projects the way it was planned in your requirement analysis.
UX testing
HR systems are among the few business application software tools that end up being used by almost everyone in the organization. This also means the need to have a system that is user-friendly and is intuitive for all kinds of workers in your organization. It is ideal to have your tool tested for user experience from different teams from your workforce. This way, you may identify the gaps in the system that allows you to tweak the product before it is made available to all employees in the organization.
