About HR Shared Service Center

• HR SSC is a new service delivery model

The whole process includes HR SSC Service delivery and performance measurement (quantity and quality of delivery), and corrective actions and taking decisions coming from data analysis.

Centralizing inefficiency is a recipe for one step forward, three back. Focused on handling high-volume, routine, standardized transactions efficiently and they're finding that the non-routine exceptions are gobbling up those savings and more.

HR SSC Tiers

Technology or Tier 0 - Fantastic Usability; Too many times we race to create a webpage or application without taking usability into consideration. Fact is that unless we make our technology usable and integrated, people will not use it...as examples of good usability is that NO TRAINING should be required.

Front Office or Contact Center; Resolution on the first call with high customer satisfaction. It's not just enough to respond to the question but it is important to do it in the right way.

Back Office or Operations; Data Integrity on a timely basis with customer satisfaction. There is a little trickier. Not everything needs to be done in 24 hours (it can but it will cost money). So it will be a matter of creating a balance of KPI's to ensure that the teams are prioritizing the work that comes in while executing the proper data integrity control points and not just copy/pasting data

Employee/Manager/COE/HRBP: Resolution on the first call, proactive support and transparency. What the customer ultimately wants is to make sure that the services representative understands their issue/question, is informed on what it will take to resolved it and how long it will take and be confirmed that the issue/question has been resolved.

HR Leadership and Executives: That they are getting their money's worth...extensive adoption, happy customers while making it less expensive than outsourcing.

What is the most important deliverable of a HR Shared Service Center? Why?

1

Quality HR Data Management

Consider this question at a level higher than service portfolio (benefits, payroll, workforce admin, etc.), the most important deliverable is quality HR data management, or HR data with integrity. Data make the world go round. Bad data make the world go round, and round, and round... Ensuring that data is good makes everything else work better.

2

Knowledge Management

Knowledgemanagement，Within the concept of a HR SSC is arranged that the specific knowledge – usually that of HR administration, Payroll and other functions that are part of the service delivery -, is centralized in the HR SSC. So it is essential that this knowledge is managed and accessible for all users.

To enable HR SSC business to be an integral part of achieving business goals can be achieved only when the HRSS can maintain quality HR data, utilize knowledge through a centralized knowledge management tool and above all its ability to continuously re-invent itself to meet business demands.

3

Customer satisfaction/delight for end users.

Particularly for implementation of a new shared services center. You have to "win the business" of the end user to effectively lead the change. Shared services are obviously more efficient, but they can also provide better customer outcomes with faster, easier, & more reliable support through scalable channels.

SSC leaders can consider how to enhance the Customer Experiencein all the daily services. How to use "Seconds that counts" to make customers have a unique and memorable experience.

SSC agents need well understand the customer expectation level,of their request,concerns and problems. Hence, respond by providing well matched level of services.

The challenge for SSC leaders is that they need have a spatial visualization capability to understand how far each service need go within the SLAs.

4

Management the complexity

The most successful shared service centers are those that manage the cost of complexity and refuse to offer different services to different customers. So the HR data and customer delight can be good, but comes at a price if different customers want different data and different ways of being delighted.

Ensuring that the end user or customer gets the resolution they need in a timely basis, and satisfactory manner. That will ensure that the business is successful as the employee's will not be distracted with unresolved issues and become frustrated that they can't focus on the task.

A big problem with the shared services concept is its failure to address complexity/variation. The model, as it has been generally comprehended, demands standardization to produce results.

Absolutely, standardization is the key to reducing cost and complexity. Here's how to describe the balancing act:

Think of the SSC in terms of supply and demand. Supply is what you do. Demand is what the customer needs. We attempt to standardize demand (i.e.,common policy, process, formats, tools, etc.) so that we can standardize supply (i.e., procedures, answers, outputs, etc.).

The problem comes when supply is standardized but demand is not, or at least not to the same degree. We've all experienced this as customers when our request situation was chocolate chunk but the service provider only knew how to do vanilla. The result is various forms of waste activity, ranging from multiple call resolutions to unnecessary escalations of errors.

The key is to find parity in standardization of supply and demand. So, standardization is very important and desirable. But if it is not possible, the next best thing is to make sure your delivery model can efficiently and effectively handle the requisite variation.

However, standardization too often is not possible -- sometimes for good reason, sometimes not. The shared services model must be able to effectively deal with the inherent complexity/variation in its client organization.

5

Management the Innovation

The most successful shared services appear to be when innovation has been applied by the leadership of the partnering organizations.

It is when they use shared service activity to positively-disrupt the current ways of doing things and creates new, better and lower cost services - which people want to share in because they are so much better than what is on offer now. It must be evident that the new service is superior.

6 

Management the Change

Shared Services is just shared change management - and that is where the problems lie， as we pretend it is about processes, when it is really about people. It is actually the problems encountered by most organization setting up shared services.

The cost of complexity issue often comes from attempts to merge or harmonies the current ways of delivering the service. The outcomes are either expensive compromise or dissatisfaction in middle management because they have to change their current ways of doing thing without being part of the change process.

It is not the processes that matter，it is engaging the leadership, staff and customers in design of a better, lower cost service, that matters most. Success should then follow.

Getting people to unlearn and start using the new system is the biggest hurdle. Leadership will play an important part of driving this change.

7

Manage the Customer Experience

Based on our client's experiences, it is certainly customer's satisfaction。 Such as the second S of SSC stands for Services. All other components are means to achieve customer’s satisfaction: data quality, management leadership, process automation, knowledge management, etc. At the end, to achieve customer’ satisfaction you need to match customers' requirements but (as mentioned above) it shall not stop you to be innovative.

We need bear in mind a SSC isn't design to adapt to customer wishes but to limit/control/standardize those wishes. Customers won't be satisfied until they fully understand the purpose of an SSC organization.

A SSC is such a radical change，deliverables aren't metrics (costs, process, customer satisfaction) but a brand new org design, a new way of delivering new services that, ultimately, fully support business needs (growth, acquisition, spin off, reduction of size/headcount).

Although we never measured KPI before the SSC transformation, known KPIs are also locking us into the past while we simultaneously design/define the future.

• Academic study evidences that there are three sets of customers for an SSC.

· The key decision makers of the partnering organizations, e.g. Chairman, Managerial Director, shareholders. No decision makers will be compromised by the restructure.

· The staff who will work on the frontline in the SSC. (but not managers or service heads who will be compromised by the restructure)

· The users of the service ，especially honest critics.

Standardization cannot answer all needs unless you talk about tiny pieces of processes.But standardizing 5% of the whole thing makes little if no sense.

We can equip us on the postgrad with necessary number of tools, techniques and templates, to bring representation from each other together to co-design the new service and co-create of the vision of what the new, innovative, lower cost service should look like. Later we can write the business case to deliver that vision. It will work out very well if done well.

To see one step further, considering classic metrics as tools/means rather than deliverables as such, more mid-terms vs. short terms goals， the metrics are, the tree hiding the forest. It's comforting, tangible, hence where we need focus on.

8

Manage the SLA

On measuring shared services performance,we can start with the question: How will you know the new model is a success? A variety of answers, but one answer always given is "when we are meeting our SLAs." In other words, meeting SLAs (metrics) equals success.

Most of us have experienced dissatisfaction with a vendor only to have the vendor look at you with an innocently perplexed expression, saying something like, "That's puzzling, because we're meeting our SLAs."

Metrics are indicators, not results. They are like the shadows on the wall of the thing but not the thing itself.

The reason we love metrics and SLAs is that they give us clear line of sight (or so we think) and unambiguous accountability. When we start looking at true deliverables, such as the more "spectacular" ones, these lines become blurred.

To get away from activity-based metrics we need to get comfortable with shared responsibility.We also have to get comfortable with customer perceptions often being the best measure, because only the customer experiences the true outcome. Hard metrics give us an objective yardstick by which to measure success, even though the measure itself may not be what's really valued by the organization.

Shared Services are about duplication of effort, so it usually starts with jobs cut to gain immediate efficiencies in payroll costs. The leadership/management is the easiest and most economic ones to cut.

That is why there is plenty of evidence to indicate that shared service concerns rapidly reduce themselves to "will I still have a job" or "will my power be reduced" - individualism rules and the complexity of people, power and politics kicks in.

9

SSC&HR Goals

To answer a simple question: What is the business goal of HR? For his clients, mostly dentists and veterinary doctors, the answer is simple - more patients, more revenue, more profit. A dentist could have the goal of making everyone look better and smile more, but that's not a business goal).

It occurs that perhaps the reason we struggle so much with measures in HR is our struggle with this basic question. Let's face it, if we had a goal as simple as "more profit" the task would be much easier.

Attract, retain, reward. Ensure compliance. Enable the business through people, etc. But nothing nearly as clean as "make more profit" is forthcoming. Of course, reducing cost is a way to increase profits, so any cost center in an organization can claim that as their goal.

What is the goal of HR?The number of possible stakeholders is finite but complex itself – is an organization’s leadership (e.g., CEO or CFO), is "direct customers" (employees and managers), is the HR Community (where they are looking for relief from handling HR "service delivery" activities), etc.

Answering the stakeholder question will at least focus the "most important" response to what that stakeholder group values most (e.g., if it's the CFO, who he/she may care about customer satisfaction and knowledge capture the discussion will surely come back to financials and economics ultimately).

The most important deliverable will depend on the stakeholder and which part of the service center:

First all， deliverables need to be substantially better than what was provided before. Failure - why spend the money.

Second，Better customer service. Cost effective service delivery. A delivery engine which is scalable and can accommodate growth of all administrative HR processes.

The Number-one deliverable in any shared services environment is... Expectations! It is the setting of expectations and then the delivering of them.

10
 SSC Compliance

To ensure control and tracking, the compliance process of the most important deliverable of a SSC in place is in accordance to e.g. SOX/internal/external audit.

To keep SSC operation compliance and smoothly run is the foundation for SSC’s future improvement and optimization and reinvention to win a table in the organization.