HR transformation: Critical insights from the tech stack to employee retention

A Q&A about simplifying, optimizing and investing in your HR function

October 09, 2024

Key takeaways

Human resources (HR) transformation can shift you from current pain points to clarity, alignment and efficiency.

Transformation can happen in phases, and it’s always an ongoing effort.

A general guideline for transformation is to simplify, optimize and invest.

Regular evaluations can detail how your tech stack works for your people and business.

Human resources (HR) transformation, including operating and service delivery model improvement, technology modernization and adoption, and talent retention, are huge topics for middle market organizations looking to remain competitive and achieve sustainable growth. 

We asked RSM HR transformation advisors Marni Rozen and Chris Mueller  to answer some of our clients’ most pressing questions. Their answers get to the heart of what most businesses struggle with as they look to modernize their HR functions.


Read through all three Q&As to gain a deeper perspective on what HR transformation means for your people and your business.

Q: What does HR transformation mean? What are some signs that it’s needed?

Marni: When we talk about HR transformation, we need to consider the HR operating model, which includes end-to-end process, people and structure, enterprise data architecture, service delivery, policy and controls, reporting and, of course, technology. You need all those things to be in place, aligned with your business strategy and working optimally to enable your HR function.

Transformation can feel like a very large word. It’s important not to think of it as a one-time project that happens, and then it’s done. Transformation can happen in phases, and it’s always an ongoing effort. Most times, there are initial pain points surrounding a bottleneck and a process. Poor systems, low-quality data, or the time intensiveness around administering a process is a pain point. What people often say are things like:

  • “I can't get reporting.”
  • “I don't have trust in the quality of my data.”
  • “I don't know where the system of record is for my employee data or my manager data.”

Having no source of truth for HR data can cause a lot of consternation and make people realize something needs to be done differently. There are many signs that can indicate transformation is needed and can prompt an effort to modernize.

Chris: HR transformation is really the process of identifying that there's an opportunity for improvement in a future state. First, we need to define the desired future state goals and work backward to figure out how to get there. Where are we today? And what needs to happen for us to get to that future state? There are many pieces to that planning process which are related to these warning signs:

  • Manager and employee frustrations and high turnover
  • Technology that doesn’t work as it should
  • End-to-end processes that no longer run smoothly or achieve the desired outcomes
  • Organizational change (restructuring, merger, acquisition, divestiture)

Cracks in your HR foundation must be addressed to support a positive employee experience and align your people strategy with business objectives. An effective HR transformation strategy will shift you from your current state challenges to an improved operating model, role clarity, data-driven decision making, strategic business alignment, enhanced employee experience and operational efficiency.

Q: What is the value-add of HR transformation?

Chris: The key value of HR transformation is really modernizing your HR operations to a state where it's more efficient than it is today and achieves the desired future-state outcomes. There are many different measures for modernization, depending on the organization or reasons for transformation. Reasons for transformation can include the need to update the HR operating model to redefine or improve the HR function. It could also be driven by other corporate events or transactions that might necessitate the need for transformation, such as acquisition, merger or divestiture, so you're really operating at the best level possible for the organization. In the end, you're providing services to your employees the way they want, and that support is a sentiment of feeling seen, heard and valued, which contributes to employee retention. At the same time, it improves the experience for all HR stakeholders who are responsible for the delivery of services.

Q: Can HR transformation be targeted at specific challenges?

Chris: Absolutely. When you assess your current-state pain points and build your HR transformation strategy, you might find your priorities lie with improving specific functional domains within HR, such as your compensation planning strategy or recruiting processes, or maybe a major challenge for your business is performance management. Any of those things can be transformed individually. The recommendation, though, would be to also look at the downstream impacts across the entire HR function as you target those components.

So as an example, if you're looking to transform recruiting and onboarding, you would investigate several things, such as:

  • Do we have the right recruiters (capability, capacity) to support the future state?
  • Have we improved our policy and process (sourcing, interviewing, offer, onboarding) to support the future state?
  • Do we or will we have the right technology (talent acquisition, recruiting, onboarding) to support the future state?

When you do that, you might find that your recruiting operating model falls short of being able to support the desired future state for your targeted workforce planning goals. The need then arises to define what that future state looks like for recruiting and onboarding and to do some gap analysis against your existing people, process and technologies. Then you might find that you need to look at and evaluate the technology that you're using to discover if it can support the desired future state.

If the answer is that it cannot, and a decision is made to implement new technology, there is a need to play out the potential domino effect:

  • We're going to transform recruiting and onboarding with new technology.
  • As we prepare to do that, we realize that some of our other current technologies are not up to par and potentially will not integrate with the proposed new recruiting and onboarding technology.
  • Are any other technology areas not up to par?
  • Will processes need to be overhauled as a result of implementing new technology?
  • Will any roles and responsibilities need to change due to implementing one or multiple new technologies?
  • Will improving recruitment and onboarding be supported by the excellent employee experience we have in place, or is the employee experience an area that needs attention so as not to lose great new people shortly after onboarding is completed?

And then before you know it, you're looking at evaluating your entire suite of HR solutions, your processes and all the downstream impacts of this one transformation area. Potentially, you are now looking at a larger technology selection and implementation project that will be more beneficial overall than targeting just recruitment and onboarding.

Targeting might achieve what your organization needs to meet your comprehensive vision of the future state. However, if you only conduct a siloed assessment of the targeted pain points without having a comprehensive HR vision, you might sacrifice time, money, frustration and employee trust by choosing the wrong technology.

Q: Can HR transformation help improve employee retention?

Chris: Absolutely. One of the best things you can do when you're seeing a pattern of higher employee turnover is to make sure exit surveys are consistently completed so you can try to identify themes of why people are choosing to leave. Similarly, in normal pulse-type employee surveys, you might also see themes that can provide valuable information and help you prevent turnover with the right actions. These surveys can play a crucial role in the development of your transformation strategy.

From a retention perspective, I think that most workers want clarity and transparency from their employer. And they want to feel valued in their organization. Knowing this, what are some easier things that can help improve employee engagement and, therefore, retention? Think about the employee experience factor. Do employees have to go to multiple systems to complete their everyday work? Are the right systems available to the right people?

To complete employees’ HR transactions such as accessing pay details, making changes to personal information or signing up for benefits, is easy-to-use employee self-service access available and utilized within the human capital management (HCM) technologies? The employee experience encompasses many things. Starting with the basics makes sense while seeking to understand further what matters most to your people.

Here are some other things to consider:

  • Do your people understand the performance, compensation and benefits processes?
  • How are you delivering services to your employees?
  • Are any technology improvements needed?

The harder part is cultural alignment with your employees. We’re finding that today’s employees place more importance on who the company is rather than what the company is. For sure, there are generational differences in cultural alignment as well. You must document and prove that your company is who it appears to be and that stated core values are authentic, which can feel less solid as metrics. That's a bigger transformation. Because everybody can say, “We're a great culture, and we're committed to x, y or z causes.” But are you doing anything about it in practice, or is it all theoretical?

Marni: Employee experience also includes the experience of the HR team. When we talk to our clients about optimizing the HR function, the first question is, how are you serving the business and your internal clients? Several questions must be considered when determining how to optimize HR, including:

  • How do we look at business stakeholders and really think about the support that HR needs to provide, and how do we drive efficiency around that?
  • How will the HR role change once we automate?
  • Do we have the right number of people, and are they doing the right things?

As you look at how to measure the success of transformation, it usually considers things like accelerating transaction processing times and enabling HR to focus on higher value, employee-focused activities. It should also involve more of that white glove support and less around trying to change somebody's employee record because they had an address change. Successful transformation is about taking some of that administrative burden out and leveling up the HR function.

When that is accomplished, you have a model that supports what your business objectives are and what your business leaders need. Consider the customers of HR; the function serves all of the businesses' employees, and each has a perspective on what they need from HR. In addition, business executives want to trust that HR is effective and focused on what's important. If you have five people in HR who are all focused on cleaning up issues from payroll or all needing to touch the onboarding process, then they're not actually able to focus on what will enhance the employee experience, drive retention or help build career paths, for instance. Those people do not have time to consider and plan for what's next for your business around your talent management strategy.

When we work with clients, we try to shift that dynamic, taking that administrative burden out and leveling up HR so they can be effective at:

  • Making data-driven decisions
  • Achieving strategic business alignment
  • Enhancing the employee experience
  • Driving operational efficiency

Q: Is investment in new technology needed to achieve HR transformation?

Marni:  In most organizations, technology touches every step in the employee life cycle—from the time you source and onboard a candidate, you're paying them, you're administering their benefits and you're looking at their performance compensation. Even within succession planning and into termination, you’re constantly utilizing an HR or payroll technology solution. So, if you have disparate systems or if they're not talking to each other, we look at ways to address that challenge by really looking at the full architecture.

What we find is that there's not always a unified data dictionary, for instance, and that systems are not seamlessly integrated, which can require manual workarounds and lead to no single source of truth for data. When considering an investment in technology, some questions to consider are:

  • What are we trying to achieve?
  • What are we trying to report on?
  • Which systems need to be integrated?
  • What do we want the employee experience to look like?
  • What are the systems that we need to have in place, and how do we unify them?

When we talk to clients about these questions, we like to introduce the concept of simplification of the tech stack. For instance, if you have an applicant tracking system, your core HR and payroll system, a separate benefit system, a separate performance system and your finance system in a different spot, and you’re sending everything from all of those systems to a data lake somewhere else, everything becomes a jumbled mess. A lot of challenges arise in how you translate all of that data.

Taking time to simplify and minimize integration failure points and ensure your integrations are intact is an investment in data accuracy and an improvement of the employee experience. Streamline processes—actually map them out—and think clearly and thoroughly about what they should look like or how they might shift over time due to organizational change or growth.

Many times, it's not a case of having the wrong technology; it's just that the technology hasn't been set up for its uses. So, if you haven't defined what the right workflow is, you don't have the right security roles and permissions, and you haven't cleansed your data, you will not get a good result, no matter which technology you are using.

Think processes through from an enterprise level. What should the experience look like? Then get the systems to match that vision. That’s why, before advising clients to switch technologies, we always try to explore the optimization angle.

Three main tech stack points to help guide this process are simplify, optimize, and, if needed, invest in an upgrade, replacement or supplementary technology.

Q: What main issues indicate a need to reevaluate the technology stack?

Chris: Symptoms to look for are system redundancy, clunky systems integration, lack of data visibility, poor data quality and lack of ability to access needed information to deliver HR services.

For example, take a system of record. Ideally, an organization would want one source of truth for HR data—one system of record. Let's call that your core HR system. However, in a lot of organizations, there might be multiple systems that handle time and attendance, payroll and HR. Depending on how the company is set up and the number of locations, they might be using all those systems differently. That means there's no true system of record. This can severely affect HR operations and service delivery if the data can’t be trusted.

For example, inconsistent or inaccurate employee accrual data differing across all those systems is a red flag for most organizations. All the accruals need to be consistent across systems, and if they're not, you have inaccurate pay and employee records. Ultimately, this can translate to poor service delivery for your employees, which also erodes trust.

While using multiple systems is not always a sign that technology transformation is needed, looking deeper to understand the story of the multiple systems and if problems are cropping up can provide information if you need to think about the transformation of the tech stack.

Another key element that most organizations recognize right away is problems with reporting and analytics. They can't get the data they need for intelligent, useful insight because of the lack of, or poor accuracy of, the data. That’s when data-driven decision making becomes difficult. Your decision making is essentially based on guesswork. And sometimes your educated guesses are pretty good, but it would feel a lot better to have your data accurately confirm your hypotheses before finalizing any decisions.

Another issue is employee data changes that happen in one system but are not accurately reflected in other dependent systems.

Naturally, the employee experience is heavily influenced by their technology relationship to HR.

  • Do they have the right systems available to manage their own data, benefits, careers, learning and performance?
  • Can they get answers to their questions quickly and accurately using HR technology?
  • Are the self-serve HR systems easy to use? What other options are available?

The worst-case scenario with HCM technology failure is when people aren't getting paid correctly, or there are problems with their benefits. Nothing quite makes employees start looking for another job more than experiencing multiple pay issues or not receiving the benefits they are paying for. It erodes trust.

Marni: As mentioned earlier, HR systems touch every step of the employee life cycle. If you have disparate systems, or if the systems are not integrating accurately, the way to solve that problem is by looking at the full architecture. What we find when working with clients is that there's not always a unified, overarching organizational strategy supporting what they are trying to achieve. Some questions that need solid answers include:

  • What is important to report on?
  • What should the employee experience look like, and what actions and tech optimally support that?

If taking a streamlined approach, simplification of the tech stack should be prioritized. Being able to minimize the number of integrations and/or ensuring that your integrations are consistently accurate is vital. We help our clients think about how to streamline processes, mapping them out and understanding what they should look like. A general guideline is to simplify, optimize and invest, taking time to look at what you have versus what you need from each of those angles as you build your strategy.

One thing that is true is that there is always a need to stay ahead of what is next because the technology landscape is changing rapidly. You can't just “set it and forget it.” Part of your transformation strategy should be to perform regular evaluations of how your tech stack is working for your people and your business.

On-demand webcast

3 signs it's time to optimize your HR function

RSM's HR advisors share tips for effectively defining what HR transformation means for your unique business as well as critical questions to ask before getting started:

  • Approach transformation as a process, not a one-time event.
  • Use technology to reduce time-consuming administrative tasks.
  • Free up HR professionals for work that directly supports business objectives.

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