Today I participated in HRchitect’s WebMingle, and I just wanted to thank them again for inviting me to participate. Everyone at HRchitect, especially Matt and Tiffany, are a joy to work with; keep up the great work!
Concerning our AllegroHR Personnel Folders product–which is a hosted document storage system configured particularly for the needs of storing personnel records–I was recently asked, “What’s the difference between ECM and a personnel folders product, and why does HR need it?” In this blog, I’ll try to answer the latter question, and in a future blog I’ll answer the former question.
Truth be told, an ECM product could serve the needs for the human resource department’s personnel folders, but why is it that so many HR departments–despite their IT department offering a strategic document/content management product–still store personnel records in paper files?
I’ve heard quite a few reasons, ranging from privacy concerns to simply not wanting to work with IT, and ECM implementation costs being too high for HR to bear to simply status quo. I think there are several valid points buried in the reasons:
1. Privacy; HR documents are indeed not the same class of documents as letters to clients, contracts, and vendor invoices. Not only is sensitive personal information found in a personnel folder, but there can be HIPPA-governed protected health information (keep in mind that there’s not a government agency who will fine you thousands of dollars for a missing or incomplete vendor invoice, but there are several such agencies in the HR space). HR is tasked with ensuring the control and the protection of this data, and (let’s be honest here) often doesn’t trust IT with this critical requirement. If HR is lucky enough to have an HRIS function, perhaps the ECM system for storing personnel folders can be implemented and managed by HRIS, but unfortunately HRIS usually doesn’t have the clout (budget) to procure and maintain their own ECM.
2. Process; personnel records aren’t just documents and content, they are records. That’s an important distinction because of all the compliance issues that surround HR. Personnel records have a life span and need to have rules (that are actually enforced) in place concerning their creation, access rights, and their eventual disposition. This implies process, and these processes are often not fully understood outside of HR, and to complicate things they’re constantly changing (e.g. the I9 confusion of the early days of the Obama whitehouse).
3. Cost; ECM is a strategic investment, and when it comes to technology strategic investments, these are assigned–as they should be–to IT, i.e. HR, even in large environments, likely won’t get the budget necessary to implement and maintain an ECM platform strictly for personnel records.
Despite the problems, the need is obviously there, and as I pointed out in a recent blog, the cost savings are incredible (automating onboarding documents alone could save a 2,000 employee company millions of dollars, not to mention life cycle personnel documents). So what’s the HR department to do? The increasing need and desire to save money, but strapped with the lack of ability to make a capital investment, creates a perfect argument for a hosted, Software-as-a-Service solution, such as our AllegroHR Personnel Folders.
In my next blog on this topic I’ll discuss what’s different about AllegroHR Personnel Folders and an off-the-shelf ECM platform.
A few weeks ago a colleague of mine, Judy Mod, from Neighborhood America interviewed me on the topic of strategic alliances and partnerships, and I meant to plug her article, published on TechLinks. So here it is: http://www.techlinks.net/component/content/article/43-community-voices/122459
Just one quick note on alliances, particularly in the human resources market…I don’t know of any other market as diverse and broad as human resources, and despite the amibitions of a few vendors out there, I don’t think any single vendor can effectively offer all of the technologies and capabilities that are possible. This creates an environment for both best-of-breed driven specialization and innovation, as well as inevitable partnerships. We continue to seek out alliance partners, and I’m pleased that we have a couple of new ones to announce – just as soon as the ink has dried on the paperwork!
I love my country, and I hope you do too. It’s my sincere wish and hope that you have a wonderful and safe holiday weekend.
Our Onboarding Best Practices Brief has become one of our most popular pieces of content, even though I kind of threw it together as a series of blogs I wrote to answer the question, “what all can you do with an onboarding system?” Firmly entrenched on the Acculturation Onboarding side of the equation in my brief is the integration of learning management and onboarding.
Onboarding is, obviously, an event: candidates are converted to employees. Onboarding, unlike learning management, is not a lifecycle process. So how are the two related?
In another of our papers, “New Employee Acculturation: Measure, Engage, and Immerse” I harp on using onboarding to engage a candidate through the onboarding process (as opposed to throwing a checklist in front of them and telling them to complete it). The intention of engagement is to lead to immersion: an all-out baptism in the organization by putting them in front of the technologies and communications strategies that have already been invested in. One of those technologies is learning management, very much a strategic investment in most enterprises today.
If the organization has a flexible enough system, the LMS should provide all of the rote “orientation” training like policy and procedures, network security, building security, etc. Some of this content may be custom to your organization, or it may be industry standard. It might also be delivered virtually, or delivered in a classroom. If you need a strategic training partner who can provide custom/standard and virtual/classroom, we recommend our partner and neighbor here in Alpharetta, Executrain (Mike, you owe me 1 beer for the name drop, or better yet invite me back over for some more of that port…).
Let’s face it, much of this training–no matter how expertly delivered–might be a bit dry. A well integrated onboarding system is going to help engage and move the onboarding employee through not only the tedium of the paperwork but also through this initial training and into the more long term acculturation functions. Engagement is not a checklist, it’s a proactive assignment of a task to hold the new employee accountable for their role in the process.
So where transactional onboarding drives the compliance and risk stuff when it comes to paperwork and automated data flow, and then starts to ramp down as acculturation onboarding ramps up, learning management kind of piggy backs along with acculturation–but as acculturation fades away and the rookie employee begins to become a veteran, learning management keeps on flying as a lifecycle process.
I mentioned orientation briefly earlier. I believe orientation is a completely separate type of function than learning management, and not just because of the obvious difference that orientation is associated with the onboarding event and learning is lifecycle based. I’ll blog more about orientation and my/our take on its impact to onboarding in another week or so. Stay tuned.
My hat’s off to the folks at AIIM and their entire team on the “Infonomics” magazine. This is one of the few (out of many) trade rags that wind up on my desk that I actually read, and the May-June ‘09 issue has a couple of great articles.
The cover article is the “real deal” when it comes to going green: Enterprise Content Management (ECM). For a technology that’s been available (yet evolving, as all good technology does) for so long, I find it amazing that there are still so many organizations who’ve not embraced it, or who have embraced it but not strategically (quite a few of the HR departments I still talk with are either not using the corporate ECM, or they are completely unaware if there is a corporate ECM).
A premise of the cover story is that so much of what we hear about regarding “going green” is so much fluff compared to what ECM has been delivering consistently for years now. We’re talking pretty substantial and quantifiable savings here, if you’re looking strictly for the ROI angle vs. the “do the right thing” angle. In a wonderfully direct and concise list, the authors cite the following 6 ways to go green by implementing ECM:
- Save money on paper and shipping
- Increase process efficiencies
- Integrate your field (remote) processes
- Reduce storage (real estate) costs
- Improve employee productivity
- Reduce off-site storage costs
So for our HR customers out there who read my blog, these are the 6 ways to justify implementing an electronic personnel folders system to accommodate not only your onboarding documents, but all of your employee lifecycle documents.
Another article in the same issue, “New Impetus For Going Paperless”, in addition to laying out a case for competitive advantage while saving lots of trees and lots of cash, cites a specific ROI of 8 months. A complete, 100% return on investment is achievable with 8 months; I would go so far as to say that this is pretty conservative, i.e. an 8 month ROI if you are simply moving to paperless. But if you actually improve your process–as we advocate in critical processes like new employee onboarding–I suggest the ROI is half that, perhaps even better.
I just spoke today with a new customer who had previously invested in another vendor’s onboarding. Among the many reasons they cited for leaving this particular vendor were 2 that blew me away. Okay, not to be gleeful in our competitor’s problems, but these seem like some pretty straightforward requirements and I can’t believe anyone would architect any major web application today–especially an onboarding application–that would have these issues.
The first was browser compatibility; the vendor required onboarding to occur in Internet Explorer 6 or later. This is fine if onboarding is going to occur in kiosks in the HR department, but not so keen if you want to encourage onboarding to begin anywhere and anytime before the employee actually starts. IE6 is actually in decline, with encroachment coming from FireFox, Google Chrome, and Safari on the Mac. I’m proud to say we can handle any of them; in fact if you can show me a browser–even a mobile browser–that doesn’t run our onboarding, I will assure you that it soon will.
The other issue was contending with pop-up blockers and security certificates (those annoying security warnings about installing ActiveX plug-ins and such). If you don’t have control over the candidate’s browser, you can pretty well expect to have a pretty significant number of them running pop-up blockers, perhaps several (IE, Google Toolbar, and the Yahoo Toolbar may all be running at the same time). Why isn’t their application — like ours 
— such that pop-up blockers aren’t an issue? Do you want your HR department to become experts in helping candidate turn off pop-up blockers?
The more I learn about the market, the more I realize our product is the best! Learn more about our onboarding at http://www.emeraldsoftwaregroup.com/onboarding
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A couple of things I’ve thought of since my communications blog from last week…
If I send an email to someone I don’t know, or even don’t know well, I believe it’s presumptuous and rude to send the email with return receipt request turned on, especially if it’s a sales call. So if you’re a sales person that I don’t have an established relationship with, the quickest way to get on my blocked sender’s list is to send an email with a read or open receipt request. If you and I are working together, or if there’s legitimate reason for requesting a return receipt, then I’ll send it to you.
Also, when I leave a voice mail for someone, I try to be very clear about who I am and why I’m calling. I actually just returned a call from a voice mail that lead me to believe they were a customer service rep on the account for one of our existing vendors; in reality they were a sales rep for one of that vendor’s competitors. Okay so you duped me into calling you back, but now you’re on my blacklist; good luck getting business with anyone I know.
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On Wednesday I had the great pleasure and privilege of being a panelist on HRchitect’s onboarding vendor panel at their HR Show 2009. I loved the event, and I hope everyone attending found it valuable. I just wanted to write a quick blog with some semi-random notes and observations I made during the panel discussion; they’re not really in a particular order, but considering I’m reviewing my scribbles from during the panel questions, they’re roughly in an order matching the questions posed.
- All vendors agreed on the main drivers behind adoption of onboarding technology, and all (seemingly) agreed on the principle driver being ROI, though a couple of vendors indicated that they’re seeing some other principle drivers, like “improving the candidate experience” during onboarding. I think this is actually a benefit, more of a side-effect really, but not so much a driver. When it comes down to it, nowadays extreme value and ROI is the driver for any decision to spend money; it might be nice to improve the experience of the candidate and there’s likely some retention benefits there, but customers today demand pretty clear cut ROI before they will invest.
- Several vendors pointed out aspects of a “generation gap” in the workforce, i.e. younger workers entering the workforce expecting certain technologies, certain business practices and expectations. While I believe it’s important to recognize these generational differences, they must be put into the context of the organization’s requirements and policies. If nothing else, I think these issues stress the need for flexibility in the onboarding process.
- We (at Emerald Software) draw a pretty clear distinction between transactional onboarding and acculturation onboarding, and I thought it was very interesting that the other vendors didn’t; yet they definitely seemed to frame their products with the value propositions drawn from one area or the other, rarely both.
- Only a couple of us vendors seemed to stress the flexibility aspect of the onboarding process, the objective that the technology must adapt to customer’s unique business processes; do most vendors have a prescribed “best practices” onboarding process of their own, and their customers adapt to their technology?
- All vendors provide “field level validation”, but we seem to be the only vendor that takes a multi-layer business rules and policy enforcement approach.
- A lot of time was spent on one particular question about how our products incorporate our customer’s unique talent branding into our products. With web technologies as they are today, I’m surprised this was a major issue; doesn’t everyone allow styling and branding of their onboarding processes?
- I was unclear on how the other vendors allow their end user customers to maintain the content of their onboarding systems once delivered; once implemented, do their customers have to go back to them to tweak the process? To add a form? To change some content?
- On the topic of material requisitioning (other vendors call it provisioning), we have a pretty unique stand: this is a lifecycle process, this is not a feature of onboarding. Managers should be allowed to request materials for their new employees as early as the position being created, through onboarding, and for the life of the employee. I had some agreement on this, but none of the other vendors confirmed that this is their approach also.
- Our requisitioning (provisioning) configuration is done – basically – by drawing workflows in a process designer. Nobody else really talked about how their workflows are designed. Or who designs them.
- On the topic of M&A onboarding, all the other vendors talked about the unique content that has to be delivered to acquired employees, which I don’t disagree with, but the basic, universal hiring process is the same. What’s really different is that you have to onboarding many (perhaps thousands) of employees in one shot, in a specific timeframe (usually a tight timeframe), and almost all the time you’re doing it with data that you’ve never seen before. This is the real challenge with M&A onboarding.
- A final observation that I had was that all of the other vendors provide their system as SaaS only. We’re unique here too: we do offer SaaS, and it definitely seems to have become our standard means of delivery, but we also offer conventional licensing, and even an appliance-based approach we call “managed services” that has the pricing and capital investment benefits of SaaS but with equipment that clients maintain in their own data center.
If you were in the audience of the panel, I’d love to hear your feedback on the event: post a comment or shoot me an email at chuck.ros@emeraldsoftwaregroup.com Of course, feel free to visit our website to learn more about our approach to onboarding: http://www.emeraldsoftwaregroup.com/onboarding
Today I sat on the panel of onboarding vendors for HRchitect’s “The HR Show 2009″, and wanted to thank all of our friends at HRchitect for inviting us to participate. So thanks Dan, Tiffany, Matt, and everyone else at HRchitect! I hope the event was successful for everyone, and keep us in mind for future events!
If any of you who read my blog aren’t familiar with HRchitect, check them out at http://www.hrchitect.com. They are a great bunch of people, completely on top of the HR industry, and an absolute joy to work with. I look forward to my next opportunity to work with them.
The format for the HR Show this year is a great one: completely virtual. Our panel was a GoToWebinar format, and at first I was a little suspect about how well it would work, but it went off without a hitch. I’m sure this was in large part due to Tiffany Appleby’s extraordinary organizational prowess
I’m a bit short on time right now, but I’ll whip up another quick blog before the end of the week listing out some of my takeaways from the panel. In the meantime, be sure to keep any eye on our website for changes, press releases, etc. http://www.emeraldsoftwaregroup.com and if you’re finding my blog by Googling for onboarding: http://www.emeraldsoftwaregroup.com/onboarding.
