ELECTRONIC HUMAN RESOURCES SUITE (EHR SUITE) 2005 COMPUTERWORLD HONORS CASE STUDY SUMMARY APPLICATION

Transcription

1 ELECTRONIC HUMAN RESOURCES SUITE (EHR SUITE) 2005 COMPUTERWORLD HONORS CASE STUDY GOVERNMENT & NON-PROFIT ORGANIZATIONS AN INNOVATIVE NEW HUMAN RESOURCES APPLICATION ALLOWS SOME 707,000 POSTAL EMPLOYEES, A WORKFORCE SECOND ONLY TO WAL-MART, TO RECEIVE TIMELY RECOGNITION FOR THEIR EFFORTS AND TO PROVIDE ALL WITH UNPRECEDENTED, EQUAL AND READY ACCESS TO EMPLOYMENT INFORMATION AND OPPORTUNITIES. [ ] SUMMARY Robert Carrigan, Chairmen of the Chairmen's Committee Ron Milton, Vice-Chairman of the Chairmen's Committee Dan Morrow, Chief Historian The United States Postal Service, with approximately 707,000 employees, is one of the largest employers in the nation, second only to Wal-Mart. To ensure that all employees receive timely recognition for their efforts and to provide all with equal and ready access to information and opportunities, the Postal Service has transformed many of its human resources processes with the innovative application of information technology. APPLICATION For a service organization like the United States Postal Service (USPS), employee satisfaction often correlates directly with customer satisfaction. Yet with approximately 707,000 employees spread across the country, working from thousands of facilities and supported by 80 geographically distributed human resources offices, the organization s paper-based programs for managing employee satisfaction and responding to their requests proved inconsistent and often inadequate. The USPS human resources organization, under pressure to reduce costs by streamlining operations, began exploring the possibility of a suite of electronic human resources processes. This ehr suite would raise the HR performance of the USPS in several ways: make it easier for employees to share their thoughts and ideas on business solutions with their supervisors, refine the way employees awarded one another, create a better way for employees to file for a reassignment to a different postal location and improve employee access to benefits information. The first process to undergo transformation to the ehr suite was the employee awards program. The original award nomination and approval process for this program was slow, error-prone and cumbersome the result of multiple paper forms required for documentation. The USPS Information Technology created an online system to eliminate paper and to speed up the approval process and the delivery of rewards and recognition to employees. Now, nominations are circulated to managers electronically for approval with alerts that help ensure accuracy and eliminate delays. Nominations are automatically uploaded to a central payroll system for processing. The program, renamed eawards, has eliminated paper and created a much more efficient process. Approval times for awards have been cut from weeks or months to just a few days which makes the program more effective in motivating and encouraging superior service and far more personally satisfying for employees. The success of the eawards program led to the transformation of the organization s paper-based suggestion box program into eideas. This program encourages innovation by asking employees to submit ideas to their supervisors and rewards employees when their ideas are put into action. With the paper-based process, ideas were likely to be delayed or lost, and supervisors and executives found it difficult to keep track of the flow of suggestions. To ensure that all employees received equal attention for their ideas, the USPS organization put the entire idea-capture process online with a web-based application and uses eawards to support the distribution of rewards. The eideas program has eliminated paper and paper-related errors and delays. Employees quickly accepted the new system, submitting 850 new ideas in the first nine months of operation. The system is helping the USPS to demonstrate to employees that their ideas and imagination do make a difference in their own jobs and for the overall performance of the postal service. The successful transformation the employee idea program prompted the USPS to create ereassign, an online system that allows employees to identify and pursue opportunities for reassignment all electronically. A secure, external Internet site gives employees direct and anytime access to information about job openings and job requirements, along with the capability for tracking their own applications

2 through the review process. Employees across all 80 districts can now be sure that they have equal access to opportunities whenever and wherever it is most convenient for them and a standardized requirements and review process. The transformation of USPS s relationship with its employees using web-based technology continued with the creation of Benefits Online. Previously, all information was disseminated through the 80 HR field offices. Getting up-to-date information about their benefits or HR policies required a phone call or visit to one of these offices and the delays that are typical when two busy employees need to find the time to interact with each other. With Benefits Online, employees have online access to the latest benefit and policy information, now organized to make it easy to use and understand. The first release of the system included 80,000 office-based employees with intranet access through their desktop computers. The remaining USPS employees will have Internet access to Benefits Online from any computer in the near future. With these four programs, the USPS is driving employee-centric communications. The bureaucratic layers are being peeled away to give employees a closer and more rewarding relationship with the USPS. Staff within the human resources function also benefits. The new online systems reduce the administrative burden placed on them and give them more time to focus on activities that enhance employee performance and satisfaction. BENEFITS The four new online programs have delivered a number of benefits to all employees of the USPS. Easier access to program benefits The four online systems give employees a more manageable and efficient process for participating in these programs, which are aimed at improving their satisfaction as employees of the USPS, their individual performance and the overall performance of the organization. Online access to information simplifies employee involvement, reduces the need for time-consuming phone calls to human resources and does away with the burden of tracking paper-based documentation. An employee can now go online to easily submit an idea, check the status of a reassignment and request and gather up-to-date and easy-to-understand benefits information. Consistency and fairness in program administration The new web-based systems help the USPS to ensure the consistent administration of employee programs throughout its 80 regions and in its thousands of facilities. By submitting their own ideas into the eideas system, employees no longer have to rely on their supervisors to submit ideas for them. The ideas that every employee has to share are assured of receiving immediate and equal attention. New ereassign tools give employees better access to job openings and a more consistent process for submitting reassignment requests. Employees no longer have to depend on human resources staff to post a paper notice of an opening on a job board. With just their employee ID and personal identification number, employees have access to all openings across the country from any computer with an Internet connection. Benefits Online provides the USPS single, consistent source of benefits information. All content is managed by a change control process to ensure accuracy. This consistent and approved online information provides also eliminates answer. Faster responsiveness for greater program effectiveness The electronic eawards system has cut approval times from weeks or months to just a few days, which makes the program more effective in motivating and encouraging employees to deliver superior service. Similarly, the technology-driven processes for the eideas program speed the rewards to those employees whose ideas are implemented, which enhances employee confidence in the program and encourages them to submit ideas. Moving reassignment request forms along the approval pipeline, from one office to another, made the paper-based systems exceedingly slow. Forms received in HR with missing information had to travel back to the originating office to be completed and then routed back to HR again. The electronic

3 ereassign system prompts employees to submit complete information with their initial request and delivers the electronic form to human resources almost instantly. More accurate administration of program benefits With paper-based systems, information had to be keyed into payroll and other HR systems, creating the opportunity for data entry errors and the accidental overpayment of awards as well as the possibility that award nominations, idea entries and reassignment requests could be lost. The new systems have eliminated these sources of errors and ensure the accuracy in the administration of program benefits. A USPS that is more accountable to employees The online systems give employees direct access to information and make the USPS more accountable for the fairness and accuracy of its programs. Suggestions are rarely stalled along the way. Employees have clear visibility into where their ideas and reassignment requests stand in the approval and review processes. More efficient HR operations The online systems have saved USPS supervisors and executives from the laborious, time-consuming processes previously required to manage these four employee programs. For example, ereassign saves staff time and dramatically improves the hiring process with more efficient tracking of employee information, notices, requests and required documentation. The human resources staff spends significantly less time answering phones, waiting for correspondence or moving the process along. Instead, transactions now are guided automatically. With a streamlined process across the 80 districts and complete information at its fingertips, the human resources staff is more efficient in handling reassignment requests, saving time and money. An added benefit for the USPS is the retention of seasoned employees. By implementing the systems, the USPS has eliminated paper and its associated costs and delays. The systems have also enhanced the agency s ability to monitor activity by allowing management to view online reports of activity, such as which eawards nominations have been approved, why nominations were rejected, and monthly and yearly summaries of awards that have been granted. IMPORTANCE Information technology is the primary enabler behind the transformation of each of the four USPS employee programs. The eawards program runs on a web-based application that uses Java, as well as an Oracle database and workflow tools. To nominate an employee for an award, a frontline supervisor goes to the USPS intranet home page and clicks on the eawards link to log onto eawards. From there, the supervisor completes an onscreen form and selects from one of 33 awards. The system automatically populates the address field, flags any missing information and provides an alert if the award amount exceeds the levels set by USPS policy all of which ensure that the proper information is included. The form is then routed automatically to the next-level supervisor for approval, along with an notification to review the form. If necessary, reminders are sent to the next-level supervisor at regular intervals. Each night, approved eawards nominations from across the country are automatically uploaded in a batch to the payroll system. Through a specially created interface, this information is fed directly into the payroll system, in the correct format, eliminating the need to re-key data. The next day, the nomination is validated and a payment is sent back to the original first-level supervisor. The supervisor can then use the system to create an award certificate and present the award to the employee typically, just a few days after making the initial nomination. The eideas program is supported by a similar web-based application. Employees submit their ideas through the USPS intranet using a PC or one of the kiosks located in USPS plants. The application then automatically routes ideas and suggestions to the appropriate supervisor, along with an and regular reminders announcing that an idea is waiting for review. The supervisor can approve ideas online and easily forward them on to the district, area and national levels. The eideas system stores on a central server any drawings and schematics used to support an idea so that they are accessible to everyone involved in the process. The system is also linked to eawards so that when an idea is implemented, supervisors can easily initiate the process for rewarding the employee. As a proposed idea works its way through the approval process, the employee who submitted the idea receives updates on its progress and can check the history and status at any time. If the employee feels that an idea has been wrongly rejected, the action can be appealed online. Legal department experts can review submissions from across the USPS to determine if any are patentable.

4 The ereassign program is the first within the USPS to use the external Internet as the entry point. Employees log onto the site with their employee ID and a four-digit personal identification number. This universal point of entry gives all employees simultaneous access to a single set of job postings, ensuring fair and equal opportunity for all 707,000 employees. Employees are able to find and sort through job openings across the country by location or job type. Once an employee initiates a reassignment request, ereassign automatically populates more than half of the form with employee information. The employee completes the form as appropriate and it is then sent to human resources staff. HR staff then make a suitability determination using established criteria that are built into the system. The system next generates a standardized letter to expedite notice of suitability back to the employee. If an employee needs to provide additional information, such as a driver s license, the human resources staff uses a pull-down menu to check it off and sends within minutes an requesting the information. The employee can check the status of the application online as it is managed by human resources. The Benefits Online program uses Authoria HR (v4.2.1), an off-the-shelf package customized with USPS-specific content. This online HR knowledge management system had the flexibility to allow the USPS to adapt it to the organization s many different categories of workers and their unique sets of benefits and HR policies. To begin, the USPS identified all of the groups that would be accessing the system. This complex and thorough undertaking revealed more than 60 groups of workers. Based on this analysis, the team created a requirements document for the new system, indicating where information could be standardized across certain groups, as well as where it needed to be tailored for a specific category of workers. The Authoria HR policy subjects then needed to be identified and authored. Testing of the new Benefits Online system validated its integrity, its links to supplemental pages and outside resources, such as the Internal Revenue Service, and its usability among key stakeholders. The system delivers benefit and HR policy information in a highly personalized manner first, according to the characteristics of the group to which the employee belongs and then according to the individual needs of the employee. ORIGINALITY Given the size of the USPS, delivering fair, consistent and timely program benefits to 707,000 diverse employees spread across the country is an original achievement. Certainly each of these programs is among the largest of its kind implemented within the US, possibly around the world. The new systems bring a level of rigor and discipline to the programs that benefit employees, union leaders and management alike. The eawards program gives supervisors the authority and ability to deliver to employees on-thespot award certificates up to a certain value, tying rewards and recognition more closely to performance. By eliminating paperwork and other barriers to use, the USPS has made it quite easy for supervisors and managers to reward excellence. With eideas, the USPS has created universal access to a forum for innovation, opening the way for employees to shape their own work and participate in improving operations. At a time when the USPS has closed several postal facilities, ereassign has provided employees with the means to quickly identify and pursue opportunities for continued employment and job advancement. Employees can take the time they need to apply for new positions at home, at the library or wherever they have convenient Internet access. Standardized criteria for reviewing reassignment requests ensure the fairness of the selection process. The Benefits Online program delivers customized benefit and policy information to employees, making it easy for them to access the information that is relevant to their job category. Employees no longer have to keep their own paper files of benefits and policies or wade through binders of information. SUCCESS Together, these four programs have proven the ability of the USPS to transform its relationship with employees. The organization has effectively implemented each project on time and on budget, a true hallmark of success for a government agency, where technology-driven transformations have historically often exceed budgets and timelines and have frequently been terminated before implementation even takes place.

5 Individually, each program has demonstrated success in unique ways. The eawards program has been widely accepted and used by USPS employees, with some 55,000 nominations being processed in the first year and a half. To ensure this level of acceptance, the USPS involved users in the development of the system, beginning with gathering their feedback on the system prototypes and enhancing the system accordingly. This feedback was particularly helpful in ensuring that the new online process would be easy to use. The eawards program has cut approval times from weeks or months to just a few days which makes the program higher performing in terms of motivating and encouraging employees to deliver superior service. This translates into a significant reduction in the number of hours previously required to operate the program. The decision to undertake successive technology-driven transformations of other programs testifies to the success of the eawards program. Employees immediately accepted the eideas program, submitting approximately 850 new ideas in the first nine months of operation. Shaping the application with input from users and placing it on the existing intranet helped ensure its success, making the system easy for employees and supervisors to access and use, right from the start. The eideas program has eliminated paper and paper-related errors and delays from the ideacapture process. Submissions are no longer lost, and clear accountability for action means that valuable ideas are rarely stalled along the way. Employees have clear visibility into where their ideas stand in the approval process. The new online program has significantly reduced administrative work for everyone involved. To ensure the success of ereassign, USPS leaders worked hard to demonstrate to union officials the benefits to employees. Union leaders were impressed, giving their support from the outset. The new system sweeps aside all of the varying procedures and dramatically improves the hiring process with online and automated transactions. Since its implementation, more than 100,000 reassignment requests have been submitted online, and the submission-to-transfer timeline has been whittled to just a few months. More than 5,000 employees have been relocated, including a husband and wife who are both USPS employees and were able to easily coordinate a move together to a new location. Benefits Online currently serves 80,000 USPS executives, officers and managerial and administrative staff in area, district or headquarters offices. When the Benefits Online system is fully implemented later this year, all 707,000 USPS employees will have access to consistent, personalized, up-to-date and easy-to-understand benefit and HR policy information online. At present, the system includes 30 subject areas per worker category. With future released, this is expected to grow to more than 100. These categories of user information demonstrate the successful re-authoring of policies to deliver information to workers in a format and style that they easily understand. Other enhancements planned for future releases of Benefits Online include integrating the system with SAP to enable personalized access to relevant HR information, developing an infrastructure that will allow all USPS employees to access Benefits Online from their homes These four programs support a larger USPS plan to reduce paper, increase employee self-service and create centralized HR shared services centers. The long-term goal is to consolidate the organization s 80 geographically distributed HR offices into four centralized centers. Rather than tackle the entire consolidation project at once, the USPS is using an incremental approach, demonstrated to be successful through the accomplishments of these four programs. This incremental approach takes into account budget constraints and the need for employees to adjust to new processes, while ensuring that individual projects fit into a larger overall framework. The ehr suite is brings greater efficiency to the USPS, where time savings of minutes, tallied up across hundreds of thousands of employees, can significantly reduce administrative hours. Overall, the programs are expected to save the USPS $50 million over the next ten years and free HR staff to focus on more strategic activities.

6 DIFFICULTY The size and complexity of the US Postal Service contributed to challenges faced in executing these programs successfully. To start, the USPS had to ensure that the technical environment would be robust and scalable to serve all of its employees. With 707,000 employees, the involvement of multiple labor unions, and limited numbers of workers with online access while at work, the USPS was challenged to create an infrastructure to support so many diverse needs. From the start, the system was designed to support the full complement of workers and satisfy union requirements. The USPS also allowed multiple routes to access, including desktop computers, multi-user kiosks and offsite access via any Internet enabled computer. The organization is characterized by a wide variety of employee types from the appointed Postmaster General in Washington DC to the independent contractor delivering mail in rural areas of the country. Previously, the 80 districts had the freedom to develop their own memo of understanding around many of the policies related to the application of these programs. That is no longer the case. To create consistency and standardization in the application of the programs across the organization, the USPS undertook the major task of pulling from the best of its many policies and memos of understanding to develop a universal set of policies governing the programs. The USPS faced the challenge of overcoming a history of unsuccessful attempts to streamline programs and processes with technology. For the ereassign program, offering the program through the external Internet added even more difficulty. It was not appropriate for employees to look for new jobs while on the clock for their current jobs, yet an internal program required them to do just that. The ereassign program would be the first ever be accessible through the Internet. Securing leadership and union approval, meeting rules and regulations and ensuring security all posed significant hurdles. However, project leaders knew that external access would be important to the success of the program and worked through the challenges. Employee information resides in multiple legacy systems throughout the USPS. The new systems had to integrate with many of these systems. For example, the Benefits Online system integrates with seven different legacy systems to ensure that employees receive complete and accurate information on the benefits that they are eligible for and the policies that apply to their work category. Looking ahead, the USPS also made sure that these new systems would have the flexibility to integrate with additional applications and systems as the need arose. Overall, the USPS identified early on the difficulties it would encounter along the path toward successful implementation and user acceptance and built solutions into the development and implementation processes.