How your legacy HRMS is letting your employees down

From Wikipedia:

“…a legacy system is an old method, technology, computer system, or application program, "of, relating to, or being a previous or outdated computer system." Often a pejorative term, referencing a system as "legacy" … can also imply that the system is out of date or in need of replacement.”

Put like that, a legacy system sounds a potentially risky thing to hang onto. At the very least, an out-of-date HRMS may be holding your workforce back from performing at its optimum level.

1. Missing features

Newer systems offer more up to date functionality that can transform your HR services, including social media-enabled recruitment, online and gamified onboarding, biometric time and attendance systems, and hierarchy-busting social collaboration and communication methods in the workplace.

These might be HR-initiated or HR-driven but they have a direct impact on the efficiency and quality of people’s work in their day to day working lives. As such, a modern HRMS can directly impact on your organization’s business efficiency and competitive edge.

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2. Lack of integration opportunities

High up on the HRMS ‘trends lists’ of recent years is the potential to be found in systems with predictive HR analytics functions. New systems’ capabilities often include the generation truly strategic people-related insights that can be used to fine-tune your business plans and improve performance. However, in this era of Big Data, to really take full advantage of such functions, integration with other business systems – such as CRM and ERP – is essential to the creation of a large enough ‘data pool’. Older systems quite simply were not designed with this level of integration and data-crunching in mind.

3. Insufficient employee access to services

It’s safe to say that employee self-service is a standard HRMS component these days and is touted as one of the more obvious HRMS benefits in terms of direct individual access to information avoiding the need for time-consuming calls or visits to the HR team. A legacy system is likely to have a more limited employee self-service functionality; e.g. employees can update their personal details but not access their paycheck details online. Or they can view their paycheck but cannot research their benefits package or make their auto enrollment choices. In fact, depending on just how ‘legacy’ your legacy system is, it may be lacking ESS entirely.

4. Non-mobile systems

Finally, few people would come to work without their smartphone and most modern HRMS products come with a downloadable app – a significant and expected advantage in an increasingly connected world. Legacy systems are unlikely to offer mobile access and given that fewer and fewer people are working from the same location every day, the reliance on flexible anywhere, anytime access is only set to continue.