Blog Post

5 questions you need to answer to avoid the Core HR nightmare

Geoffroy de Lestrange

Southern Europe Marketing Manager, Cornerstone

As an HR or HRIS professional, you want to remain at the cutting edge of innovation to ensure that your organisation uses the most efficient management tools. On the other hand, you know that administrative features have a low business impact. So how can you modernise your HR platform, optimise business impact and avoid a long and costly project?

Ask yourself these questions:

1. Where’s the problem?

First things first – you need to identify the specific issues being caused by your current Core HR tool. Whether this be an unclear view of your employment base, the utilisation of multiple HR systems or too much time managing admin rather than dealing with strategic HR issues.

Consider an alternative solution. Without ditching your payroll systems (especially if they work properly), you can unify your employee data and foster people management with a single system of record. This system will gather the information from your back-office systems, and use workflow and form management to streamline the relationship between employees and HR.

2. What does the business need and want?

This is completely strategic and very often overlooked. The question is as follows: What does your CEO, management team and other stakeholders expect from HR?

The answer is very often that:

  • When looking at short term operational requirements, management and employees in general consider this to be an administrative function.
  • Yet, when looking at the longer term strategy of an organisation, HR is expected to work closely with the management team as well as product and business development to anticipate future talent needs.

Therefore, you need to align HR with both the short term operational needs and the long term company strategy.

3. What are you doing about workforce management?

Talent management is now moving towards people management. An employee or a contractor is a person, not just part of a process. Having a unified vision of your employees will help at all levels of HR. If you are using a single platform to manage employee data, you can offer easy admin elements. In addition, this unified view of employees will enable continuous talent development: performance reviews will be linked to targeted training, on-boarding will speed up time to competency etc.

At the end of the day, your people management system will be a powerful tool to foster engagement and increase retention.

4. Do you really get the most from your data?

Industry-leading data analytics tools now allow HR to obtain real insight from their data, including features such as:

  • Standard and personalised reports that help you track your daily activities
  • Consolidated dashboards with company-wide visibility
  • Predictive analytics dashboards based on big data algorithms that enable true data-driven decision making.

Yet, remember that analytics is only as good as the data it can use. Therefore, unifying your system of record and including the talent management data will enable the best of both worlds. You’ll manage company-wide administrative data and have a real positive impact on the business.

5. What can be simplified?

You already have functioning payroll systems and keeping your existing solution is often the simplest answer. Yet, you do need to have a unified system of record, global talent development, an international mobility programme, and an ambitious succession and workforce planning strategy. There is an alternative HR architecture that will help you get quick benefits from business-driven talent management and simultaneously serve as the central repository of all employee records. This system will then be able to exchange data with your local back-office or payroll system. And as you’ll be able to keep existing systems, project cost and length will be significantly reduced.

We’re here to help!

Cornerstone can help you analyse your current situation, define your business priorities and start with the most urgent needs you might have to unify employee records and develop talent. This is how HR will speed up its operations and have the highest impact on the bottom line.

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