HR Shared Services: Beyond Payroll

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Editor Coda
Dec 24, 2013

When I talk to people about their HR shared services function, for the most part, we’re just talking about the payroll transaction process.  But one process does not a shared services function make. Well not in today’s terms, anyway.

Discussions around finance, procurement and almost any other shared services function focus very much on the “value-add”. But how often do you hear this phrase in relation to HR?

Carole Pearson, Head of People Systems & HR Shared Services at Marks & Spencer, explained that what often prevents HR transformation projects is the “welfare admin” culture.

Like many other business, Marks & Spencer previously had HR administrators in nearly every one of their 766 UK stores. In such a large organisation, any change to the ingrained support system would feel like a cultural upheaval.

However, as Carole said, the change would not just affect the 600 HR admin FTEs they had to find alternative roles for, but for the 75,000 staff across the UK. It was therefore crucial that they had a tightly facilitated communication effort to ensure that everyone was bought into the reasons for the change.

“It was certainly about getting back to basics – making sure that people are paid correctly”, admitted Carole, “though it was also about making sure that we were truly adding value to the business”.

After outsourcing their transactional payroll processes came the real win. The second stage of the process was utilising market-leading technology to automate the way they were recording attendance and lateness.

Previously, staff would come into the store, have to find their manager who might not be in the back office, tell them they had arrived, and then be told in which department they would be working that day. And if staff wanted to book holiday, they just needed to check the wall calendar.

All this meant that centrally, there was a complete lack of visibility over resource, no real time reporting, and ultimately it prevented the company from forward planning.

But by introducing staff swipe-in cards, and by managing payslips and holiday bookings in the cloud, store management can now roster up to 26 weeks in advance and by making the more of their resources, the company as a whole have made significant efficiency and cost savings.

Get in touch with your HR shared services stories too – we’d love to publish them on sharedserviceslink!

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