4 reasons why employee feedback should be the basis of your HRMS strategy

Your HRMS can provide the foundation for HR to succeed, but only if it reflects how people actually work and interact with it day to day. With a smorgasbord of features, you have many stakeholders and viewpoints. One crucial yet often overlooked source of intelligence is your employees themselves.

Structured feedback mechanisms in the workplace turn those everyday experiences into data you can use.

1) Employees are our internal Customers

Historically, an HRMS has always been ‘HR’s territory’ but as manager and employee self-service functionality is released, we need recognize that our employees are internal customers and consumers of data. Not only do we need to solicit employee feedback on the look and feel of the HRMS, but as well we need to be proactive in finding out their future wishes and expectations from the HRMS.

Recommended download: HRMS Self-Service - 6 Steps to Success

This means putting simple feedback mechanisms in place – for example, quick in‑app polls, short usability surveys after key tasks, or feedback prompts in self-service workflows – so you have an ongoing view of what works and what does not. Your HRMS needs to be user-friendly as well as focused on value-added transactions, this will help you to define your HRMS strategy appropriately.

2) System design should be informed by employee feedback

Have you ever seen an HRMS where the processes and configuration are done in a bubble, often by outside implementation consultants with no understanding of the business or operational HR?

While implementation consultants bring a wealth of knowledge and experience, we need to ensure that employee feedback is involved in the various phases of design to make sure that the implementation is taking into account the impact on employees and long-term needs.

This means building employee input into design workshops, user testing sessions and pilot phases, then closing the loop by showing how that feedback has shaped configuration decisions. When HR treats employee feedback channels as a core design input rather than a nice‑to‑have, the resulting HRMS is more intuitive, better aligned to real workflows and easier to adopt.

3) Employee feedback provides a foundation for the future state of your HRMS

Often HR professionals and others in the HR business such as consultants can get into a rut when thinking about the HRMS. We do what we’ve always done because that’s what we know. However, an employee can look at your HRMS with fresh eyes and, rather than seeing the current state can help you to define the future HRMS strategy by providing ‘outsider’ ideas.

Feedback mechanisms like pulse surveys on new features and focus groups with power users help you spot patterns in frustration and wish‑lists that can feed directly into your HRMS roadmap. Over time, they create a living backlog of improvements, so your HRMS strategy is guided by evidence rather than assumptions.

4) Ignoring employee feedback leads to workarounds and low system adoption

Not for the faint of heart, but an honest employee or manager can provide brutal, vital feedback which will allow you to shape a successful HRMS strategy. By asking an employee, "how would you change an address or W-2 withholding?" or asking a manager "where would you go to find out an employee’s grade?" you may get some startling answers. I once saw a supreme shadow HRMS implemented by a business group.

As the corporate office was slow to address and incorporate requests, the group went off and built their own HRMS! This type of situation is then difficult to dismantle, never mind the costs involved. If your employees aren’t using your HRMS as their source of data, you need this feedback to guide strategic HRMS decisions.