Survey: Knowledge-Centric SSOs Nurture Talent Through Training

During North America's largest shared services & outsourcing event, earlier this year, SSON and Scott Madden, leading consultants for HR services delivery, collaborated on a survey to find out how leading SSOs have implemented strategies to guarantee them the talent they need to support their businesses in the future. We present the core findings, below. HR services have benefited from a big push in HR technology, which today underpins much of the automated processes that were previously hugely labor-intensive and prone to errors. The HR services work that remains, therefore, tends to be knowledge-centric and value-add, often focused on country- or regionally-specific requirements. This puts the onus on quality resources, as never before. In other words: this is not the time to neglect your talent. What emerged from the survey, however, was that, apart from some mature, predominantly multifunctional centers, few SSOs are strategically managing their talent for the future – in fact, only 45% of those asked perform succession planning. Of those, nearly half (46%) said they had plans in place for only 10% of their leadership team, and just over a third had plans for less than 40% of their leadership positions. A marginal 15% were able to respond that they had 91-100% of their SSO leadership team covered. Other findings: competency models are employed by half of respondents, often modeled on corporate models. Shared Services, given the varied skills-requirements would justify a more tailored competency model 75% of respondents have career paths in place: most include mix of horizontal/vertical (62%) vs just vertical (10%) or horizontal (15%). Still: one quarter of respondents have no career paths defined. Shared Services’ cross-over into other parts of the business is recognized and encouraged: 55% of respondents include progression to positions outside the SSO in their career paths. to retain talent, lucrative career paths still rank in first place, followed by regular communications, and reward and recognition programs. In training, this year management and leadership training (55%) ranked ahead of customer service training (45%) but still well behind process and functional training (both at 76%). Most training included the fairly time-intensive shadowing and rotational assignments. If Shared Services is going to raise its "partner" status across the organization, however, we’d be hoping to see more management and leadership training to support staff in their increasingly collaborative roles. [eventpdf] Engaging employees is still key in delivering performance. Most SSOs are relying on regular communication as an effective tactic, helped, perhaps, by the explosion in online social networking opportunities. Rewards and recognition programs are ranked in 2nd place. Given the enormous opportunities offered by online networking forums, we’d expect to see more innovative use made of these channels for interacting with employees, sharing results, and driving greater engagement. While the technology exists we are not yet seeing enough examples of their effective implementation, but do expect that to chance with the mobile, bring-your-own-device-to-work generation now becoming prevalent across the workforce. Get the full survey here.

Survey: Knowledge-Centric SSOs Nurture Talent Through Training

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