{"id":1832,"date":"2011-03-30T01:00:22","date_gmt":"2011-03-30T09:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/?p=1832"},"modified":"2011-03-13T06:55:13","modified_gmt":"2011-03-13T14:55:13","slug":"merge-outsource-re-merge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/?p=1832","title":{"rendered":"Merge, Outsource, Re-merge"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Imagine this. <\/span>You\u2019re fixing your house, and you take down a few walls to reconfigure how the place looks \u2013 it\u2019s a bit more open, you can see more, put more people in it when you entertain. <\/span>While you\u2019re at it, you decide to put new walls up \u2013 perhaps a new powder room where there wasn\u2019t one before, or a new bar area. <\/span>But the bar area never got used, and you didn\u2019t install water to go to in so you could have a sink and forgot the wine rack, so you take it back out since it wasn\u2019t what you really needed. <\/span>At the end of the day, you\u2019ve spent a whole lot of money trying to get what you wanted, and then didn\u2019t get what you wanted.<\/span><\/p>\n

The trend has been going on in business for decades now. Organizations acquire or merge, and then merge common business units and functions. What follows is counter intuitive: after the merge comes the re-piece mealing of the business unit or function. Basically we merge things together and then break them apart again.<\/span><\/p>\n

We’ve really done the same thing in HR. Over the last decade and more, we’ve tried to figure out what can go into HR shared services. We’ve dropped payroll and benefits in there, then we added HRIS and call centers. The first steps were easy, we gave payroll to the ADP’s and Ceridian’s of the world, and benefits to the Mercer’s and Hewitt’s of the world. Then we went a step further and gave away our call centers to HRO, going ultimately to a state of letting someone else do the transaction processing for us.<\/span><\/p>\n

We thought this was smart, and in many of the cases, it was. We reduced our costs, created scalability through our providers, and theoretically instilled better quality. <\/span>But a couple of years ago, we had one of those \u201cuh-oh\u201d moments \u2013 we realized that we did it wrong, perhaps went too far, or just didn\u2019t prepare the right way. <\/span>It\u2019s not to say that outsourcing was bad, or even that we outsourced too much. <\/span>But it did make us realize that simply outsourcing doesn\u2019t get you to the end state without a lot of work.<\/span><\/p>\n

What we\u2019ve done in the last couple of years is pull back some of the outsourcing and reintegrate the processes back into our shared service centers. <\/span>We realized that there is lots of stuff in HR that can\u2019t be simple handed over to an outsourcer and scripted. <\/span>After all, we\u2019re not talking about accounts payable and cutting checks \u2013 much of what we do is nuanced and no matter how many process flows or scripts you write, there is always another unique problem heading towards you just over the horizon. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The problem with HR outsourcing is not that they can\u2019t do what they do effectively. <\/span>It\u2019s that we haven\u2019t figured out where to draw the lines. <\/span>We give away the core employee indicative transactions like personal data or job changes. <\/span>Yep \u2013 those are pretty easy. <\/span>But along with that, we group the complex international movements in with the job changes. <\/span>Often these are high potential or succession candidates that are getting moved around because we\u2019re actively investing in their development. <\/span>Rather than simple job changes, we\u2019ve moved people between countries and business units, and both they and their managers are senior people in the organization that expect a high quality transaction. <\/span>Outsourcers seldom bungle the regular transactions, but given the complexities of other types of movement, dissatisfaction rates can be pretty high. <\/span>So we bring the transactions back in, but it was not the outsourcers fault \u2013 they were probably good at the basic stuff, and we were supposed to be smart enough not to give away the complex processes that were important to us.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m pretty sure we\u2019re going to go through another round of this pretty soon. <\/span>Everyone seems to be thinking about service delivery models, but we\u2019re still thinking about efficiency and cost rather than effectiveness and services. <\/span>Sure, we can save $100M on paper, but in most cases it didn\u2019t work the first time around. <\/span>Are we going to make the same mistake again?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Imagine this. You\u2019re fixing your house, and you take down a few walls to reconfigure how the place looks \u2013 it\u2019s a bit more open, you can see more, put more people in it when you entertain. While you\u2019re at…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1836,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[33,47,48,8,17,3],"tags":[303,304,260,302,451],"class_list":["post-1832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance","category-governance","category-hr-service-delivery","category-strategies","category-hro","category-vendors","tag-cost","tag-effectivemess","tag-efficiency","tag-ma","tag-outsourcing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1832"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1832\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1833,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1832\/revisions\/1833"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}