The Human Capital Management Strategy-to-Execution Disconnect

Organizations typically have siloed Human Resources (HR) and finance systems, data, and processes to run payroll, administer employee health and welfare benefits, and manage other key HR systems and functions. This hampers the experience for all parties involved – employees, HR, Finance, and more.

Optimized Human Capital Management (HCM) is the key to compliance transparency and reporting, a frictionless employee experience, and the real-time recruit and retain data access needed for effective business decision-making.

Here’s what it looks like when an organization lacks this optimization:

Getting data in and out of each system to do analysis is a manual effort.

This manual effort creates both room for error and redundant work. It also burdens HR and finance with administrative work that keeps them from their strategic HCM initiatives. The leading Chief Human Resources Officers (CHROs) in a McKinsey survey said they see moving routine administrative tasks to automated, self-service, or shared-service centers as one of the critical activities in their transformation efforts to focus more of their time as strategic business partners.

Lack of access to real-time data for macro and micro analysis impacts HR’s ability to make critical business decisions with the senior leadership team.

HR teams are forced to pull data from multiple systems and piecemeal a workflow together to do the reporting and analysis necessary to advance the HCM strategy. Often there are significant gaps in data integrity, compliance challenges, and wasted time trying to bring together these siloed systems and disparate processes.

Perhaps worst of all, the time HR wastes on manual data gathering for reporting and siloed systems creates a disconnected employee experience.

CHROs in another McKinsey survey identified two primary areas needing attention to improve the employee experience: self-service for employees’ simple administrative needs, and a personal touch for the moments that matter. Seamless self-service presents a consistent user interface and access to all of the administrative functions across the employee lifecycle, from onboarding and benefits to performance management tasks and on-demand training. As well, employees can get immediate access to their questions on benefits, training, and performance management without going through the HR department. This alleviates friction on their end waiting for HR to reply, and it lifts the burden from HR to answer commonly asked questions repeatedly.

Explore how well-optimized your organization’s human capital management system is. Ask our employee benefits experts or download our white paper, Human Capital Management Optimization, and see the way forward.

With more than 10,000 clients managed across our National Employee Benefits Practice, Risk Strategies delivers the high-quality, cost-effective, and compliant benefits programs and solutions employers need and employees value.