Episode 28: Fixing Broken HR Processes: Lean Thinking for HR Teams
Lean thinking can help you fix broken HR processes and create a high performing HR function
Trina Sunday: Imagine a HR function where you’re no longer buried in admin, chasing approvals or drowning in outdated processes. Instead, your team operates with speed, efficiency and impact, focusing on people and strategy and culture. They’re things that truly matter. Today, we’re unlocking the power of lean thinking to help you fix broken HR processes, cut inefficiencies and create a high performing HR function. If you’re ready to work smarter and not harder, this episode’s for you.
Welcome to Reimagining HR with Trina Sunday
Welcome to Reimagining HR with Trina Sunday, the rule breaking podcast where we challenge our thinking and our current people practises. This podcast is for time poor HR teams and business leaders who are feeling the burn, lacking laughs and not feeling the love. I’m Trina, your host and I’m here to cut through the bs, explore different ways of thinking and create high impact HR functions because happier, healthier organisations are better for our people and our bottom line. So if you are keen to flip traditional HR on its head, hit the follow or subscribe button so you’re the first to know when new episodes drop. I’m here to help and also to shake things up. So let’s get started. Picture this. You’re an HR leader walking into another Monday morning firefight. Your inbox is overflowing with leave requests, hiring approvals are stuck in limbo and your team is stretched thin chasing paperwork instead of driving real impact. Sound familiar? It doesn’t have to be that way though. So what if you could cut the noise, streamline processes and free up your HR team to focus on what actually matters. Your people, your culture and your strategy. Today I’m unlocking the secrets of lean thinking. The same approach that transformed global businesses and showing you how to apply it to fix broken HR processes, eliminate inefficiencies and create a HR function that runs like a well oiled machine. If you’re ready to shift from survival mode to high impact hr, then I really want you to lean in. Excuse the pun. So lean thinking. It comes from Toyota’s legendary efficiency model, but we’re seeing it revolutionise industries far beyond manufacturing. So healthcare, finance and now hr. And it’s not just theory. Today I’m going to explore some real HR success stories where applying lean methodologies led to measurable impact. I’m going to cover a few things today. Lean hr, which is how we can identify and eliminate waste. Kaizen, which is about continuous small improvements that drive big results. Process mapping with a step by step approach to help you find bottlenecks and automation. How AI chatbots and Self service tools are transforming HR plus I want to look at a case study of a company that cut their HR admin workload by 30% with lessons from some HR leaders and clients of mine who like us and me and you, have been through the trenches.
How much of your day as an HR leader is spent on high value strategic work
But what is lean hr? Lets start with a simple question. How much of your day as an HR leader is spent on high value strategic work? And how much is spent on chasing approvals, fixing errors or doing the repetitive tasks that in theory could be automated? For most HR teams and especially clients that work with me, that reality is really frustrating. And I was speaking to a HR director from a national healthcare provider recently that I’ve been working with and she admitted that her team spent almost 40% of their time manually updating spreadsheets. 40%. I’d be losing the will to live. They spend all their time chasing managers for performance review data or reconciling leave balances. But when we worked together on how she might be able to improve that and they finally mapped out their processes, they realised that over half the steps they were doing were completely unnecessary, unnecessary. So what they do, they cut them out. And there was a telco company that had also, and this was a colleague of clients, not my client but a telco that eliminated recruitment delays in a really massive way after she shared our process mapping process with them. They’re essentially a mid sized Australian telecom and they had a six step approval process for recruitment. HR had to collect hiring manager approval, senior leadership, sign off a second review from Finance and then wait for final CEO approvals. And the result time to hire was like 30 days. And not because they couldn’t find talent, because, because they were just stuck in an approval loop, an endless loop of approvals. So the lean HR fix, they reduced those approvals from 6 to 2, the hiring manager and HR. They implemented an automated tracking system that alerted hiring managers when they had stuff to do and they removed the redundant sign offs. They didn’t add any value. So what was the point? And the outcome was that they dropped their time to hire from 30 days to, to 15. Like they halved it so candidates got a better experience. HR saved time and of course the business filled their roles faster. But one of the processes I really like to look at is Kaizen. For hr it’s kind of, you know, lean thinking isn’t about overnight transformations, it’s about Kaizen or continuous improvement. The best HR teams I’ve ever worked with are the ones that are not waiting for a massive system overhaul. Massive system overhauls. And massive projects like that, they actually rarely drive efficiency. It’s all about making small, impactful changes every blessed day. So one of the solutions that we put in place for one of my coaching clients that came off the back of the Kaizen philosophy was HR Fix It Fridays. And it started as an experiment, but this financial services company in the east coast need to be a bit careful here. They were struggling with HR bottlenecks so they had manual, onboarding, paper based leave requests and approval chains that took way too long. Right. The HR team introduced a Kaizen style initiative called Fix It Friday. And it was basically a dedicated time every month to fix one inefficient hr process. Just one chip off, one, you do it once a month. You’ve updated 12 processes and improved things 12 times in a year. The first fix for them was around automating leave requests. That was the first one that we trialled and that I shadowed them on and helped coach them through the process and then they went on to do it every month. And basically what was happening is before employees emailed HR all the time to request leave and HR manually checked balances and approvals. Now obviously switching to a HR chatbot, employees were instantly able to check their leave balance and submit requests. And they were using Slack but you could also use Microsoft Teams. But the results were, you know, they saved 10 hours per week for the HR team. There was faster approvals and happier employees and errors reduced by 90% cause there was no more missing leave requests. And the lesson from the HR director when getting that fed back was, you know, they thought that automation was going to be costly and complex and because they weren’t a large organisation, right? But small changes like introducing just a simple chatbot completely transformed their workflow and it freed them up from a lot of that unnecessary, admin work. And that made me think about when I was talking to them, like how are we measuring up? How are we actually contemplating efficiencies in HR and what it means to level up our processes so that we are working leaner. And in its 2023 research, EY found that performing a single manual entry made by a HR pro of data without self service technology carries an average estimated cost of $4.78. So every time that manual entry was done, it cost the business $4.78. Now that figure includes labour and non labour costs required for all the steps of the process, right? So producing the forms which included printing and copying and postage, double checking the accuracy of the data and then of course transferring the information into a HR system. 478 every time you do something manually, I was extrapolating that out and I’m like, whoa, that’s a big cost. But knowing how many transactions you’re doing every time, that’s sometimes really easy to measure. Other times it can go by time as opposed to activity. And so if you look at how you’re going to estimate that manual data entry, you can just look at a basic annual cost calculation, right? Take your hourly wage, multiply that by the amount of hours that you spend per week doing manual stuff, multiply that by the number of weeks in a year, and you can come out with some kind of annual figure. So if you took an average HR officer’s wage or the midpoint of it, which according to seek, which they say a HR Officer ranges between 80 and 95k in Australia, seems high. We all know that they start at 55 and go up to 100. But if we just take the SEEK data by way of demonstrating a point, that works out to be about $42 an hour. But then if we look at weekly hours per data entry, research says that the average HR officer would spend about 6.5 hours a week doing manual data entry. So if you take that $42 and you multiply it by those 6.5 hours and you multiply that by 52 weeks a year, it’s about $14,000. 14 grand. Manual data entry. If you have about three or four HR officers doing that and you’re looking at what the actual cost would be to automate some things, you start to get a pretty good projection and business case for some of your tech solutions. And if you’re wondering where my 6.5 hours is coming from, I’ll share the link in the show notes. But we know that HR departments are in charge of know vital personal and private employee information. But having employees keep track of that information is honestly stealing valuable hours of work from hr. And it can also introduce errors into the data when we have manual intervention. So the 6.5 hours that I’m talking about here came from some research and a survey of around a thousand HR professionals who were using some software. And about half of the HR professionals said that they leveraged between seven or more employment systems ranging from HR information systems, applicant tracking systems, benefits admin, payroll, time tracking, a whole load of things, right? And as a result of that, 64% of those HR leaders said that on average they spend between four and and nine hours manually entering data every week. So I took a Midpoint of that 6.5 hours, let’s split the difference. And all of these things have slices of what the employee lifecycle is, all of these different apps and tech solutions, but they’re often not talking to each other or they’re talking to other products that are not even ours. And so it’s not HR not doing its job, but the outcome of poor system integration. Because in house HR is having to jump between these different systems manually, especially as companies get larger. And don’t even get me started on the fallout of mergers and acquisitions where you are literally trying to combine apples and oranges in the first instance and we haven’t costed the implications or the resource needs to appropriately support a leaner HR function. Ultimately, that’s what you would want to do if you were saving money through merging two businesses together. But measuring your HR inefficiency costs, they can be a great fix it Friday exercise for your team. Coming off the back of potentially a month of tracking their time, and that month your team is going to hate life, right? But you can use different apps and software to track how much time you’re spending doing things. But when you can show the costs and thereby the savings, if you can automate that manual data entry execs suddenly have a vested interest in supporting your business case for a tech solution. And while these manual activities on the surface might seem minor, their costs can have a really serious impact. Like on top of the costs alone, there’s the frustration of that it’s creating. By saddling employees with tedious tasks, they consume time, energy and the financial resources that your HR staff could otherwise be directing to high level activities like professional development or recruiting or retention. Not only do the costs add up, but they appear to be on the rise thanks to inflation and technological advances.
Process mapping is a really practical tool that every HR leader should use
So what else can we do to lean up hr? Well, get your coloured sticky notes ready team. There’s a really practical tool that I use with lots of teams if I’m going in and doing consultancy work with HR functions. And it’s good old process mapping. And process mapping is a really practical tool that every HR leader should use, in my humble opinion. But it’s literally a way of visually breaking down each your HR workflows. And it helps you find the bottlenecks and to streamline operations, it helps you find where you’re duplicating things, where you’ve got too many fingers in the pie and where you’ve got groups of activity that are really manual in nature. One of my clients was an Australian healthcare provider and they were Wanting to transform their onboarding. So we worked with the HR team to map out their onboarding and we discovered that new hires were basically waiting more than three weeks to get IT access. It might seem like a really simple thing, right, but that’s three weeks of lost productivity. And there’s really no excuse for that when we have so many systems involved in hiring and onboarding our employees. So why was it going wrong? Well, IT requests were being triggered after the employee start date, and the managers had to manually submit IT access forms. And HR had no tracking system for pending IT requests because they didn’t have any visibility over the IT request forms. So the lean HR fix, you know, they automated IT system access requests. It was triggered immediately upon contract signing. So as soon as a contract was signed that went immediately and in an automated way through to it, a pre boarding process was introduced which meant that employees received access before day one and they even started to expose them to receiving information, but with no expectation that they did anything. Don’t expect your people to do stuff before they work for you and are getting paid by you. It really annoys people. But they also reduce manual tracking by integrating their onboarding into their HR software where IT had been separate. And so the outcome was, you know, their new hires were productive from day one and HR saved like 20 hours a month. I think it was based on their manual follow ups because they were having to manually follow up everything. But process mapping and bringing all of your separate teams into a room is a really powerful exercise to bring a team together. And I have lots of my clients where I suggest if you’re doing a Fix it Friday, which is based on how can we improve a process? Chip away at making small changes for big impact. Get the coloured post its and give a different colour to each of your functions within hr. So recruitment or talent acquisition might be green, your payroll processing function might be yellow, your learning and development team, might be purple. Whatever the case might be, right, you get the point. Different colour per function within your team structure. But then think about people outside hr depending on the process that you’re trying to fix in your Fix it Friday. But if you have a long table and you step out a process employee does X, that person puts a coloured post it down. There’s always an approving manager colour, there’s always an employee colour and then you’ve got your HR people. So when you step out a process, every single step of a process, it’s quite alarming when you run out of table space, you start to appreciate that there might be 38 moving parts. In trying to get something, what might seem quite simple done. And so when you map it out and if you use different coloured post its, it becomes a process that becomes really visual. You can see lots of coloured post, its where they’re clumped together. Well, that would tell you that that team does the bulk of the work that’s attached to that process. Just so you’d expect a recruitment team or talent acquisition team would have a lot of steps in the process, right, for recruiting a new hire. But there’s other people involved in that process. And when you then see processes duplicated or if you’re doing this as a team and then you see that there are some similar activities happening that might be duplicating, that becomes really obvious. And your team also gets visibility through doing that activity on what each other are doing. And so it can be a really powerful exercise. But you should always have an outcome in mind, right? Improving your processes, becoming more efficient, becoming more impactful. But you get some great byproducts and secondary outcomes in terms of team awareness, team cohesiveness and people understanding what other people do. But if we look at automation, because sometimes we will look and do this process mapping and we’ll see certain tasks or activities which are really manual in nature. So once I’ve had some of my, clients map out the process and we’ve got the rainbow all over the table, it’s then about going through the sticker and saying what’s automated and what’s manual. And so when you start to see lots of different people doing sequential steps in a process and it’s manual, you have so many opportunities for that process to fall over. So the more you can automate, the more seamless that will be. Things jump from one step to the next step in real time.
Using lean thinking can transform HR from reactive to high impact
And so if we talk about automation, because, you know, manual HR is the biggest time waster in our field. It’s how do we look at it? And one of the retail chains that I’d worked with, they cut their admin by 30%. So National Retail company, they had HR teams manually handling payroll enquiries. So hundreds of emails every week about pay slips and tax details and leave balances and employees were really frustrated with slow response times. And this might seem like a really obvious fix to people, right? Why isn’t your HRS doing this? But it was more than that. But the lean HR fix was simply to introduce an AI driven HR chatbot which had basically payroll and leave FAQs. And in developing the FAQs, which felt like a really difficult process and HR resisted it at the time. But sometimes we have to put work in to make life easier for ourselves, right? But also in going through and developing the FAQs, we really challenge ourselves on, well, what questions do employees really ask? And if you sit there and you develop those FAQs on your own without actually asking your employees, hot tip for you, those FAQs probably are not going to hit the mark because you will come up with what is a frequently asked question valid, but the real questions that employees want to ask but they don’t ask because they haven’t had good customer service in the past. We also want those included. But they also automated payslip retrieval via self service HR portal and they removed all email based inquiries so employees could get their answers 24, 7 at their fingertips. And that HR admin workload reduced by 30%. Right. the payroll errors dropped by 70% and of course employee satisfaction was higher because they were less annoyed by HR’s delay not answering their questions. And all they really wanted to know was how much money was coming in because they needed to remortgage their house or how much leave they had because they really needed to book a holiday. So there’s some really key takeaways here in terms of how we can use lean thinking to kind of really make HR more efficient. And the first thing is to identify and eliminate waste, like cut out the unnecessary steps. The other thing is to look at the Kaizen micro improvements. What are small fixes that can create really big gains? Process mapping. Love it. But look at it and do it with a purpose of finding and fixing bottlenecks. And then the last thing is automating your HR workflows. Chatbots, AI, self service tools, they are all critical in terms of making processes and information flow seamlessly. And an action tip for you. Pick one HR process this week, just one, map it out, find some inefficiencies and fix one thing. And if that’s the way you show up, and if you bring that lean thinking into your day, you’re going to be improving the performance and the impact of your HR function week by week. And in improving how much value you add, you’re improving your credibility. HR should be a strategic enabler, not an admin department. So by applying lean thinking, we transform HR from reactive to high impact. Imagine that. Thanks for tuning in and leaning in to this week’s episode. As we look to reimagine how we show up for our people, organise organisations and community reach out to us via our website at www.reimaginehr.com.au with your HR horror stories or suggestions of people you’d love to hear from or topics you want to explore. It’s all about people, purpose and impact and we are here for all of it.
Until next time, take care, team.
