3 Ways Your Company Can Benefit from an All-in-One Technology Vendor
Many HR professionals feel the stress of keeping track of the legal, cultural, and communication standards and expectations that seem to be evolving faster as we hit each new year. Their day-to-day can seem like they’re endlessly putting out fires instead of maintaining and improving their management methods.
When the HR department runs smoothly, you get a positive ripple effect throughout the whole company. How can you stay ahead of the game instead of playing catchup, constantly putting out fires, or feeling as if you’re in the dark?
The simplest (and potentially most cost-effective) strategy is to utilize the right technology vendors to put effective systems and automations in place. To maximize your investment in the technologies that will save your company valuable hours, you should consider partnering with a single provider that covers all the bases you need.
The Three Benefits of Partnering with One Vendor
When it’s time to implement a new solution -- whether it’s case or policy management, a hotline or call center, social media monitoring, effective exit interviews, etc. -- the payoff should be worth the time it took to research, purchase, and implement the product.
There are many benefits to consolidating your HR technology with all-in-one vendors. We’ll examine them here in three stages: Implementation, Integration & Collaboration, and Business Growth & Continuation.
Stage 1: Implementation
The very beginning of a project can set a company up for success... or frustration. Concerns along these lines make working with fewer vendors make sense.
When you know and trust your technology partner, several things can happen:
Going live is a smoother experience. Your vendor will understand the level of your business needs and that no two companies are the same. With one trusted partner, you can feel confident in the product bundle you’re implementing and easily make tweaks to your level of service.
The ease of use with one bundle will also speed up technology training and adoption across the organization for your employees.
You can fix inefficiencies. One vendor will best understand how their products work together and will help you find gaps in processes, workflows, and data analysis. An experienced partner can often provide an outside perspective you didn’t know you needed.
Stage 2: Integration & Collaboration
When you’re using an all-in-one ecosystem of products, you don’t need to switch between various views or user designs. Turn your organization into a collaboration machine when the data you monitor and collect can be used for multiple purposes.
Your all-in-one vendor can offer multiple communication benefits:
Your data is more visible and effective. Compliance should be simple, and with products designed to work together from the start, you don’t have as many blind spots. You won’t miss out on insights due to consolidated data and analytics.
Your workflows work for you to save time and effort. Because your vendor understands how industry regulations affect your organization’s needs, workflows have been designed to save time and better inform your decisions.
For instance, companies of all sizes need a way to clearly communicate policies and track enforcement in a consistent way. When you introduce some automation, it’s easy to alter policies, make them visible, and alert the necessary employees that they have changes to review. That means no more tracking down out-of-the-loop or confused employees, and less risk of noncompliance.
Stage 3: Business Growth & Continuation
Without proper insight into your organization’s cultural realities -- and how you’re perceived -- your plans for growth might be disjointed. It’s critical to keep management aware of any trends that need attention before that trend becomes a hindrance to moving the company forward.
Whether you’re meeting goals or creating new ones, bundled solutions for tracking and communication will offer valuable insights:
Your analysis and future planning are supported by quality data. Because of the increased integration and collaboration that reduced your data silos, you can trust the data you’re using to plan future initiatives. A dashboard that clearly displays analysis and benchmarks could support your proposals for change.
Your solutions can grow with your organization. Partnering with one vendor -- especially with a SaaS product -- can help your tech solutions scale with the business.
Meet or exceed your recruitment and retention goals. Connect case issues you’re managing with perspectives you get from exit interviews to make culture and system improvements. You can leverage the safety outgoing employees feel while talking to a third party to get the honest opinions you need to initiate change.
These days, prospective employees are more and more aware of “red flags” within an organization that can hurt your recruiting efforts. What if you could easily keep track of concerns and resolve them before another great employee leaves? Having these solutions in place keeps current employees satisfied and reassures prospective employees that you’re listening.
How to Make Sure Your HR Solutions Work for You
Look at your current processes and software solutions. Does everything make sense for your organization? Does your technology work for your employees, or is everyone scrambling to make the technology cooperate?
Think about where you could save time, energy, and money by consolidating tools and getting departments to work together. What if you could reduce the time it takes to manually update policies while also analyzing adoption and compliance rates?
Not every solution is necessary -- you don’t need to overengineer the fix to every problem. But if you know there are areas that need improved or simplified solutions, we’d love to help you decide on the best way forward. Ask us how ETHIX360 could be your trusted all-in-one vendor for managing your employee ethics communication and HR case management.
The ETHIX360 blog brings you weekly updates on all things human resources and compliance.
MEET THE AUTHOR
Kristin Hassan is the Chief Human Resources Officer of ETHIX360. Kristin spent six years as the New York City SHRM’s executive director and is a board member of the Human Resources Management Association - Princeton SHRM Chapter and a member of the Peer 150 HR Group.
ABOUT ETHIX360
At ETHIX360, our goal is simple: to provide an affordable, flexible, and comprehensive answer to employee communication, policy management, corporate training and case management on issues related to corporate ethics, code of conduct, fraud, bribery, and workplace violence.
