How to ensure you’re making the right reward technology investment

You don’t need me to tell you that HR tech is here to stay. Embracing its possibilities will empower your existing processes and streamline your working life, saving you time and hassle.

Whatever your problem, there’s a piece of software out there that purports to solve it – but how do you sort the wheat from the chaff and choose the right investment for your business?

Here are four quick factors to consider before you make your choice.

Consider your objectives

Do you want to fix a gap in what you do, and enhance your employee proposition eg benefits, performance management? Are you wanting to save time and manual effort, and ultimately money? Are you trying to gain a more strategic view of your ‘people’ operation through analytics and insight? Or do you want to professionalise your HR function?

Conduct a technology audit

Make a list of the systems that you currently use – even the Excel spreadsheets – including how you are using them. What are the demands being made on the HR function that you can’t address? Are your systems meeting the current and future needs of the business?

Do your research

There will no doubt be several products on the market that are potentially suited to you needs. To make the right decision, you need to look at them all and compare them. Do they really do what you want? How easy are they to use? And how much do they cost? You will need to do a bit of digging to get the full picture – ask for a demonstration and to speak to some of the clients to get peer reviews.

Create a business case

Establishing a business case is a time-consuming process, but absolutely critical in order to gain executive team buy-in. Outline the business benefits and include return on investment figures ie how much will the technology cost (both initially to buy and the year-on-year license fees) and then look at the potential savings.

HR and reward can really benefit from the power of technology. How many times have you done battle with a spreadsheet at annual pay review time; with a VLOOKUP that just won’t work no matter how many times you have played with the formatting? Whether it’s internal job evaluation, external market comparison, pay review allocation or performance management, technology can take away some of the pain. Making your processes faster and more effective will massively enhance the credibility of the HR department overall.

The author is Justine Woolf, director of consulting at Innecto

This article is provided by Innecto