Change! It is often a scary notion for employees when asked to embrace new technologies at workplaces. Employees tend to have a common misconception that new tools or technologies will be difficult to use and will make their work more complex or in certain cases, will make their job obsolete.
Contrary to the misconception, providing your employees with proper support and training as well as making them feel a part of the entire deployment process can go a long way when it comes to making deployment of new technologies a huge success. For instance, when implementing a new HR technology, the HR and IT team should pair up for successful deployment and rollout.
Did you know? About 70% of software implementations fail due to lack of support and training to employees.
Here are five common and top implementation challenges faced by HR tech professionals:
- Difficulties in defining the future state of the HR department to sustain new responsibilities and roles that stem from HCM technology implementations.
- Need for customization, which further adds expense and time to the project.
- Challenges in running and developing analytics and reports.
- Lack of knowledge and expertise in managing HCM technology.
- Resource constraints such as insufficient workforce to drive the implementation.
Pay Heed to Employees’ Concerns
The best and the most trusted way to managing change is to put yourself in the employee’s shoes and anticipate what it might infer for your people and addressing the various concerns of all the employees affected by the change.
On the very first day of rollout, employees do tend to ask questions such as “what about my job, will I lose it? What changes I need to do in my work? What skills do I need to have? Will I receive adequate training for the same?”
Even if it includes the C-suite people, businesses ought to consider as what the first day looks like for every employee in the organisation affected by the new technology or software.
Business leaders ought to understand that today’s HR landscape entails redundant human resource operations, disparate systems, decentralized data, standalone tools/apps, incompatible report, disgruntled employee data and heavily customized solutions. Thus, it is supposed to be overly confusing for employees to embrace the changes.
Provide prompt support to your employees by arming them with proper information and a fair amount of reassurance. Ensure that everyone is aboard and on the same page.
If you fail to persuade people to adopt change, nothing is going to work. Whether you are introducing a new ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solution, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software or a new human resource management software or are moving your existing business process system to cloud, it is imperative to convince your people to embrace the change before rolling out the solution.
And if the new technology is expected to make someone’s job obsolete, be honest and upfront about the same.
Your Quick Checklist to Managing Change during Deployment
Proper planning for how employees will require to make the required changes to adopt new technology is as pivotal as planning for a new technology or process. So you will need to:
- Define all the success factors well in advance.
- Identify key stakeholders.
- Identify the gap between where your business currently is and where you intend the change to drive your organisation.
- Determine whether people have the right set of skills and passion to drive the change.
- Devise implementation crew wisely. Pick the best-suited and stellar managers to drive the implementation project.
- Create a robust and enterprise-wide communication plan.
The Biggest Hurdles May Be People, And Not Systems!
A whopping number of businesses are opting to redesign their end-to-end and existing HR processes with new HRMS implementations.
Some of the biggest hurdles include:
- Integration
- Project management
- Change management
- Reporting
- Configuration
Other challenges include HRMS vendor selection, HR organisational redesign, determining the need for technology and churning out (RFP) request for proposals from multiple software vendors.
Further, there are various other hurdles to change such as culture, misperception, resentment, fear, penchant for poor processes, lack of support, lack of communication and uncertainty.
Ensure that there is unanimity among leaders and key influencers that change is the need of the hour. You may even want to assess resisters, stakeholders, disrupters and most importantly, the ignorant. This is because keeping everyone engaged all throughout the implementation journey is crucial.
How to do this? One of the simplest and easiest ways is to solicit feedbacks from your people on a regular basis right from the start. Conduct surveys and hold Q&A sessions on a frequent basis.
Rightly quoted by Heraclitus, remember that “The Only Thing That Is Constant Is Change -”
For a flexible and ready-to-deploy Cloud based HRMS solution, contact us now. Drop us a mail at sales@pockethrms.com or give us a shout out at Twitter or Facebook.
