Stepping Up the Game for Social Sustainability

Our keys to success are satisfied, responsible, and committed employees. We are fully focused on sustainable employees and have been ranked top ten among Sweden’s best employers for nine consecutive years. So, we have done a lot and have a good structure and control over many things. But we always want to and can improve. We needed to take the next step and look more deeply at our employees’ well-being and working environment from other perspectives. After all, work and private life are much more intertwined now than in the past – so we need to consider more parameters than what is captured by standard employee surveys.

These include physical well-being, stress, and social sustainability in a broad sense, as well as other health and economic aspects.

Sustainable Employees – Sustainable work-life

After our first Employee Survey for Wellness from Heartpace in the spring 2022, we could see two areas of health that needed significant improvement: movement and stress levels. Based on the thorough analysis and concrete suggestions from Heartpace, we have now launched a plan to improve these areas at an individual level.

Input to Sustainability Reporting

The benefits of Heartpace’s Employee Survey for Wellness are precisely that it really focuses on sustainable employees, measures well-being, and provides a concrete basis for sustainability reporting according to Agenda 2030. In addition, the survey is flexible, allows you to add your own important issues, and provides a good basis for effective follow-up.

What were the main challenges you wanted to solve with an HR system?

When I started as a new HR manager at Uddevallahem, I spent quite a lot of time talking to all managers, safety representatives, trade unions, and other people in the company to understand the current situation, challenges, and opportunities for development.

It became clear that we had challenges linked to the follow-up of statutory certificates and training, clarity, and knowledge of job descriptions, and employee development in the form of various conversations and clear management of objectives.

In what way has Heartpace helped to overcome these?

Compared to other HR systems on the market, I found that Heartpace had features that could help us digitialize and professionalize all the parts I was interested in developing. Each employee now has a clear personal profile where job descriptions, mandates, and responsibilities are shown.

We can also follow the status of our time-limited statutory training and certificates very simply and receive reminders when it is time to renew. Through the interview module, we create uniformity in the organization so that all employees have the same conditions for well-prepared and qualitative interviews regardless of their manager.

Goal management has also taken several steps forward, despite being a slower (more difficult) change process that is still ongoing.

What are your next steps?

We are actively working on developing our HR system, and now several things are going on in parallel.

After launch, we connected the HRM module, where all employee data are now collected and stored in one place. We can produce reports and analyses regarding e.g. age distribution, staff turnover, length of employment, etc. What remains there is the integration with our payroll system and our AD. With that, we will be able to use Heartpace as our system for master data, where all employment begins and ends. Additionally, we will have an integration with Scrive to be able to handle employment contracts and signing in Heartpace in the future.

We have also added the Onboarding module for handling all our on- and off-boardings. Currently, we are working on building processes for different types of pre-, on-, re-, and offboarding. It will professionalize the employee experience in important stages of employment, which is what start-up and termination actually are, and provide good support to managers and support functions in what needs to be done in connection with these processes.

Recently, we have conducted our first employee survey through Heartpace’s Employee KPI survey for sustainable work life. We are very pleased with both the user-friendliness, content, and focus of the survey and the feedback on the results included in the service. In the future, we will look at connecting the Pulse module for more regular follow-up of certain KPIs – on parts of the business or for the entire company.

Which three tips would you want to share with other companies starting their HR digitalization journeys?

1. Proper analysis of actual needs
Do not buy an HR system because it is trendy or a colleague in the industry recommends it. Instead, make a proper analysis of what the business actually needs now and in the long term, and make decisions based on that. Preferably in collaboration with several internal stakeholders for the sake of anchoring.

2. Prioritize the preparatory work
If time and resources are available – prioritize the preparatory work before a system is launched. Minimize the first thresholds by building the system as well as possible for the users so that they get a direct feeling of what the system can give them and how it can facilitate them. That being said, not all features need to be in place right away – on the contrary, I believe in releasing a well-developed narrow version in the first release and working up module after module thereafter.

3. Slow and respectful change management
Move slowly and respect that change processes and digitalization are difficult and challenging for many. Since it is more about behavioral changes than you might first think, it requires safe change management, a lot of dialogue, and long-term patience. Be kind to yourselves!

What were the main challenges you wanted to solve with an HR system?

Initially, it was mainly GDPR and the need for compliance that drove the need for an HR system. Keeping track of all documents, storing them securely and in a structured way, and managing all documentation at hiring, onboarding, and throughout the HR year. We wanted a controlled and more automated management for the whole flow.

In what way has Heartpace helped to overcome these?

We have a good order and structure to all the documentation as originally planned. We have also started the payroll audit in Heartpace instead of working in Excel, which often ends up with 15 different Excel lists in different parts of the organization. Now we have everything in one place, and everyone works in the same way. We have put the pay policy and pay criteria into Heartpace and got clarity on the whole flow. In addition, we have structured approval flows that make the process clear. Now we have trained the managers on how to do the payroll audit in Heartpace, and suddenly, everything is correct. This saves us a lot of time both in HR and for the managers.

What are your next steps?

Although we’ve had Heartpace for a while, we’ve chosen to take one step at a time. From HRM, document structure and payroll audit, we are starting up a pilot in the new onboarding module. The open APIs that Heartpace has will also allow us to integrate with other systems that feed into Heartpace, such as our current recruitment system Jobylon.

We envision having a fully integrated, seamless flow from first interview to first paycheck.

Which three tips would you want to share with other companies starting their HR-digitalization journeys?

1. Start in time!

Set up routines and processes from the start. Don’t wait until you are 200-300 employees, then it is much heavier! Build a flow for an employee from axis to limb so that it is a seamless and smooth journey. It’s just as important to have this flow in place whether you’re 50 people or 200 or many more. Put this in place immediately!

2. Get professional help to digitalize!

Don’t reinvent the wheel. Take advantage of the help available from the vendor. Take advantage of the expertise available. The extra cost of professional help is a far better investment than sitting and fiddling for hours yourself.

3. Have a clear vision of the end result – and set a proper plan to get there!

Make sure there is a clear end vision of where you want to be when you are finished and how you will get there. Also, remember that the fewer systems, the easier. Scaling down and consolidating processes into one system will make moving forward easier and smoother. And don’t stare blindly at a price per module, but look at the big picture and the overall price in the end. But most importantly – make sure the organization also uses the system – for real!

What were the main challenges you wanted to solve with an HR system?

Here at Bredband2 we have already created solid HR processes and digitalized them since before. However, we have been using different systems from several different suppliers that were not integrated, which created unnecessary manual steps. Our ambition was to find a system where all our digital HR processes could be gathered in one place and integrated. We want to focus on dialogues and development instead of manual registrations into systems.

In what way has Heartpace helped to overcome these?

Heartpace fulfilled many of our listed criteria. Among others, we wanted to continue measuring eNPS simply and smoothly, enable documentation and follow-up employee talks, and ensure a great onboarding process for all new employees. Another factor that led to the choice of Heartpace was that we have a mutual vision of the purpose and an incredible engagement to develop current processes. If a requested function is not in the system today, we will create it together!

What are your next steps?

Actually, we are only just beginning our journey, although we have used Heartpace since last summer. As of now, we are integrating several different systems so that everything can be managed through Heartpace HRM. The next step will be to build our onboarding processes and competence development in the system.

Which three tips would you want to share with other companies starting their HR-digitalization journeys?

1. Think long-term! Where do you want to be in five years? Then build sustainable processes and routines from there.

2. Involve the organization and the leaders to increase both engagement and the success rate.

3. Keep your own culture and values as the guiding star when establishing new HR processes. Despite this being about digital processes, people are always at the center of them!