In this month’s Jeitocast Karen Beaman interviews Steve Parker on how HR Shared Services can help achieve greater efficiencies and effectiveness.  Steve talks about how it’s important to realize that not every high-volume, transaction-based activity is necessarily a good candidate to move into a shared services group.  The most effective use of the HR Shared Services balances three components together to determine what should be transitioned:

1. move non-strategic, non-business unit critical activities that will scale appropriately to Shared Services while making sure the business units can still operate effectively,
2. make sure expertise exists within your Shared Services staff to handle the activities in a cost-effective manner with improved quality,
3. re-engineer or streamline processes before moving them to Shared Servcies to take advantage of process improvement and standardization.

If you can’t standardize a process, you need to give some second thoughts to moving it into an Shared Services group.  Many failures in the delivery of services from the Shared Services function can be tied back to non-standard, one-off processes that cannot be effectively managed by the Shared Services group.

Given today’s economic environment, companies are under pressure to do more with less.  Often this involves standing up a Shared Services function.  But unless care is taken to ensure that the right processes are identified, standardized, optimized, and that the Shared Services staff is adequately trained to handle them, the result can often be more costly and less efficient.

 

 How can HR shared services achieve greater efficiencies and effectiveness [20:50m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download