Four tips for keeping your HRMS project team happy

Selection and implementation can be a stressful time for an HRMS project team marked by long hours and intense efforts. Maintaining a functioning HRMS project team is crucial for a successful implementation. How can you keep your team motivated and productive?

1. Match your talent into the right roles

Nothing is more demotivating to an employee than to spend 40+ hours in a painful job. A role should provide some level of learning or mental challenge in order to keep an employee on track and motivated.

If you are using external HRMS consultants, set clear guidance and expectations for how they should engage with your team. In a best case scenario your consultants and team are partnered together with your consultant keeping their HRMS counterpart informed and involved in system design and configuration. In a worst case situation your consultants are in a silo making long-term decisions alone while training up their junior consultants. A quick test is to ask your team how much time they are spending with the consultants and actively learning about the new system.

Recommended reading: help your HRMS project team through the selection process unscathed with our HRMS selection survival guide.

2. Provide training and certification options

I am always surprised by the number of companies who do not send their HRMS project team to formal training, expecting them to learn it all from the consultants or to teach themselves. Training can be a great motivator as it shows a financial commitment by the company to employee development.

As your employees are getting training and experience on the new HRMS, they can sometimes become a flight risk. To counter this possibility, consider certification options. Many HRMS now offer customer certification on various modules such as core HRMS, benefits, analytics, etc. Save this option for when the going gets tough and your team needs an incentive. Best is to tie it to a future date, such as one year from go live, ensuring that employees have the experience as well as the commitment to stay on post launch.

3. Manage to personality types

I’ve found HRMS projects to be a fun dynamic, the mixture of HR and IT staff can create great synergy and includes diverse skillsets to get the job done. Different styles of management are often needed in these situations, so be aware of what conditions cause your team to thrive. I’ve seen projects that lean too heavily toward either an HR or IT management style and it can cause issues or unhappiness with the project

4. Financial incentives

Bonuses are often tied to projects and these are particularly needed when an implementation is going to result in jobs lost or moved. I am currently involved in an HR transformation where data entry for the new system will be centralized in a low labor cost country. The project team requires the expertise of the outgoing team members in order to be successful. In this delicate situation a bonus was provided to keep the team committed and focused on a strong delivery.