HRMS Selection: 3 Simple Steps to Achieving Employee Buy-In

Selecting and implementing a new HRMS can be an exciting project: building your shortlist, viewing product demos and finally choosing a product. But is it possible to keep everyone happy in the process? Should everyone get an equal say in the HRMS selection process?

Identify the Key Stakeholders

Often, it’s relevant to document your HRMS requirements along with the stakeholders in the HRMS selection process and whether someone provides requirements, input, or is responsible for making a decision. The Executive Board usually has responsibility to make the final decision, but will need input from other stakeholders such as HR Directors, HR Managers and Business Partners, as well as Shared Services Professionals who will use the system on a daily basis.

Other related departments who are indirectly involved in HRMS selection may also have a voice, such as the payroll department, or an IT team who may provide technology support. Finally, casual users such as employees and managers who may use self-service functionality in the HRMS should also be considered too, for the usability aspect.

Quantify the Business Requirements

As everyone’s business need or use for the system will be different, feedback may be heavily based on personal opinions. In this case, it is helpful to quantify the input, so to put a cost against the future use. While a system may have impressive functionality to manage your non-employee population, if non-employees are a tiny part of your population, business benefits or cost savings may not be a factor. If you can establish an HRMS requirements list and a rating system, it will be easier to gain consensus and insert objectivity into the decision making process.

Demo with a Variety of Audiences

In addition to quantifying your decision factors, it’s always wise to run multiple HRMS software demos for your various internal audiences, to ensure that HRMS selection feedback can be received from different roles. For example, I know of a large company that only included high level HR and non-HR managers in the software sales cycle, and they were sold on the online dashboards and self-service functionality. However, they failed to grasp that their own company did not have the data behind the dashboards or the staffing available to collect and upkeep it. As you can imagine, they were terribly disappointed once implementation started and the team could not deliver what had previous clinched the decision. Had a broader audience been involved, this would have been caught much earlier in the sales cycle.