Why People Teams Need to Support a Single Platform Strategy
What is a single platform strategy?
A single platform strategy refers to the practice of having all of your business systems built on the same technology.
For example, your business may invest in Salesforce. This means having everything from your HR & Payroll software to your Marketing systems set up on Salesforce technology makes a big difference to the results of your work. A single platform strategy has resulted in major success for many organisations – keep reading to learn how your people teams would benefit from one.
Boost Employee Performance
A new employee is often expected to take months before they are competent enough to become a ‘billable’ resource, and studies have found that some roles can take up to 18 months for employees to fully ramp up to. Until this point, the employee is little more than a cost to the business and the sooner that new hires can become billable the sooner the organisation can see a return on the recruitment investment.
A single platform strategy improves the flow of information between your key business systems, which will greatly benefit your onboarding process. This is important because an efficient onboarding process has been linked to improved productivity, engagement, and retention. Ensuring your new hires don’t have problems with access permissions or missing information ensures they’re able to move from paperwork to learning and development quicker, as well as relieves any pressure on existing employees who would have to plug the gaps left by poor onboarding or faulty technology.
Streamlined Payroll
With a single platform strategy, integrations are much smoother, lessening administrative burden on the Payroll and HR teams.
If you implement a single HR and Payroll solution, it will take you one step further. Not only will HR and Payroll both be built on the same technology, but they will also sit within the same system, strengthening the benefits of enhanced data security and time-savings. After implementing the xcd single solution, Landmark Space were able to slash their cumbersome three-week long payroll processes down to just three days.
For example, when you have timesheets and leave sitting in your single solution instead of being a 3rd party integration, employees can book holiday in the HR system and it will automatically populate in timesheets as well as flow through to payroll, ensuring that holiday pay is correctly accounted for.
Better Visibility, Better Results
With a single platform strategy your organisation also gets a single source of truth, as integrations between business systems are much smoother. This enriches HR’s data, allowing them to make more informed decisions.
For example, employee performance management processes within your organisation should highlight anyone who is under or over utilised. Cross referencing this with sickness and absence data can give your HR team valuable visibility of employees who may be an expensive flight risk, with the CIPD estimating the average cost of filling a vacancy as £6,125, with the figure rising to £19,000 for manager roles.
A robust HR solution should be able to link NPS scores, client surveys, and data around customers, resources, operational delivery and finances through a resource planning solution which provides key performance metrics, allowing your management team to track employee’s engagement with clients on a consistent basis.
This can allow you to pinpoint and resolve any issues in the early stages to improve their performance and potential job satisfaction. You can also identify your top performers and analyse the skills and behaviours that are proving the most successful, in turn leveraging this knowledge to enhance your performance and development programmes to ensure that the service you’re providing to customers is based on genuine customer feedback.
This presents how interlinked key people and business metrics are – while it’s easy to fall into the trap of viewing them in isolation, a holistic view often provides the most in-depth, actionable insights. This allows HR to better evidence their impact when reporting to C-Suite as well as make better cases for change.
Bridewell Consulting looked to a single platform strategy to improve visibility and simplify processes across the organisation:
“A single source of truth is critical. Having a platform that you can use – that everyone can use – means that you can make the right business decisions based on the right data.” – Ruth Billen, CFO at Bridewell
Read the full case study to see the results.
About Salesforce
Salesforce is the world’s #1 business cloud platform, with 3 billion transactions daily and tens of millions of users across multiple industries.
The xcd people platform is built on Salesforce technology, enabling it to benefit from all of the enterprise technology’s strengths without passing on the associated costs to our clients.
Our Salesforce HR system boasts best-in-class configurability, integrations with all other business systems built on Salesforce, as well as stringent security:
“All of our company’s core systems sit within a Salesforce perimeter, and that makes quite a significant difference to us from a security perspective.” – Henry Horsfall, HR Director at Landmark Space
Book a demo with one of our experts to learn more.
