How your People team uses your HRIS (human resource information system) matters – a lot. That’s not to say there’s a “wrong” way to use your HRIS, but it is important to recognize that the role of your HRIS will change alongside your company.
To start, it’s important to make sure you have the right HRIS in place for your needs. But even then, there will be many opportunities to adjust how exactly you rely on your HRIS (and even what coordinating platform options you choose) to help manage HR processes and understand your people data.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at why an HRIS is so important and HRIS examples that show how you might take advantage of what your platform has to offer based on different requirements.
Regardless of what exactly your company needs are, an HRIS should sit at the heart of your HR tech stack. That’s because an HRIS is a system of record for people data, helping to manage and streamline HR tasks for the People team and employees alike.
Specifically, an HRIS should help your People Operations team and organizational leaders better understand org structure and workforce trends. In turn, this should support more strategic decision-making. An HRIS should also help manage employee information like compensation, performance, and more, for streamlined processes.
Altogether, these critical functions of an HRIS can lead to benefits like increased efficiency for key HR processes, more self-serve opportunities and easier access to information for employees, streamlined workflows for managers and leaders, and deeper insights into people data through advanced analytics and reporting.
Many teams – including, but not limited to those in the earlier stages of building out processes – can benefit significantly from the efficiency provided by an operational HRIS. The operational HRIS focuses on everyday people management and administrative tasks.
For example, an operational HRIS can help streamline HR tasks that take up valuable time by automating routine processes like onboarding and offboarding and by making it easy to access pertinent information.
Additionally, having a single system of record for your people data eliminates the need to spend hours consolidating data from various sources (not to mention managing all of those platforms). As a result, you can spend less time wrangling data and more time actually getting the answers you need.
Just look at Truework, which provides a comprehensive income and employment verification platform for lenders.
According to Jelena Tomasevic, who does HR Operations at Truework, “I used to have to work with different systems to get all the information I needed because none of them synced with one another. Not having everything in one place was very difficult and it was time consuming to get what I needed.”
Looking to bring everything together in one place, Jelena and the Truework team turned to ChartHop, which has since become their one-stop-shop for all things people operations.
“We love ChartHop. Now, we have everything in one place for greater transparency, visibility, and time savings,” Jelena says. For example, she adds: “I compile monthly and quarterly reports for our management team so we can track progress toward certain goals like headcount, retention, and diversity in management. With ChartHop I can just filter and access the information I need in about 10 seconds.”
A tactical HRIS not only provides benefits around day-to-day people operations and administrative tasks, but it also offers in-depth support for specific areas of focus in your people strategy, like performance management or compensation planning.
In these cases, scaling processes while supporting employees and gaining deep insights along the way become especially important. A tactical HRIS can help by offering targeted capabilities in the area in question and then putting that data (e.g. performance review data) in context alongside all your people data.
For instance, a tactical HRIS focused on performance reviews combines the capabilities of an operational HRIS with a performance management system. This includes straightforward and automated workflows for collecting, calibrating, and approving reviews, detailed analytics for understanding performance trends, and the ability to put all of that information into perspective by combining it with data like employee tenure, compensation data, or demographic data.
The ability to streamline the performance review process has been critical for the People team at Movable Ink, which activates data into personalized content in any customer engagement.
Movable Ink started using ChartHop to connect data across systems and has since expanded their usage to include reporting for the FP&A team, compliance surveys for the People and Legal teams, and, most recently, performance reviews and goal setting. Doing this all in a single system – not to mention one as visual and intuitive as ChartHop – has made a big impact on everyone from the People team to managers to employees.
“People just love the ability to see everything all in one place, and ChartHop does that,” says Kevin Brock, Associate Director of People Operations at Movable Ink. That’s made a big difference for performance reviews, in particular.
He adds: “We previously had performance review information that went into a system and then I had to do manual work to bring it together, but with ChartHop you don’t need to do that. Now, a manager can just click a link and see their entire team, whether that’s three or 50 people, all in one place – who they are, their ratings, comments on their performance from their managers. It’s all just one screen that’s super easy to use.”
For People teams contributing to the organization’s strategic vision, a strategic HRIS can not only help automate the many moving parts of people operations, but it can also help stay organized and collaborative for more continuous planning efforts.
Both People leaders and executives may be hands-on in the HRIS, viewing people analytics to better understand organizational and workforce trends as they plan for the future – whether that’s workforce planning, succession planning, or anything else. These insights can be particularly useful when it comes to forecasting business needs and strategizing accordingly.
Furthermore, having an HRIS that can provide employees visibility into their own information as well as details like who sits where in the organization is extremely helpful in allowing everyone in the company to make more informed decisions and work together more closely.
When Headspace and Ginger joined forces to form Headspace Health, they created the world’s most comprehensive and accessible mental healthcare platform. The new company’s People leaders knew they would need to effectively support this larger team, and they used the merger as an opportunity to find a way to better use their people data to make data-driven decisions that would advance the business.
Headspace Health found ChartHop as the perfect partner to help deliver on this goal. First, they pulled data from the legacy HRIS instances for each company into ChartHop, giving them a single place to view the entire merged organization and build reports using that combined people data.
From there, the Headspace Health team has been able to easily build reports and scale processes like compensation planning, which has allowed for more informed decision making and given the People team time back to focus on more impactful work.
“ChartHop enables us to flex what we can really do in a meaningful way. It’s been the silent hero of the merger in terms of allowing us to scale,” concludes Casey Delehanty, Manager, People Data Science at Headspace Health.
Every company needs an HRIS. This system of record for people data is critical to HR processes of all kinds. But what that HRIS looks like and how your team structures processes around it will change as your company needs evolve over time.
The HRIS examples above are just a few of many that illustrate those different needs, as well as how the right solution can adapt to those needs.
So what does it take to find the best HRIS for your company? Follow these six steps to get started.
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