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There’s no hard and fast rule dictating when growing companies should start investing in serious people management technology. But with a headcount of 100 employees, an HR team of five people and ambitious plans to expand, Yes Telecom was stretching its manual systems to the limit in 2006.

Founded in 2000 and now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Vodafone, Yes Telecom boasts over 100,000 business-to-business customers for its mobile and fixed line communications services.

Operating as an autonomous unit from its giant parent company, it’s seen rapid growth, with headcount climbing from 100 to 160 in the last eighteen months alone. From a people management perspective, however, that growth has brought a number of challenges.

Until the autumn of 2006, most of the company’s HR administration was based around a combination of paper-based systems, spreadsheets and Word documents. The paper systems were inherently inefficient – holiday forms were occasionally lost, for example, which made it all but impossible to track employee entitlements with total confidence about the accuracy of the data. And the spreadsheets had their own limitations. “As we were growing in size, we required more and more reporting capability,” says HR officer Mellissa Wong. “We were having to rely on the Operations department to help us create complicated formulas to report on basic stuff like sickness absence. And HR personnel were spending lots of time managing, collating and maintaining data.”

Those administrative inefficiencies caused a number of problems for the business. Absence data, for example, had to be entered into one central spreadsheet by every line manager. But because it wasn’t designed for multi-use, as soon as one person started amending the spreadsheet everyone else had a ‘read-only’ view – and if there was a problem with a formula, the whole system could crash. Generating custom reports from spreadsheets can also be tricky – if managers wanted details of all new recruits joining within a certain timeframe, for example, Wong would have to manually search through every start date.

Those difficulties alone would have been enough to encourage the company to consider investing in an HR Management System (HRMS), but the balance was tipped in April 2006 when it started subscribing to a benefits service from Thomsons Online Benefits. The service, which was introduced as an incentive for both retention and recruitment purposes, gives employees greater personal control over their benefits,

including flexibility to change their pension contributions and the ability to select other features such as childcare vouchers. The new service raised awareness among employees and managers about the potential of internet-based HR systems, helping persuade the company to go to tender for an HRMS.

Computers In Personnel’s Ciphr product was selected at the end of that process from a shortlist of five, and the core system, Ciphr People, was implemented at the end of 2006. Ciphr Net, the self-service application, was rolled out in January this year, followed by training and recruitment modules.

Wong says the initial self-service rollout was incident-free and relatively low-profile. “A lot of employees didn’t know what to expect. We just informed them that there would be a new HR intranet system that would allow them, for example, to book holidays online. That was pretty much the only bit of information they got pre-training. Once they saw it was pretty user-friendly, there were no more concerns at that stage.”

The system is used for a variety of administrative and business intelligence needs. At a basic level, employees can now enter their own personal data and update their bank records, saving HR administrative overhead and reducing the likelihood of errors. By the same token, managers can look up contact details for their own team members, rather than asking HR for information and waiting for information to be emailed. Removing paper forms has also improved efficiency and speed, and created an audit trail in case of future disputes.

From a talent management perspective, employees can log training requests online, which are automatically directed to their line managers for authorisation. They can also apply for internal vacancies through Ciphr Recruitment. And from a management perspective, reporting has improved significantly. Managers can now see a calendar view of absence to spot sickness trends, for example, helping them analyse how much time is being lost and where.

Just as important, automation has had a significant impact on efficiency and effectiveness within the HR function. The HR team remains at five people, yet with total employee headcount up 60%, it’s now supporting a far bigger workforce with the same level of resource. Significantly, the nature of its work has also changed, with the balance shifting away from administration to more proactive people management projects. Inevitably, there were one or two teething problems in the rollout. While the system training for the HR team and employees went well, for example, the company hasn’t been able to make the most of the specialist training it received on Crystal Reports, a leading reporting tool that comes bundled with Ciphr. That’s largely because of the big gap between the two-day crash course that the Yes Telecom HR team went through at the start of the year and the time when they started using the tools in earnest and wanted to amend the standard reports.

Going forward, Yes Telecom is also liaising with Computers In Personnel about enhancing the self-service system for performance management. The system allows managers to enter information about one-to-one performance reviews through web-based forms – Yes Telecom’s managers, however, are used to typing up notes in custom-built Word-based templates. In the short-term, managers continue to use the templates, but future enhancements to the Ciphr Net system this autumn will allow users to attach and post documents.

Those issues aside, overall feedback on the new self-service capability is strong. “In the general workforce, overall it’s been very positively received,” says Wong. “We’ve had feedback from new starters who’ve joined from bigger companies, and they’re very impressed with what it does compared to their previous employer.”

Computers In Personnel Ltd
28-30 Chapel St
Marlow, SL7 1DD
0870 366 2345