Head of People at The Co-operative Bank shares four emerging opportunities for HR professionals
The big theme for our virtual event Access All Areas this season has been about energising engagement – improving the sense of participation, pleasure and involvement that your employees hold from working at your organisation. I caught up recently with one of our customers about their experience improving and enhancing employee engagement.
Ruth Clarke, Head of People Delivery at The Co-operative Bank spoke to me about the post-pandemic world for HR professionals - who are expected to be more agile, more resilient and more flexible - and described what she sees as the key upcoming opportunities for HR professionals.
1. Your prospective talent pool should get bigger
“The biggest opportunity that I see is a geographical change. We’re moving away from the old model, which is that you work in your own geographical location and you go to an office there. The pandemic has allowed people to realise that working from home, being more agile – maybe a hybrid model of the two – is actually a workable solution for organisations.
With the growing number of recruitment moves and attrition challenges in the market right now, the move to more flexible working enables us as HR professionals to maximise our talent pool because we’re not restricted geographically.”
2. New methods of communication to drive greater efficiencies
“We’ve seen a huge shift in the way in which we operate as an organisation throughout the pandemic and obviously since things have started to ease a little,” Ruth explains.
“We used to rely very heavily on what I would classify as ‘old school’ communication methods, for example, supporting phone lines and face-to-face sessions. But recently we’ve been utilising communication technology and have a single point of contact for this within our HR function, which has pretty much eradicated our need for phone support lines and a lot of our in-person activities. The technology has played a massive part in that.”
3. Leveraging technology to support a people-centric experience
“I could draw a very direct correlation with our move to Access People systems when it comes to becoming more people-centric. What we have now is a situation where the technology feels like a supportive tool for the roles, rather than a necessary requirement.
Our people now have the ability to make real-time changes, with less delays in their processing, and very quickly have the information they need to hand. I think nowadays it feels like our tech is an enabler of people’s responsibilities, whereas prior to the move to Access, people found it more of a hindrance, a necessary evil, perhaps.
The other element is the usability of the technology, how user-friendly it is. Then there’s the visibility that the system provides. We would have anticipated a certain number of calls every payroll period and we’ve seen a big reduction in those – from hundreds of calls a month, they’ve gone right down.”
4. Digital transformation – and the risks of standing still
”Without moving forward with our HR transformation we would have struggled to keep up with the ways in which the world has moved and found it far more difficult to find a place where the technology can drive the answers, instead of relying on those old-school methods. Changing nothing would have caused a significant challenge in terms of our ability to support our employees and managers throughout the period in question. We would likely have muddled through the pandemic and probably not given the best service to our internal colleagues. But what I feel we’ve actually managed to do is give them the right tools, the ability to do their roles better, and allowed us all to focus less on day-to-day administration. We’re now able to support employees with their real needs and some of the more value-added activities that HR can provide.
For example, we had a benefits case when choosing to move to PeopleXD and a cloud-based HR system, and absolutely realised the advantages we’d hoped for, but there can always be unexpected peripheral benefits. In this environment where recruitment is critical, we now have an extensive screening programme enabled, and the pace at which we can complete quite complex screening is significantly faster than it ever was before. In terms of our future HR transformation plans, we’ve taken the decision to move to the Access rostering solution early next year. We’ve had lots of different processes and ways of working across the organisation historically but putting the rostering solution into practice will allow us to have a single process, one way of working across the business. That will make a huge difference to us.”
Access People are pleased to announce that our Payroll Managed Services project with The Co-operative Bank plc won Project of the Year at the 2021 CIPP Annual Excellence Awards.
Access People solutions include a comprehensive portfolio of HCM software applying over three decades of knowledge and innovation, supporting HR, learning and compliance professionals to deliver seamless people experiences.
Download the Access People brochure to find out more.
