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Our Ultimate Guide to Choosing the Right HR Platform H R S O F T W A R E W H I C H C A N G R O W W I T H Y O U.
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1. Setting strategy and goals As with starting any project, it’s vital to sit down with your team to define the overall strategy and goals that will direct your choice of a new HR platform.
Whether your client’s current HR software contract is ending soon, they’re relying on manual processes or it’s just time for a technology overhaul to get aligned with a new strategic direction, there is a lot to think about when selecting a new hr platform. This guide will explore how you, as an intelliHR partner, can help your clients choose the right solution and ultimately achieve their goals!
Form a clear strategy You want to ensure the platform selected will service your organisation for at least the next 2-4 years, so it’s essential to have a long-term strategy laid out. Map out what is important to the business in terms of strategic direction, company culture and future growth. These factors will impact your ultimate choice of the best platform to go with.
Define implementation goals On top of looking at strategic goals for the organisation as a whole and how a new HR platform may fulfil these, you’ll also need to define specific goals for the implementation of the software itself. What does the business hope the new software will achieve? In the following sections we will explore how to determine these requirements.
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2. Audit your current processes and technology
3. Consider your requirements
support this.
After your initial audit you will probably have identified a few core needs already, but now it’s time to discuss any other requirements that may be expected across your team and the wider organisation. Once you have a broad idea of these expectations, it’s time to narrow this down and distill what you truly need.
Consider some of the following examples that might apply to your situation:
How do these requirements relate to your strategy or goals?
How do these support your goals Now it’s time to ensure you can have the right processes and technology in place to fulfil your strategy and goals. Different features will be necessary to
Now revisit each proposed requirement and ask the all important question: is
YOUR GOAL
TOOLS TO GET THERE
PROCESSES TO GET RID OF
Enhance communication
Continuous feedback
Excessive team meetings
Policy management
Static spreadsheets and paper forms
•
•
this aligned to our strategic direction? •
Strengthen compliance
Compliance dashboard
Improve performance
Automated, on-demand performance reporting
Annual reviews
Embrace lifelong learning
Training record management
Lengthy training approval processes
Reduce attrition
Real-time engagement analytics
Periodic engagement surveys
Better strategic alignment
Cascadable goals
Manual goal setting
Increase efficiency
HR automation tools
Paper-based and manual administration tasks
If an interstate expansion is on the cards, then continuous feedback tools will be vital for helping staff keep in touch across offices. If you want to achieve better alignment between teams, then cascadable goals are a must. If you want to move the company culture away from a focus on time and instead focus on performance and quality of work, maybe time and attendance features aren’t actually necessary.
Let’s consider some of the aforementioned tools in more detail, with the goal of automating as much as possible:
Continuous feedback Continuous feedback tools can help close the loop between managers and direct reports while setting up one-on-one catch-ups for success. If you
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want to improve communication, especially between workers in disparate
leave, mandatory qualifications and other key compliance needs means
locations, tools that allow for quick and easy two-way feedback are a must.
the business can be notified when items are due for renewal and get an
For example, intelliHR includes tools to build team pulses and form designs, and also comes with hundreds of pre-made templates. These allow organisations to build check-in forms that can be automatically sent
instant overview of their “compliance health” in one place and instantly. This helps ensure regulatory requirements are appropriately managed and successfully achieved.
to staff’s email inbox at set times, where they can easily reply online and submit to send the information back to their manager. Likewise, managers can provide feedback to their employees on how they are going. This information can then be used to create more meaningful conversations when managers and direct reports do meet face-to-face.
On-demand performance reporting Annual reviews can be time-intensive, difficult to act on and stressful for staff. Automating this process is important if you are aiming to proactively improve team performance. Rather than waiting up to 12 months to take action on areas where staff could improve, this can now be picked up and
Cascadable goals
acted upon straight away.
Cascadable goals are essential if you want to increase alignment between
With the right HR software, you’ll be tracking key performance metrics
company top-level strategic goals and make this relevant to the personal
consistently in the background and this can then simply be pulled together
KPIs of each individual team member. With cascadable goals, employees will
into an on-demand performance report in just a few clicks.
be able to set their own goals and share them with others so everyone can formulate targets that are working to fulfill the same overall aims. Think critically about each requirement and whether they are really complementary to your organisation’s strategic direction.
Training record management Having a central place to track training is essential if you want to place more importance on the value of ongoing development. Firstly, team members will be able to track their own training and ensure they are
Policy management and compliance dashboard Managing policies via static spreadsheets or paper-based systems leaves organisations and their employees open to risk. Having an online compliance dashboard to track things like work rights,
completing enough professional development each quarter. Secondly, your organisation will be able to measure the return on investment value of this training by comparing against performance data. Thirdly, with individual goal setting, training can be aligned to support company strategic objectives.
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‘With the implementation of intelliHR, the improvements in our culture are clearly visible. intelliHR is a tool that helps with our strategic cultural goal of being a great place to work, with improved engagement, communication and goal management now well on track.’ Sarah Gatehouse National Manager People & Cultural, Fujitsu General Australia
What are your priorities? Now that you know which requirements are relevant, it’s time to prioritise them in order of necessity. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking ‘the more features, the better’. While having many features may seem like a good idea to give you as many options as possible, there is not much value in this if you don’t actually use those features. Instead, it is much smarter to prioritise having 100% of your most vital features rather than 80% of what you need and a whole lot of ‘nice-to-have’ options. By having a thorough understanding of what your priorities are, you can ensure you are actually choosing a system that supports all of your needs
Real-time AI engagement analytics Similarly to annual performance reviews, periodical staff surveys can be difficult to act on in a timely manner. If you are currently relying on surveys to gauge employee engagement, you may have experienced low completion rates. Long forms are a chore for employees to complete meaning they often only get completed by the most diligent of staff. While this may make for
with room to grow. Decide on these before progressing to the next step.
What is non-negotiable? Knowing priorities is one thing, but knowing REAL priorities is another. It’s also easy to get stuck in thinking you need certain features just because you are used to having them.
positively skewed results, it doesn’t give us accurate data or show us areas
But what if there is a better way to do something, and those features are
for improvement in real-time.
actually redundant? For example, your team may be requesting a certain
intelliHR is the first HR software to include AI sentiment analysis and happiness analytics - two tools that draw on words and phrases entered
amount of document storage, but what if you could scrap the need for forms altogether?
into the system by employees to determine measures of engagement which
Make sure you can justify every priority with a ‘why’, and if you know there
organisations can review in real-time and drill into to find root causes of
is a better way that doesn’t require said feature, then it’s off the list.
positive or negative feelings.
So when ascertaining a list of true non-negotiables, be sure to focus on what the system must allow you to do, not how it allows you to do it.
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4. Look at multiple systems Now you will need to consider multiple systems and compare and contrast them before coming to a decision. Keeping in mind the priority features you have decided on, list these out and then compare at least three vendors to see which has the majority of what you require. If any or all systems do not fulfill all of your non-negotiable features, replace these with other options and repeat the process until you have found at least one system that meets all your essential criteria.
Strengthen compliance
Qualifications records
Strengthen compliance
Work rights records
Strengthen compliance
Contractor records
Strengthen compliance
Policy management
Reduce attrition
Retention analytics
Reduce attrition
Exit Surveys
Additional feature 1
Additional feature 2
Here’s an example matrix to help you get started: RELATED ORGANISATIONAL GOALS
PRIORITY FEATURES
VENDOR INTELLIHR OPTION 2
VENDOR OPTION 3
Increase efficiency
Automated organisation charting
OPTIONAL FEATURES
Increase efficiency
Automated workflows
Reduce attrition
Sentiment analysis
Improve performance
Automated performance reporting
Reduce attrition
Happiness analytics
Improve performance
Employee-driven performance management
Strengthen compliance
Health & safety analytics
Better strategic alignment
Cascadable goal setting
Improve performance
Performance management
Enhance communication
Continuous feedback tools
Better strategic alignment
Organisational design analytics
Embrace lifelong learning
Training records and ROI tracking
Additional feature 1
Strengthen compliance
Onboarding and offboarding
Additional feature 2
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5. Select a system By going through the process of comparing different systems and building relationships with vendors, you should now be very close to identifying your stand-out system. Using your own research and completing the disciplined selection matrix outlined above you will be able to determine which system will best fit your needs.
6. Set clear goals for the project that are measurable Congratulations, you’ve made it through the selection process and chosen a new HR platform. Now it’s time to decide how you’ll measure its impact on your organisation over the next 12-24 months. What you choose to measure will be based on your initial goals, but make sure all the ongoing objectives you set meet the SMART framework. S - specific M - measurable A - achievable R - realistic T - timebound Set two to three key objectives based on this framework that you will use to measure the effectiveness of the new platform toward. When defining your timeframes, keep in mind that your processes should be gradually replaced over time, not immediately.
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Congratulations on selecting your new HR platform We hope you found this guide helpful to selecting a new HR platform for you. If you’d like to learn more about what intelliHR offers call to chat to one of our team members.
1300 993 803 (AU) 0800 631 631 (NZ) info@intellihr.co
I N T E LLI H R .C OM . A U
intelligent people management.
0248 Š 2019