7 reasons why global HR projects are important

Meta4′s Corporate Business Development Director, Santiago Lecomte’s, and  Thomas Otter, Research director at Gartner, explain combinedly 7 reasons why HR projects are important to us here in Meta4.

When customers come to us looking for a HR system strategy solution along with answers to their needs. Our contributions to our customer’s success range from Core HR administration to fully integrated talent management.

1.    Addressing customer’s global needs
Thomas Otter, Research director at Gartner talks about how “even small businesses today operate in a global basis… but what often they’re missing is global HR systems that control, manage and support their people globally.” All global customers face similar problems. On one side, they need global data, processes and consolidation. On the other hand, their local offices require local legislation and compliance to their local requirements. “This doesn’t just mean keeping track of them in a central data base but it actually means supporting them locally on the ground.”

Upon these needs, Santiago explains how Meta4’s product is organized in two main layers:

• Dealing with all the global aspects and all which is common to all the countries it means data models, processes, workflows…
• Full dedication to local compliances built in the foundation of the product and location f the client.

2.    What key points do our customers look for in a global HR model?
“When our customers look at Meta4 HR systems they generally find answers to questions that are always generated when constructing a global HR system”, S. Lecomte explains. Therefore companies first define what we call the basics which to T. Otter denominates “the multis: things such as multi-company, multi-language, multi-currency, multi-jurisdiction, etc.” Meta4′s basics are the following:

• Capability to manage multiple legal entities under a common framework.
• Capability to use the system under a multilingual environment.
• Being able to manage different relationships with Human Resources such as employees, contractors, retirees, trainees and expatriates.

Furthermore they will discover more advanced features such as managing a global framework at the same time as local requirements for companies interested in standardizing processes while respecting local compliances.

3.    What do our customers expect in terms of leadership?
Meta4 has a broad experience in managing global HR projects for companies with 1.000 to 20.000 employees in different local offices situated in many countries. Therefore, “they need a solution to consolidate data and help them take good decisions by setting cut costs in all their efforts to improve employer branding”, says S. Lecomte. If you’re a company “you want people that can adapt to different country needs and different cultures involved in a global HR project, you can’t just say this is the way we do it in the US, and those projects tend to fail. You need to have in mind those cultural factors to make this project a success”, adds T. Otter.

4.    What different delivery models do they need?

• Traditional in-house model where licence is acquired.
•  Global Software as a Service (SaaS) platform where pay is based on usage. We offer as well the possibility for our customers to switch from one model to the other as their strategy evolves.

5.    How do our customers address organizational challenges?
“Global HR challenges are tough”, says T. Otter. In other words, “let’s say a big objective such as a selling process to their local offices, urges us in general to break down the project into smaller goals to get tangible results. We help our customer to build the pilot face and push the project to collect a feedback and digest it to get the system approved. For these cases we have created a global services team which is fully dedicated to global HR projects”, explains Lecomte. “This is what we call the ‘quick win’ strategy and its key to the success of the project”, adds Otter.

6.    What are the benefits from implementing a Global HR project?

• Our product is cost and time effective when implementing Meta4 PeopleNet. It has fully integrated HR features, it is preconfigured, workflows are predefined and most of the remaining configuration can be done by the users themselves.
• Most manual transactions will turn to the automated version. Consequently this reduction in paper related transactions will translate in a big reduction in costs.
• They will help settling the company with a global database with all the HR data and for the most effective decisions.
• Advantage of huge business benefits transition from administrative to strategic tasks. Most of our customers will be able to build a global talent strategy and it on a much broader international talent pool. “The real benefits come from having better information about your people. This is why clever organizations measure the values of information.”

7.    What do our customers want when looking towards the future?
In words of our Corporate Business Development Director, “over the last years the weight of HR systems has been dramatically pushed towards Manager Self-Service and Employee Self-Service. Our customers want the HR systems to be very attractive, have different user interfaces, they want their users to even play with the system and understand all the HR analytics that can be provided. They want managers to be able to investigate their team performance, new ideas and new ways of connecting people inside the company (the same way people connect inside the social networks over the internet). They want to move away from boring transactions to highly sophisticated process oriented transactions. With all this in mind,  we have what we call our “all in one employee timeline” where employees and managers are going to be able to see and investigate, in a very effective and graphical way, the professional evolution of any member of the team or their personal evolution”.