How to get HR working for you on Salesforce
“We were sinking in a sea of paper. Our employment contracts were filed in cabinets, holiday requests were logged in a spreadsheet, performance reviews went into another system. Time and again we would be entering duplicate data into different systems. And nothing was joined up or automated. We spent all of our time on administration and paper chasing. It was getting to the point that we if we just managed to get the payroll out each month correctly, we sighed with relief’”
That was where one customer was was with their HR, when they first met with Chris Mitford-Slade and the XCD HR team. There was work to do here to turn this situation around, and Chris came along to Forcewest last night, along with Ben Coleman from SF Support Per Hour, to tell us the story of how they managed it, in full.
What they needed was a solution that put all of their HR information in one place, and then automate this data to work sensibly for the business. The answer was an intuitive HR system, built on the Salesforce Platform.
What does an intuitive HR solution look like?
An intuitive solution is one where your data is managed by a series of rules and workflows to automate and streamline all of your HR processes. Here are just a few examples of where this could come into play.
Holiday booking
Sounds like a simple process but employees may work part-time or complex work patterns, and organisations have different rules around how they manage Annual Leave, Sickness and other absence requests. The XCD HR system has these rules built in to their system. Submit your holiday request and it will be routed to the correct manager, for approval. Once that’s done, holiday dates are recorded in the Leave Calendar, leave balances are updated and everyone knows who is in the office, or out of office.
Managing visa and passports
If you have team members working overseas, an overlooked expiry date on a passport or visa could be a very expensive mistake to make. With an intuitive solution, an alert would go out to the department who manage your visas, along with all the information needed to renew the application. A simple workflow rule can trigger this process.
Dealing with an onsite emergency
On site emergencies are difficult enough, but let’s say something happened on a Sunday. The ideal scenario would be that your site manager could immediately see who was on call that day, and he could send out a ready made template email to the necessary personnel with all the details of the incident, outlining the action he needed. All of these incident details would be automatically recorded in the system for later review by anyone who needed this information…and not just in the dusty ‘Incident Log Book’ at reception..
Not just useful HR data, but useful HR reports
Having all the HR data you need, in one place, is key to the smooth daily running of the business. It’s not just about operations though, its also about planning and analysis. It is a very powerful tool that allows business managers to view their HR data in a report that makes sense.
For example, you might be a manager who wants to understand why some departments have a higher staff turnover than others. Imagine the insight you would get from being able to analyse the issues cited in the disciplinary reviews of these departments, against each other, at a click.
Operating on the Salesforce.com platform means that these reports are easy and quick to build, and you can adapt and customise as much as you need to. This type of integrated report is so quick to put together, your HR department can do it straight off, without needing to speak to IT.
HR as just one part of your joined up Salesforce platform
Every business needs HR, and every business needs IT systems that work the way they need them too. Salesforce is a great enterprise platform for many reasons – you can read a lot more in our Salesforce guide about why we recommend it and work with it.
But from the perspective of HR, your personnel are fundamental to your business, so put them at the heart of your business data, not on the periphery. If Salesforce becomes the hub of your business information and you are working off one joined up platform, all the better. Put your HR here.
Mix and match can still work fine
Joined up may be the goal, but if you already have a couple of HR apps already in place, that your team are attached to, there is no need to ditch your time investment here.
You might be currently using Jobscience for your recruitment, or perhaps Cornerstone for your training requirements. The great thing about using Salesforce as the hub is that you can still use an app like XCD’s to pick up the rest – (performance, reward, payroll etc) and it all flows in and out of the hub – Salesforce.
A lot of enterprise IT for your money!
If you are familiar with Salesforce and the AppExchange, then you will already know that once you start bolting on app licences here and there, and then multiplying that by the cost per user, per month, you can end up with a hefty annual bill.
It will come as a surprise then to discover that it’s possible to get all of this HR functionality for as little as £5 per user, per month. If you are not operating on Salesforce.com and have no plans to, then, you don’t need to buy one Salesforce.com licence to access this. With an app such as the one from XCD, your whole team get self-serve access to the HR system. So that means that if you have a business of 100 employees, you get all the functionality you expect from Salesforce, via your customised XCD portal, for a cost of £6K pa.
There’s a lot to consider, but the news is good – your HR department no longer need to drown in a sea of paper – the solution is available, real, quick to implement and affordable.
Key ideas to take away for your HR Salesforce implementation
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HR is traditionally an administrative nightmare for businesses – paper-based and lacking in automation. By joining up processes and data, there is a better way
- With programmed workflow and rules, intuitive business systems like Salesforce can automate many of your HR processes
- Joined up data = meaningful reports = better management decisions
- You can manage just your HR needs through Salesforce, or you can run your business end to end on the platform, through sales to operations, marketing to HR etc
- You don’t need to start again – if you have current Apps and/or systems that are working, then you can integrate around them and fill in the blanks
- You don’t need to have Salesforce licences to get the functionality of a Salesforce based HR system – it can be accessed via an App like the one available from XCD
- It’s less expensive than you might think – you could fully automate your HR processes from £5 per user per month
We would like to thank Chris from XCD HR and Ben Coleman from SF Support Per Hour for coming into talk to us last night at Forcewest. If you would like to find out a little more about future Forcewest events, please take a look at the information here and how to stay in touch.
If you would like to talk more about getting started on the Salesforce platform, or you want some expertise on the set up you currently have, get in touch with us, and we would be very happy to chat.