Want to be recognized as an awesome and essential part of the business (and have GREAT career prospects)? It’s all in your shopfront experience.
For an HR team in Asia, it’s fairly simple. Creating a great HR shopfront or first impression for employees is all about making sure your employees have an awesome experience each time they deal with the HR team!
How to Create a Great HR Shopfront and Employee Experience
The reality is that most employees outside of the management team have limited experience with the HR team, so you’ve got to make every time you touch the employee’s professional life count! Here are the 3 best opportunities that our HR clients say they look to impress:
1. Onboarding
First impressions count and a great onboarding experience into your company is the perfect way of getting your new joiners passionate about what they are doing and making an impact in the business. Although a lot of different teams including IT, operations, the employee’s new team, etc. play a role in the onboarding experience, HR should take ownership (and credit) of planning out an awesome onboarding journey!
Welcome pack – Sending your employee a welcome email and pack before they start is a great and easy way of getting your employee up to speed quickly as well as demonstrating you care and that you’re a well-organized business. The best practice is to send the welcome pack before the employee starts so that they can turn up to their first week well prepared and be free of as much administration as possible. Need some inspiration? Check out some of the welcome kits these teams are using.
The engagement meetings – A growing body of research into employee engagement tells us although a lot of factors impact employee engagement and 3 key factors include:
- Employees relationship with their manager
- The employee’s belief in senior leadership
- Whether the employee is proud to work for the company
The key takeaway is that the company’s senior leadership is essentially the biggest driver of the engagement of your new joiner. Employee engagement is often assigned to the HR team on the basis that it is perceived as a ‘human’ issue (despite the research showing that senior management are the critical influencers!) so it’s crucial that any HR team charged with employee engagement get new joiners in front of senior management as part of their onboarding.
The team lunch – Don’t underestimate the power of food! Research shows that sharing a meal with people helps build trust, relationships and performance (and is of course a nice thing to do!). While it seems an obvious choice, welcome lunches and having an informal conversation with new joiners can often be lost in the busyness of onboarding. Don’t let it be! Treat yourself!
2. Payroll Experience
The employee’s payroll experience is the core of the ‘shopfront’ for the HR team. End of story! Processing payroll is the one job you can’t screw up and it’s one of the HR team’s most frequent chances to impress.
Employers make a commitment to pay employees in an employment agreement and not fulfilling your side of the deal will never go down well. All Asia HR professionals will know the downside of achieving less than 100% in terms of accuracy and timely payroll payment – Employees’ productivity and engagement plummets and staff can often vote with their feet.
However, even though calculating payroll is a risk that HR teams need to manage, the employee payroll experience is also one of the biggest opportunities for an HR team to show off their capability.
What does your payroll experience say about your HR team?
- Still delivering paper copy or emailing payslips? Given the systems employees use in their personal lives, either of these methods will portray the HR team as extremely backwards and paper pushers. Don’t be the last HR team caught using these inefficient and unsecure approaches.
- Using an employee self-service HR or payroll portal? What is the UI/UX like? Is there a mobile App? Are you using Single Sign-On (SSO) so employees don’t need to remember another password, saving your HR team time spent answering calls when an employee can’t remember their password? Can employees manage their leave and personal information from here as well? If it’s like most HR or Payroll portals in Asia, chances are it’s fairly dated or something that resembles DOS. At the minimum, the HR team must have a modern, good-looking landing page and it must be mobile friendly!
3. Business Partnering
Business partnering is a perfect opportunity for HR teams to be confirmed as a valuable and strategic part of the business. Helping senior business leaders make better people decisions is critical to building a great HR function.
The use of HR Analytics as a way of empowering an HR team has exploded in popularity and is helping businesses make better people decisions including:
- Measuring email data to predict relationship strength between managers and their teams and ultimately employee engagement;
- Investigating the impact seating arrangements had on performance, eg, seating high performers with particular sets of staff, and using seating arrangements to boost performance;
- How psychometric testing can be correlated with performance in certain job functions (eg sales) and predicting the best hires.
How do you help business leaders make better people decisions? Even if you haven’t started your HR Analytics journey there are still a lot of easy wins achieved by just sharing key HR metrics with your business partners! Need inspiration? Some of our favourite HR Metrics that lead to great business partnering are right here!
Want to improve your HR shopfront? Links International provides Asia’s leading payroll outsourcing solutions and supports 17 countries across Asia-Pacific.
Related Articles:
- The 4 Benefits of Employee Assistance Programmes
- 4 Ways to Increase Employee Engagement
- How to Write an Effective Payroll RFP + Template
- Top 3 Reasons the Best HR teams Use Outplacement
- Driving Purpose Equals Driving Success
Links International is an industry leader in innovative HR outsourcing with services such as payroll outsourcing, visa application, PEO/EOR Secondment, outplacement, recruitment and more! Contact us for more information on how we can help leverage your HR function.
