“Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression,” wrote the author Cynthia Ozick.
In HR tech, this couldn’t ring truer.
Roughly nine out of ten (87%) of the 524 U.S. business leaders 3Sixty Insights recently surveyed are chronically underserved and underwhelmed by their HCM platforms. This is not just due to technology but also to expertise, adoption, support, and inadequate implementation.
Problems aside, there’s a way out of this. Time and time again, it has been made clear that collaborating with a provider can enhance the success, usability, and implementation of an HCM system, helping organizations maximize their benefits. The key is understanding where the faults in your strategy lie and how to fix them.
A Faulty Premise
When it comes to implementing new technology, there’s a simple belief that a ready-to-use HCM solution can be easily set up and understood by the team on their own.
In 3Sixty’s survey data, we found that the C-suite, who are often the ones writing the checks to pay for implementations, valued a dedicated implementation team the least (38%). At the other end of the spectrum, managers—who feel the full effects of a bad implementation in the form of time and stress—ranked it the highest (62%).
The unfortunate reality is that the people who want a strong implementation are not the ones buying it, and the ones experiencing it often have no seat at the table. The pitfalls of the conceptually adjacent build-over-buy mindset cause troubleshooting friction that falls on already-stretched internal teams and leave SMBs with a system that was never properly configured to reflect how the business actually operates.
Not only does this make for a poor experience and a lackluster first impression of a new platform, but it leaves managers who likely work in the system daily with a bad taste in their mouths and skepticism for what’s to come next.
Ultimately, the end result is what our survey found: only one in three (37%) respondents say their systems do what they were intended to do, making the line from implementation quality to utilization to retention impossible to ignore.
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