Shared services boost HR delivery at Symantec

Citation

Dickens, H. (2010), "Shared services boost HR delivery at Symantec", Strategic HR Review, Vol. 9 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/shr.2010.37209fab.005

Shared services boost HR delivery at Symantec

Article Type: HR at work From: Strategic HR Review, Volume 9, Issue 6

Short case studies and research papers that demonstrate best practice in HR

Symantec is the world’s leading provider of security software and a Fortune 500 company. It is the world’s fourth largest independent software company, listed on the NASDAQ with a market capitalization of $12.84 billion (on 10 September 2009). Globally Symantec employs more than 17,500 people, of whom 5,000 work in research and development. Symantec’s UK operations are headquartered in Reading.

Shared services and why?

Like many HR organizations, prior to 2008 the Symantec HR structure was aligned by location and/or site, by geography and/or country. In an organization experiencing rapid growth by acquisition this structure created challenges, including the following:

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  Resources were not always used efficiently with different territories experiencing troughs and peaks of workloads.

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  Senior HR employees were undertaking administration tasks.

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  There were limited ways to share knowledge.

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  It took longer to respond to questions as team members needed to have a breath of knowledge to handle relatively low volumes of questions.

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  For the client it meant having a named contact, which could result in delays in support if that local contact was not available.

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  Enforcement, approach and response times were variable across the region.

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  Company satisfaction surveys identified that doing business internally was a challenge and needed to be simplified.

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  The diverse nature of the HR organization meant it was hard for the HR leadership to quantify and demonstrate the value HR was adding to the organization.

Globally the decision was made to create two areas of HR focus – transactional and strategic. The goal for the transactional piece was to provide a consistent, efficient and scalable service. This then enabled senior level HR to focus on strategic business partnering activities. To provide the transactional level support, an EMEA-wide HR shared services center was created which formed a centralized (if physically distributed) resource for all HR administration and transactional work. This allowed for greater transparency and allocation of resources. In addition, following the lead of the North America region an EMEA HR helpdesk was created to respond to employee queries from across the region in an efficient and consistent manner.

Creating the team

The shared services team was created by bringing individuals who carried out similar types of administration roles across the region in three different teams into one pan-EMEA team. Typically these individuals had previously carried out a narrow breadth of tasks within one area of HR. At inception an exhaustive analysis and data collection exercise was carried out to understand what roles were being carried out by employees and their specific knowledge and skills.

One key driver was to make the new team an “excellent place to work” by deploying the good HR practice devised for other areas of the business within its own function. As part of initial fact finding, individual’s career goals were explored and new roles were defined as part of the new team, which enabled workloads to be more balanced and meet individual aspirations as much as possible. Roles and responsibility documents were created to ensure that team members, customers and stakeholders understood who was responsible for each task at a very granular level. Objectives were set for the team around work and knowledge transferred to enable them to rapidly take on their new remits.

A key feature of the new team was the introduction of greater levels of remote support. This included moving work out of countries and grouping tasks according to expertise and not just the location from which they originated.

Building the infrastructure

The next stage was to overlay the HR helpdesk infrastructure and create an operation that could respond to queries from managers and employees throughout the region. The scope of service was wide and included supporting employees and managers through the entire life cycle and advice on employee relations topics.

The implementation plan was devised entirely in-house with support from the North American regional team and included installation of infrastructure (phones, shared mailboxes), definition of customer service approach and training, as well as marketing and communication collateral. Measures of success were defined to direct and reward the new behaviors and ways of working.

The HR helpdesk was first launched in pilot countries – specifically the emerging and Nordic countries. These were chosen because they did not have local HR resource in-country, so it was less a case of a change in support and more a case of adding something new. The service was then rapidly rolled out to the other countries, which included seeking works council approval in France and Germany. Overall, from conception to being fully implemented, this process took one year.

Smoothing out the creases

The implementation of the new ways of working faced challenges from both the client and within the wider HR function. The primary hurdle to overcome from the client was perceptions about call centers being ineffective and impersonal and therefore an inappropriate way for an employee to connect with HR. To overcome this misconception, initiatives were taken to make interactions more personal, such as using an unscripted approach to telephone responses.

A communications campaign was launched with basic marketing collateral, in addition to subtler positioning via the HR community. At launch, key success measures such as SLA, customer satisfaction and volume were defined and the team members were set goals and held accountable to their personal service delivery. Achievement against these measures rapidly exceeded goals and these metrics became the bedrock of ongoing communications describing the success of the service.

There was also a challenge within our own function to overcome. The wider HR community was wary of delegating transactional work into a pool of resources. This initial resistance was overcome by high levels of communication on how the team would deliver tasks and continuous publicity and transparency on what work was being done and a continuous feed of success stories.

A boost to performance

Efficiencies have been gained in the shared services department through the implementation of improved ways of working. By grouping together tasks, best practice could be identified and process engineering deployed. A globally aligned infrastructure to support customer queries such as a ticket database and knowledge share repository leveraged the research and best practice carried out and made it available across the team. In addition, the team was briefed to seek ways of working smarter not harder, advocating a new mindset in which tasks were carried out.

Measurement of key performance indicators of the helpdesk operation has demonstrated a high level of performance against usual call center measures. The most important metric is the feedback, both quantitative and qualitative, from customer satisfaction surveys. One respondent to the survey commented:

Excellent service. Before this no one was ever sure whom to contact in HR for various issues. Each time I have received a prompt and comprehensive answer.

Responses for fiscal year April 2009 to April 2010 show that 95.1 percent of customers were satisfied or very satisfied with the service they received.

HR depth and breadth

The reason this type of HR shared services system works is because it has both the depth coverage across the full HR spectrum of activity and the breadth of doing it across geographies. If the service offered is credible, a move to shared services can be quite bold. It can be a real opportunity to redefine how your HR structure works and how HR provides service to the business.

An effective shared services operation enables those focused on strategic work to carry it out uninhibited by transactional distractions. HR will always be a cost, but this kind of structure helps to build credibility of the function by allowing it to be cost effective. Next steps include a global project to transfer selected tasks to an offshore in-house team at a cheaper location to enable the EMEA team to take on higher value HR support work.

About the author

Helen Dickens Heads Symantec’s EMEA HR direct services team. The team forms a shared services operation carrying out all HR administrative and transactional work throughout the employee lifecycle for the region. Dickens has worked at Symantec for four years and was appointed to her current role two years ago to set up the team and implement the shared services operation. She worked at United Biscuits for seven years in various roles prior to joining Symantec. She holds a BSc in biological sciences from University of Birmingham and a doctorate in biodiversity from the University of Exeter. Helen Dickens can be contacted at: helen_dickens@symantec.com