It’s common for employees to request HR information such as their personal time off (PTO) balance, sick day balance, benefits, pay stubs, and tax deductions. (Heck, I do this all the time.) It’s also necessary for a company to perform background checks on potential employees before making an offer.
When HR personnel manually handle employee information requests and candidate background checks, it distracts HR personnel from more valuable tasks such as employee training and development and spends as much time as possible match candidates to vacancies. Manually responding to employee inquiries and performing candidate background checks places a heavy administrative burden on HR staff and takes far longer than employees, candidates and HR staff would like.
It’s also important to have visibility into employee requests and candidate background checks to avoid duplication of effort, improve processes and efficiency, and distribute work fairly. Without such visibility, it is difficult to make informed decisions in the management of human resources.
Challenges encountered
Discovery Ltd., a South African global insurance and financial services provider with 12,000 employees, faced all of the above issues. HR staff responded to employee inquiries via email and phone, had no process for tracking employee inquiries, and performed background checks on applicants via email and phone. Everyone – HR staff, employees and candidates – felt that the processes were taking too long. This frustrated all parties and left them hoping for a better experience. HR managers believed they could improve overall operations and productivity if they had sufficient visibility into the tasks and status of HR personnel.
Discovered solutions
Fortunately, Discovery has improved the HR interface and experience for employees, candidates, and HR staff through digitization and automation. Work with SAP success factors solutions, the company created a portal for immediate access to standard HR applications and automated candidate background checks using robotics. Discovery also automated company-wide reporting on HR staff tasks and status, to shed light on operations and help improve employee satisfaction by reducing administrative tasks and duplication. balancing workloads and realigning roles.
Elegant portal design
To bring the portal to life, Discovery redesigned 12 processes, automated 37 processes and created 110 links to 53 employee policies for self-service platforms. In addition to direct access to self-services, Discovery included chat-assisted services and a tool to assess resolution quality.
Stellar results
The employee portal satisfies employees with immediate answers, and automated candidate background checks ensure candidates progress through the assessment process as quickly as possible. Both solutions allow HR staff to focus on employee development, candidate recruitment and onboarding.
Results include a 25% reduction in time to hire candidates and 45% of HR staff freed from manual tasks to develop the workforce and recruit. With no HR interaction required in many cases, an employee accesses the portal and retrieves the desired information in a single session. Service levels for resolving employee inquiries increased from 80% to 93%. Eighty percent of Discovery employees use the portal and rated it with a satisfaction score of 2.5 out of 3.
Results also included 10% budget savings through centralization, process automation and redeployment of highly skilled capabilities across the enterprise; and a 32% reduction in HR generalist staff and a 41% reduction in HR administrative effort thanks to the reorientation of roles and the reskilling of employees.
All of these excellent results were achieved thanks to the creative solutions of Discovery, which earned them a place as a finalist in the SAP Innovation Awards 2022.
“Working with SAP solutions has enabled HR to create a differentiated shared services function through digitization and automation, improving the people experience and enhancing productivity,” said Kammy Sing, Group Leader People Operations , Discovery Ltd.
To learn more about Discovery’s award-winning solution, check out their SAP Innovation Awards pitch deck.