11 Transforming HR Service Delivery

National Archives and Records Administration

Over the past decade, most federal HR organizations have been moving toward a much more strategic role, characterized by a focus on human capital, organizational strategy, and mission requirements, along with relatively less focus on processes, procedures, and HR transactions. At the same time, improvements in HR technology have made it possible to dramatically improve customer service while serving in a more strategic advisory role. Every federal organization needs to take a deep and unbiased look at what kinds of services it is providing customers, how it is delivering those services, what customers really want and need, and the technology that is supporting service delivery.

Inevitably, organizational priorities will change. Nonetheless, the need for HR organizations to provide strategic input on the organization’s workforce and level of engagement, enterprise data related to human capital planning and organizational performance, and efficient recruiting and hiring support and outreach is here to stay. The challenge that most organizations face is coming up with ways to assume this strategic role while still finding time to fulfill operational responsibilities. Evaluating how your organization delivers HR services is critical and needs to be done not only thoughtfully but regularly as well.

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has successfully made the transition from a transactional focus to a strategic business interest. NARA’s approach involves a combination of process analysis and redesign; the selective application of HR technology; and the restructuring of HR roles and responsibilities. Today at NARA, the transformation is still underway.

The Situation in 2009

In 2009 the Human Capital Office at NARA was having a tough time. There had always been interest in jobs at the organization, but since the economic downturn, hundreds of people were applying for every job. Entry-level positions like archives technician were getting 500-plus applicants for each job vacancy that NARA posted on USAJOBS. Having a big applicant pool is usually great, but NARA was still using a manual, labor-intensive process for reviewing applicants.

It was the worst of both worlds: USAJOBS was making it easy for people to reuse application materials and apply for lots of federal jobs, but NARA’s process was highly centralized, requiring that every inquiry from an applicant or hiring manager be routed through an HR staff member for a personalized response. This approach had worked well in a traditional paper-based environment, but it was not scalable to a modern online recruiting environment. Unfortunately, the disconnect NARA experienced among its personalized service-delivery model, its HR systems, and its approach to customer service is not unusual in the federal HR community.

From a service-delivery perspective, NARA’s HR service delivery was “about as traditional an HR model as you can imagine,” according to Analisa Archer, the Chief Human Capital Officer (CHCO) at NARA at the time. Analisa joined NARA in 2005 as NARA’s first human capital management specialist when the agency’s approach to HR focused on enforcing rules and offered limited flexibility.

Like many HR organizations, NARA’s HR office was homegrown and had a staff with very long tenure. They had designed a very good HR office 25 years ago; however, their roles, service offerings, technology, and policies had not changed much over the years. The staff in the HR office realized that expectations about HR’s role were evolving, but hadn’t seen the opportunities or gotten traction around initiatives that could help them take on a more strategic role. Unfortunately, these challenges were starting to inhibit NARA’s ability to function as a modern human-capital organization that could provide business value and guidance across the organization.

It is easy to understand why NARA wasn’t pushing the envelope. Its approach to HR had worked for many years, especially when it was viewed through the lens of the traditional HR model. NARA’s HR team helped managers hire new people into the organization and followed all the rules doing it. They managed and updated employee personnel records within their HR system. They administered benefits fairly and provided a great deal of information about those benefits to customers.

NARA was providing basic HR services with a very high degree of customer service. The HR team spent a lot of time working directly with managers, prospective employees, and benefits consumers, very often in face-to-face interactions. In the 1980s and 1990s, this approach made sense. The strategic demands on the HR department were limited and customers viewed HR as a transactional business. NARA’s degree of customer service and face time with customers and stakeholders was highly valued.

HR Process Analysis and Redesign

NARA’s HR management team was committed to transforming how and what services were offered. The team considered the kind of workforce that NARA would need in the coming years, how to provide outreach to target and recruit those individuals, which skill gaps turnover was likely to create, and the efficiency of recruiting and onboarding new staff members. HR as an organization didn’t have the bandwidth or resources to fully address these issues, so the management team developed a plan to focus on four critical areas: (1) strengthening strategic human-capital planning, (2) improving the recruiting and hiring process, (3) improving the use of reporting and metrics for HR purposes, and (4) enhancing core-service delivery related to payroll, benefits, and personnel actions.

The team tackled recruitment first. HR improved some internal processes and policies for recruiting and hiring, and they began reaching out proactively to targeted audiences. They also began focusing much more explicitly on finding and recruiting a diverse pool of applicants. A workforce strategy branch was established to proactively conduct human-capital planning related to strategic workforce initiatives. This was a good start. However, HR faced challenges that involved business process and policy issues in combination with the use of outdated or nonexistent technology.

In 2009, a consulting firm was engaged to help address some of these challenges, focusing on evaluating NARA’s HR service-delivery model and assessing technology options. The firm spent time getting to know the staff and meeting with the HR team in College Park, Maryland, as well as the operational HR staff that worked in St. Louis, Missouri. The consulting firm’s efforts were initially directed to the question of whether NARA should adopt new HR technology, but they eventually led to process analysis and recommendations for improving all of the agency’s HR processes, policies, and systems.

NARA conducted a series of meetings with subject matter experts (SMEs), stakeholders, and customers to get a sense of what was working well and where improvements were needed. HR’s decision to train a critical eye on its own business processes and systems on a regular basis was the most powerful aspect of NARA’s approach. In addition to critically analyzing its entire service-delivery model, NARA worked to institute policies, procedures, and systems that would enable the agency to review its HR performance in the future.

NARA’s approach to this project involved several major steps. First, the agency conducted a review of all of its HR processes. The focus of this part of the project was the agency’s business processes, policies, and standard operating procedures for the following:

• Personnel action processing

• Core payroll services and time reporting

• Staff acquisition, including recruitment, classification, diversity, job analysis, and entry-on-duty

• Organizational analysis and position management

• Employee and labor relations

• Performance management

• Reporting, including internal and external reporting as well as metrics.

For each of these functional areas, NARA held a series of interviews with key SMEs, stakeholders, and customers to examine or identify successes, challenges, flexibilities, regulatory issues, performance indicators, current baseline levels of performance, and target performance levels.

The second step of the project was to conduct a similar review of each of these functional areas in terms of HR systems and technology. NARA reviewed the systems and technology supporting each functional area to determine if a system was in place, whether that system was working well, its level of integration with other systems, and its ability to meet NARA’s needs moving forward.

Following these reviews, the team developed recommendations for both short- and long-term changes to the way NARA performed its HR work and the systems used. The reviewers recommended new policies and policy revisions as well as new and revised business processes and standard operating procedures. NARA also developed recommendations regarding the technology that supported HR service delivery.

HR Technology

The front-end analysis and evaluation showed that many of NARA’s issues stemmed from a lack of automated capabilities related to processing personnel actions, timekeeping, and recruiting and hiring. In addition to business process and policy concerns that both help and hinder HR service delivery, technology was recognized as a critical part of the conversation.

For example, moving to a more contemporary service-delivery model often means using technology like a human resources management system (HRMS). Also known as enterprise resource planning systems (ERPs), these systems are commonly used in the federal community. At their core, they are workflow management tools that integrate a lot of different HR data related to employee personnel information, payroll, and benefits. They generally allow users access to a database through a web-based or standalone application from their desktops. An HRMS also often provides self-service functionality where both employees and managers can view, initiate, and manage various activities and transactions, reducing the burden on HR professionals and improving engagement, accountability, and transparency with other systems users.

Besides self-service, the primary benefit of these systems is the automated workflow and integration between various HR functions where changes to an individual’s records update related systems (e.g., a promotion automatically impacts an individual’s pay and makes him/her eligible for different benefits). Although federal agencies may have useful HR-related tools and processes, if the systems aren’t integrated to push and pull data from each other, duplicative and manual processes are necessary to generate useful, enterprise-level reporting. Agencies then must choose between spending a lot of time and money connecting their systems or creating high-workload, frustrating procedures that must be continually maintained to consolidate information.

With these considerations in mind, the HR management team made the recommendation to adopt a new, more modern human resources information technology (HRIT) system that was fully integrated with a payroll system. The team also recommended that NARA deploy a web-based time and attendance system, evaluate an enterprise reporting capability, and use an automated staffing tool to build and post jobs, rate and rank applicants, and perform other hiring actions. In addition, they suggested that NARA seriously consider implementing an automated entry-on-duty system that would help HR coordinate with new employees and facilitate onboarding.

As with many HR-related challenges, the combination of outdated or missing technology and inefficient policies and procedures can create significant and sometimes insurmountable issues for HR service delivery. For this reason, the NARA team also made numerous policy and business process recommendations that corresponded to and augmented many of the proposed systems improvements. Most of these process-related recommendations focused on rules for handling documents related to applications and new hires, new standards and procedures for position classification and management, permission for managers and employees to have access to self-service functionality within the new systems, policies for overpayments and leave advances, standards and policies for timecard review, and processes for eliminating all paper tracking of HR processes.

The team’s analysis showed that the agency’s then-current service provider could not meet the agency’s requirements for a more modern HRIT system that was fully integrated with a payroll system. NARA decided to move forward with the migration to a different service provider.

NARA’s developed a request for proposals (RFP) to provide to prospective providers. Operational capabilities demonstrations (OCDs) were scheduled, during which each provider walked through its system’s basic functionality and addressed a number of different scenarios. Consulting with SMEs, the HR management team determined that the Department of the Interior’s Interior Business Center (IBC) would best meet NARA’s needs. That core HR system was deployed in April 2012, and the automated recruitment tracking and onboarding system (Workforce Tracking and Transformation System/Entry on Duty System, WTTS/EODS) became operational in April 2013.

During the nearly two years it took for NARA to migrate its HR systems, the agency streamlined many HR processes, updated policies, and integrated a number of related but separate functions like training and development. As part of the migration to IBC, NARA deployed a fully integrated personnel, payroll, and enterprise reporting system that provides access to information across many of its HR systems and functions. WTTS/EODS is an especially valuable tracking and reporting tool that provides comprehensive information to HR staff and hiring managers on the status of recruiting actions and where prospective employees are in the transformation.

HR Roles and Responsibilities

Representatives from the HR management team have commented that they were surprised how supportive most stakeholders were throughout the process. This was largely a result of the significant amount of work the team put into providing change management and communications support throughout the process. NARA’s philosophy was “early and often” when it came to getting people involved in the discussion about how the system should look, how their roles and responsibilities might change, and what the benefits (and risks) of the migration would be. Throughout most of the migration, NARA HR staff conducted monthly meetings with administrative officers and hiring managers to keep them in the loop, get their feedback, and gradually introduce them to likely shifts in their responsibilities and duties.

The human capital team worked closely with managers throughout the process to describe the opportunities that they would have, framing this transition as a way of empowering them and giving them authority and autonomy to initiate actions that were critical to them. NARA carefully reviewed its process for completing recruiting and hiring activities, focusing on where they could improve efficiency with automation, cross train HR staff, delegate responsibilities to hiring managers, and even consider delegating some of the work outside the organization (e.g., have O?M complete some of the more typical and standard NARA recruiting actions). The combination of technology and the service-delivery model created true efficiencies.

NARA also had to reconcile its model of customer service; the organization was spending so much time on certain aspects of its work that it was naturally making tradeoffs in other areas. Like most HR offices, NARA had several different customers, including current employees, prospective employees, hiring managers, leadership, and outside organizations like O?M and OM?. NARA had traditionally provided a very “high touch” interaction for almost all aspects for its work and interactions with these groups. This approach was no longer viable given the volume and complexity the agency’s work had taken on in recent years. As part of this transformation effort, NARA worked to introduce greater standardization into work processes and formalize roles, responsibilities, and performance metrics associated with various functions. For example, NARA standardized many of its position descriptions (PDs); the HR office worked to reduce the need to develop customized PDs for every employee a hiring manager wanted to bring onboard.

The HR office also worked to establish the formal roles, responsibilities, and expected timelines for various aspects of the staffing process. The HR team continues to deploy and refine this strategy, monitoring timelines associated with the various phases of the staffing process and moving quickly to advise hiring managers of any bottlenecks and identify mitigation strategies (up to and including returning the hiring action to the manager until the manager is able to afford it the necessary attention). The deployment of WTTS/EODS has made this kind of tracking and accountability focus come to life.

NARA also made a conscious decision to reduce some of its internal audit and error-checking procedures related to recruiting and hiring to a more reasonable, yet completely adequate, level to save time and resources. The agency also established strict criteria for what applications to accept from prospective employees so staff didn’t need to wait or coordinate as frequently with candidates who submitted duplicate or incomplete application packages. These kinds of decisions helped NARA free up resources so staff could prioritize where necessary and provide a very high level of service where it made sense, while streamlining efforts in other areas.

Managers and executives now have access to information. NARA has been working closely with them over time to ensure that the data they want is made available to them. With the new integrated system, managers have much greater visibility into where actions are in the recruitment process. They can view the status of the recruits in the hiring process, a task list of things they need to do to move various activities along in the HR workflow, and transactional data related to issues that can help them manage their staff, resources, and organizations more efficiently. Executives and managers now have data at their disposal and can more easily monitor the status of relevant HR-related activities.

NARA is still taking a number of things slowly. One is timekeeping. NARA had a very manual process for entering time, where employees submitted their time on various activities on a paper timesheet and then official timekeepers entered the information on their behalf into the system. NARA employees are now able to enter their time directly and have their managers approve timecards electronically. However, many of NARA’s employees in the Federal Records Centers don’t have regular access to a computer, so NARA will continue to evaluate the best time to put this functionality fully in place. In addition, many of the employee self-service functions and information have not been rolled out to the organization yet. NARA is working carefully and cautiously to determine how to introduce the best procedures to the workforce at large.

Benefits to the Agency

When asked if taking on this kind of transformation was the right decision and if it was ultimately worth it, NARA’s HR management team responded that they believe that agencies have to go in this direction. A lot is expected of HR offices; to continue delivering even basic services and to ensure legal and regulatory compliance, HR organizations cannot be bogged down by time-consuming, highly manual transactional processes. These burdens were burying NARA in a huge backlog of recruiting and other personnel actions that were becoming increasingly difficult to manage.

In addition, the CHCO now sits on both the executive team and the management team at NARA, the two highest decision-making bodies in the organization. Given the combination of traditional HR responsibilities and the expectations to provide more strategic services, HR process, policy, and technology inefficiencies simply had to be addressed. Participating in strategic discussions and introducing business process and technology improvements have gone a long way toward putting NARA’s HR organization on the right path.

One of the biggest payoffs for NARA resulting from the HR transformation is how much less paper (and the time spent moving that paper around) the organization is using. Prior to deployment, managers and HR had to route paperwork manually through the HR operations center in St. Louis, which could take 12 days. This meant almost two weeks of waiting and coordination before they could even start moving a candidate through the hiring process. In contrast, managers now have access to self-service functionality that completely eliminates the paper-based processes. Prospective employees are able to fill out most of their paperwork before showing up at NARA on their first day, eliminating the need for HR to enter the data manually. In fact, the organization has been able to cross-train and realign staff that previously performed manual data-entry activities to focus on more strategic, high-value aspects of the recruiting and hiring process.

NARA is also improving its hiring timeline, especially considering the new and labor-intensive requirements associated with OPM’s Pathways program in addition to the increasing number of applicants that apply for every posted job (often 1000+). Process improvements and the use of automated tools have enabled NARA to reduce its time-to-hire significantly.

NARA has been able to provide higher quality and more regular reporting as customers need it and to provide stakeholders with direct access to these reports. By eliminating paper-based manual processes and manual data entry, NARA has been able to free up time for HR staff to focus on critical but difficult issues like employee engagement. Improvements in technology have given HR staff the bandwidth to put programs, procedures, and evaluation strategies in place that will enhance engagement across the organization.

Lessons Learned

As other agencies consider similar changes in HR service delivery, they should take note of a few key lessons-learned from the NARA experience:

• Work closely with stakeholders, particularly customers, to evaluate their needs; prioritize those needs; install processes, procedures, and policies; and then manage expectations to allow HR to meet customer needs based on predefined standards.

• Define roles and delegate. HR doesn’t have to do everything. Many HR departments are partnering across their organizations to define activities that individuals and organizations outside HR can do to support the HR mission. Embracing the employee- and manager-self-service philosophy can also free up critical resources.

• Strive for fully integrated HR technology systems and services. NARA moved to a new HR technology provider and is working to continuously improve and enhance its technology tools for HR and its customers.

• Emphasize reporting capability. One of the essential requirements for the human capital function to elevate its role is to develop its ability to advocate for the business value of human capital initiatives. Integrated systems, enterprise reporting, and the corresponding analysis and consulting are essential. The ability to create compelling and comprehensive reporting provides the foundation for HR to play a more strategic role in the organization.

• Continue to improve. Organizations always need to be looking for ways to improve business processes, change policies, reconfigure systems, and push vendors for new enhancements. It is imperative for organizations to install a structured and regular process that trains a critical eye on all aspects of HR service delivery to see where things can be improved, where needs have changed, where expectations aren’t being met, and where things are going particularly well

Every federal organization needs to take a deep and unbiased look at what kinds of services it is providing customers, how it is delivering those services, what customers really want and need, and the technology that is supporting service delivery. NARA provides an excellent example of how to do these things in a systematic, thorough, and effective way.