The importance of HR Service Delivery in the Digital Workplace

HR digitalisation during pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic caused tectonic shifts in businesses and to where, when and how people work. Desk-based work transformed to become entirely digital during lockdowns. And as things are starting to transition to a new normal, a majority of organisations have stabilised their approach to flexible and hybrid work. With 65% of HR leaders thinking that flexible working is driving higher productivity, it is no surprise that about one third of European organisations are still planning to expand their adoption of flexible and hybrid work over the year to come. 

The pandemic required all HR products and services to be digitised to exist in the digital workplace. This affected hundreds of services, including:

• Clocking in and out, 
• Shift swapping, 
• The delivery of payslips, 
• Contract management with electronic signatures, 
• Onboarding, 
• Promotions, 
• Maternity/ paternity leave, 
• Sabbaticals, 
• Cross-boarding, 
• Salary reviews, 
• Performance and feedback 
• And offboarding. 

HR teams are still working on the backlog of services to be digitised and as a result many organisations have introduced digital HR Service Delivery solutions to standardise their services and handle requests. Modern HR Service Delivery solutions are embedded in Cloud HR suites or are available as specialist solutions that sit across the HR ecosystem. They are typically comprised of the following components:

• An HR Helpdesk that covers case, response and service level agreement (SLA) management, as well as survey management to provide a professional and consistent digital service. 
• An intelligent HR Service Portal that contains an HR Service Catalogue, a Knowledge Base and HR Policies to reduce employee enquiries and to provide up-to-date information on all HR services, globally. 
• A digital Employee Document Management module, providing safe and secure digital storage, access and management. 
• And an Employee Workflow Management solution allowing HR operations to self-configure key employee workflows.

Historically, these HR Service Delivery solutions have been used by people operations teams in HR Shared Service Centres. But since the pandemic Fosway Group has seen demand increase quickly in the mid-market and SME space. 

The mid-market: the importance of HR Service Delivery growing exponentially

As organisations start to introduce these solutions, they soon recognise the importance of being able to deflect cases to cope with volumes. The aim is to solve or address an employee’s service request even before it reaches an HR service agent.

But since employees often do not have the time to study the content in HR service portals, in FAQs or knowledge base articles, these pages are not great for case deflection. While they help a little, their main purpose is to provide service agents with efficient and detailed responses to standard enquiries.

To improve case deflection, many service delivery solutions have invested heavily in becoming more embedded into the employee’s flow-of-work. Employees will often have work tools such as Outlook, Slack or MS Teams open during the day to interact with their colleagues, which is why they are ideal for embedding an HR Service Delivery chatbot that picks up employees’ questions when and where they occur. 

The importance of HR Service Delivery and Natural language processing (NLP)

Assume an employee reads an MS Teams message from their manager asking the team to book their personal time off to ensure they are all within their carry-over allowance before the year ends. Here, the employee will want to check their balance, potentially confer with family or friends and then book a few days. With an HR Service chatbot the service catalogue, the FAQs and the knowledge article as well as the data from the core HR system, can be exposed in the flow of work. This provides employees with a much faster and simpler experience than having to login to the HR system, navigate to the screen with the paid time off (PTO) balance and then click through to book the days they require.