What Did the HR Tech Salesperson Say? Demystifying the HR Tech Selection and Implementation Process.
Presentation given by Steve Boese and Trish McFarlane at the SHRM Annual Conference, Orlando, FL on June 25, 2014.
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Understand the needs of the organization. Do you need time and attendance solutions, payroll processing solutions, tax solutions? Maybe you need all three or a combination of two. What is your budget? These are some of the critical answers you’ll need as you start to think about what type of payroll service will work best.
2. Know what type of payroll service works best for your organization. Are you going to do payroll in-house with a vendor or do you want the vendor to provide all the payroll services? Do you already have a payroll staff or are you going to hire them? All these questions are important to have answers to before you start talking to the providers.
3. Check out the vendors. Ok, shameless plug for Brandon Hall Group memberships, but having access to our KnowledgeBases is definitely the easiest way to pull information on various providers and compare them side-by-side. If not, you’ll be determining what to include in your RFP and then will need to determine which vendors provide the types of solutions you need.
4. Demo, demo, demo. Did I mention demo? As a former HR leader who supervised a payroll department, I can tell you that there are so many intricacies to payroll that you’ll want to see the provider solutions in action. This is one area not to skimp on. The time you spend will be well invested and will help ensure you get a solution that best matches your need and your budget.
5. Ask all the right questions. Be sure to ask how well the solution will integrate with your existing systems, how secure is the organization’s data, how long it takes to implement the system and what resources are necessary. You’ll want to know every detail on pricing too. Different providers handle pricing differently so be sure to ask how much it will cost per employee or per transaction. Also, dig in on which fees are part of the cost and how much the “extras,” like tax services, will be.
6. Ask around. You’ll need to spend time talking to references. Much like the demo stage, this is not one to skip. Also, don’t just call and ask a few easy questions about their satisfaction with the provider and the payroll system they selected. Be sure to ask how the provider responds when things go wrong, because they will. Ask how responsive providers are, how quickly they resolve issues and if they are available for questions. Give examples for them to respond to, like how providers respond when a group of employees is not paid correctly due to a system error, or if state taxes are not handled properly.
Another key area I examined was why organizations change providers. Here you’ll see the top reasons that organizations say they change HR system providers. Keep in mind, these are often your HRIS/ benefits and payroll systems. This can also include your workforce management systems. For many organizations, as they built their organizations over the years, they picked up many disparate systems to handle a variety of tasks. System integration came in as the most important driver of change for HR systems and user experience was close behind.
When looking specifically at the talent management systems (again such as those that handle performance management, coaching, mentoring, succession planning, rewards and recognition, etc) we see that user experience and enhanced reporting both rank quite high as reasons organizations would switch providers.
I see these as building up one by one and this is where we would do the dialogue about what the HR Tech person says and what it really means
There isn’t a Yelp for HR Technology
Trish – “So what do your other customers say about this solution? “
Steve – “We have industry leading customer satisfaction ratings.”
Trish – “What exactly do you mean by that?”
Steve – “We have industry leading customer satisfaction ratings.”
Then we spend a minute breaking that down, explain why this is a problem for the HR buyer and what they might be able to do about it.
Here is where I thought we’d break this down into
Research
Evaluation/Process
Decision
And try and give 2-3 key takeaways for each process step
We will need to be a little careful here that we don’t come off as sounding like we are selling our own stuff too much
Events and Conferences
Analyst reports and advisory services
Social Media/Online forums
Peers
Colleagues
Vendors
The idea here would be to talk about the different elements that factor into the evaluation and that each specific organization would have a different level of importance attached to each criteria, and may even have some additional or different criteria altogether
We could then give some examples of types of systems and types of companies that would say value functionality more than UX, or Cost/ROI more than Product Vision, that kind of thing.
For core HR systems, you’ll see that budgeting more time for training and implementation are the top things the HR leaders wish they had done. This is followed by developing a change management plan. As someone who has implemented many systems, I can attest that these are the critical pieces to consider as you look to purchase new technology. Asking more questions around timing and ensuring you have both your team, the leaders and the employees trained on the system is critical to user adoption of the new solution.
When looking at the talent management systems, you’ll notice the results are very similar. Budgeting more training time and implementation time were also key. Additionally, spending more attention on evaluating the talent management strategy up front is important. I have worked where we got partially through an implementation only to realize we needed to tweak our strategy before proceeding. Taking that time before implementation would certainly make the implementation process run more smoothly.