Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/227268
First-Hand Account made a good start and moved closer to a more consistent approach globally. the appropriate stakeholders across the organization whether it was HR, managers, senior leaders, or employees. In terms of the HR portal, this had originally been designed for a different service delivery model in a very different company and here was an opportunity for us to refresh the way we delivered content. I'm pleased to say that the feedback from employees has been very positive and has allowed us to move people to a single point on the intranet for the vast majority of their HR-related needs. However, we need to continue to monitor this and make sure the portal keeps pace with the needs of employees—nothing lasts forever! The first component to this approach was stakeholder involvement which was at the center of our communication and change efforts. Upfront, we conducted a stakeholder analysis to fully understand all of our stakeholders, identify what's changing for them, and document the benefits and concerns. We also asked for input from our global HR and manager teams throughout the process, including conducting surveys. This input led us to create a comprehensive change strategy and plan. In terms of performance management, we realized we spent way too much time getting to a "rating." This had created a culture of evaluation and labels, and it didn't support collaboration—one of our core values as a new company. We wanted to create a culture of high performance and we recognized that in the past we spent too much time and resources trying to "hit the distribution." That time could be better spent on meaningful dialogues talking about how we can improve performance at the individual, team, and organization levels. Basically, we were always looking in the rear view mirror instead of looking out in front. What were some challenges during the process prior to going live? As you can see we changed a lot—all at the same time. We were very focused on what needed to happen and when. We had two years to complete this phase of our transformation and we spent a lot of time at the beginning being very clear on our objective. We developed a set of guiding principles to help us through some of the more difficult decision-making we knew we'd be faced with throughout the project. I think we did an excellent job at project managing and maintaining tight governance on a multifaceted project where sequencing and interdependencies were critical. To be honest this is one of our great strengths as a company so in many ways we expected this part of the project to be a success. One of the biggest challenges we had prior to going live was in the payroll arena where we had issues relating to the integrations between Workday and the local country payroll systems. These issues really reflected years of complexity where we had customized interfaces extensively. Trying to unravel that was very difficult especially when you know that above all else, the one thing you need to get right is people's pay! The team did an outstanding job at making sure that these issues got fixed and we went live in all countries as planned. I'm pleased to say that apart from a few teething problems, everyone got paid on time. How did you communicate the new process to all HR resources part of the MSI global community? We had a work stream as part of the overall project that was focused solely on communication and change management. They had their own project plan which was fully integrated with the overall plan. This ensured we communicated at the precise time to Next, it was important to tell the story. At the time of separation, we told a very crisp, cohesive story. Our employees appreciated and responded well to that approach. So, we articulated an HR transformation mantra called "It Just Works" to reinforce the ease and simplicity of our new systems and tools. We also built a visual identity system to make it easy for employees to identify HR transformation communication. And, of course, we had a fullblown communication strategy and plan. We knew the best way to reach MSI employees was to engage them in a variety of timely, relevant, and compelling communication. We leveraged email—some from leaders, some highly visual to provide just-in-time action-oriented information. We used video, meetings, and a variety of other tools such as flyers, webinars, know-beforeyou-go guides, and so on. Finally, we prepared our global HR colleagues to manage the change. We set up a global change agent network and put them in charge of managing and communicating the change. What were some successes and challenges of the big-bang roll out? The roll out was very successful; we achieved what we set out to do. Our systems went live, the interfaces to other systems such as payroll worked, the Service Centers came on stream on time around the world, and employees used them extensively right from day one. Overall we're very pleased with the way the launch has gone, and our focus for the first nine months has been on stabilizing what we have. Inevitably we've already started looking hard at how we can improve the performance of all the parts, and to be honest we will probably always be looking at how we can make things better. We are working hard to reduce manual interventions, and fine-tune our employee service centre knowledge and the operating model. At the same time we're continuing to standardize and simplify our processes wherever possible to make things easier for employees and managers. Ultimately, we believe our HR technology and service delivery model can help us unleash the value of HR. We're shifting from implementation mode to continuous improvement mode—and that will free up our HR folks for more strategic activities. We're also focused on leveraging the power of our new technology to provide meaningful talent intelligence that will help us drive better people and business decisions. NOVEMBER 2013 | www.hrotoday.com [61]