September and October are historically prime months for HRs to reach out to Matchr, HRInsidr’s co-brand, for Human Resources Information System (HRIS) advice. Dave Rietsema, our founder, spent 10 years as a senior HR leader for Target. He says, “The best time to implement an HRIS is to follow the fiscal year for W2 employees.”
HRs have many factors to consider when purchasing or upgrading to a new HRIS. The timing of the purchase is just a small, but important piece to the puzzle. Due to the various HR responsibilities, purchasing or upgrading to a new HRIS requires you to think strategically about anticipating the ripple effects across your organization. Ultimately, you hope it will automate your processes, but the adoption process for your workforce can cause a massive headache for all involved if you don’t consider user compatibility.
Implementing an HRIS requires you to consider how to anticipate the pitfalls as best you can without relying on your vendor to provide those specific solutions that they might not even know are problems for you. When purchasing an HRIS, are you asking the right questions? Do you know what questions to ask?
Compatibility Questions
Understanding your current state is critical to anticipate the obstacles you will face in a software transition. First, identify how the change will affect your users. Here are just a few compatibility questions to consider when it comes to your workforce:
- How many users are affected?
- Are they transitioning from one HRIS to another?
- How will the change affect their daily roles and responsibilities?
- How do they interact with technology?
- What helpdesk tickets do they submit?
- Is it possible to develop my workforce with HRIS?
- Will the solution actually be better for our business needs?
Choosing an HRIS is challenging because of all the complexities. Some of those complexities are specific to the industry and, then you throw in your own specific workplace challenges, that make choosing a compatible HRIS nearly impossible.
Most software sites will ask you about compatibility with features, but what about choosing an HRIS based on the people in your organization? How can an HRIS help your leadership team to reach future goals? Have you defined your technical culture?
What’s Your Technical Culture?
Take a step back and analyze the technical tools currently used at your company. Maybe it’s Salesforce, Slack, etc. Do your employees complain about these tools? What are they frustrated with? Do they experiment with extra features or do they need extra hand holding?
Consider asking your IT team to summarize your leadership and employee’s helpdesk ticket topics to understand more about the frustrations in your technical culture. Pay attention to common features used and the tools that are less used. Exploring your technical culture with an HRIS advisor can save you time and money when you don’t know the questions you don’t know to ask.
Tip: If you have an existing HRIS and are upgrading to a new one, your current system should glean some UX insights to help select a compatible system specific to your workforce’s needs.
How UX Analytics Can Help You Meet the Needs of Employees
Previously in my role as an IT Manager, our employee demographic was middle-aged, mostly female, tech savvy, but generationally behind the curve. Our CEO was trying to cut costs, and I was tasked with customizing a cloud storage solution in SharePoint. As the user interface became too complex and took consistent effort by our managers to update, it resulted in the system becoming outdated years later.
Looking back on it, we should have oversimplified the user interface based on our demographics. Fewer options, the better. We didn’t need to meet all our needs at the start, especially considering that it sacrificed adoption by our employees. A more effective strategy would have been to add features slowly to help users digest. Hindsight is always 20/20, but this is why matching your workforce technical level with the right user interface is a worthy analysis to put some thought towards to increase compatibility.
See the examples of Rippling and Bitrix24 dashboards below. Notice the difference in the number of options available. Less options are easier for a non-tech savvy culture.
Analyzing the Current State
In the tech world, when you troubleshoot an issue, you want to know as much as possible about the current state of the problem. When you apply it to understanding your technical culture, this means listing what tools your company is using and how they are interacting with them.
Step 1: Have Your IT Team Dive in UX Analytics
1. Make a list of the technical tools your company is currently using.
2. Analyze analytics and UX reports to understand human behavior and your specific workforce’s relationship to the software.
Tip: You may have to manipulate and compare data to glean meaning from behavior and usability, but start with any data your IT team can pull from the systems. Invite collaboration with your technical team to help you understand the culture from their perspective.
3. Summarize top helpdesk ticket topics to give you more information. You can do this by having your IT team summarize the topics of your most common helpdesk tickets. Assessing their technical level will help give you more information. For example, if most tickets are resetting password issues, you’ll need to start off with a simple interface and build in features slowly to smooth out the implementation process.
Step 2: Discover Your Company Goals
How do your stakeholders make decisions? Are you in a state of growth? These are just examples of more questions to dive deeper on to further a compatible match.
👜 Discover more questions to help you understand how your leader thinks to get more dialed in.
HRIS Systems are categorized into 5 types: Comprehensive, Strategic, Tactical, Operational, and Limited Function. Applying how your company operates to how your team thinks will help you select the most compatible system for integrating and influencing your leadership team.
When Do You Push Your Culture with Technology?
Leadership development is one of the top priorities for HRs today. HR leaders can affect the culture and organizational development in the choice of HRIS they select. For example, how can your HRIS also support your company in growing in the right way? Can your HRIS offer AI capability so that unfamiliar employees can experiment and gain more skills in this area? Does your HRIS offer a way to provide consistent communication and updates to build trust?
A robust system may be more attractive but, it’s up to the administrator and team to use its capability to its full potential. It’s best to strike a balance between what the technical level is of the majority of your workforce and finding their edge to help them continue to innovate. When you match it to your leadership team’s style or employee’s usability comfort level, it has a greater success rate of becoming adopted as a supportive tool, not just for documentation.
For example, one company I worked for used Workday. I found the tools helpful, but the performance review process felt impersonal. My manager complained about documenting the process and disconnected from any follow through. I could tell that piece of technology was more of a hindrance to her than supporting her in her role. The way to ensure compatibility is to uncover these perspectives from your leadership team while collecting buy-in on how an HRIS could support them with their responsibilities.
HRIS technology is advanced, couple that with the AI capabilities, and it’s a powerful tool to use but depends on the users and the environment it’s placed in. Analyzing your technical culture can help you choose a compatible system.
Assessing HR Needs
Top priority of a new HRIS should relieve HR from the burdens of manual processes. It should allow you to move more efficiently, especially as the role grows, but that’s the minimum criteria. That’s what demos and free trials can help you explore.
After applying this level of awareness to the dashboard, notifications, confirmations, and other UX features, you’ll want to apply how you’ll measure your HR initiatives and ways your HRIS can support you in the influence of your leadership team.
Most HR professionals don’t have a seat at the table, but HR can have a large impact on the culture and development through their pick in an HRIS. It’s difficult to imagine the possibilities. Sometimes we don’t know the right questions to ask. If you’re facing burn out, you also may be so bogged down with the myriad of pain points, anything will be better at this stage.
Yet, if you take a step back and get really precise into that process of understanding your employees needs and your culture around their relationship to technology as a living, breathing thing that can develop and partner with you to take your company to the next stage of its evolution, you open up a world of possibilities.
An HRIS is difficult to choose because the issues surfacing within your workplace are specific to you. Sometimes vendors will tell you that their software can meet all your needs without really understanding what those needs are, if you even do.
Of course, there are the obvious questions like what processes need to be automated, confirming data, and updating data in multiple places for record-keeping and compliance purposes. But when you are looking at a system that will integrate with your people, you need to understand how they interact with technical tools so you can meet them where they are, push them to grow, and influence where you can with the investment.
Everyone wants to be on the other side of the technology learning curves, but they are a part of the process. You have some control in making a more compatible match by analyzing your technology culture, UX analytics, and pain points with current tools.
An HRIS selection should seek to go as far as possible with the investment, but even in that process of budgeting, there are options to start small like choosing a limited functionality HRIS, and growing into a robust tool. Consider analyzing future projection where possible to ensure the system is not only a match for your business needs, but compatible and ripe for adoption with your workforce.
