Traditionally an outsourcer of HR activities, the decision to bring it under its own control was a bold move for BT who decided this was the only way it could obtain a stronger hold over employee issues; read on to find out if it was a success.

BT Group is one of Europe’s leading providers of telecommunications services. Its principal activities include telecommunications services, internet products, services and IT solutions. In the UK, BT serves over 20 million customers with more than 29 million exchange lines. The company employs 100,000 people worldwide; around 85,000 are UK based.
The challenge:
The sheer size of the BT organisation means that recruiting and managing people is a mammoth task, so BT had traditionally outsourced its human resources (HR) activities. This meant that BT did not have control over HR-related management information.

If it wanted to delve deeper into staff statistics, to identify trends, spot inefficiencies, or keep a closer check on salary and training spending, it had to approach the external agency to produce reports on its behalf. This was not only time consuming, but also very expensive.

As Sam Hill, BT Group’s Head of Human Capital Management and Reporting, explained: “If I wanted a report, the agency would charge BT; if someone else then wanted the same report, we would be charged again. Not only was this expensive, the standard lead time for a basic report was three days – by then, in many cases, the need for the report had time expired”.

The solution:
When the outsourcing contract came up for renewal, BT decided it was time to bring many HR functions back under central control. The group could then rein in costs and have greater, faster visibility of its HR activities. It also allowed the company to identify new opportunities to improve efficiency.

As part of this initiative, the delivery of Human Capital analysis and Reporting was brought back in house.

A higher aim was to make the HR function more strategic in focus. This meant finding more efficient ways of managing mundane activities such as reminding staff how much holiday they had remaining, or when major company events were due to take place.

Hill commented: “Our goal was to take HR up the value chain, so that, rather than being just an overhead for the organisation, it became more proactive; helping to define BT’s business strategy and the resources we will need if we are to fulfil the company’s vision for the future.”

This would allow BT to start building appropriate recruitment and retention plans, to ensure the business had the right combination of skills that would allow it to capitalise on future business opportunities as they arose.

“We also wanted to be able to take our HR people higher up the value chain, so they were not involved in day-to-day transactions. We sought to do this by empowering employees to answer these questions for themselves.

“Our vision is to have one touch HR for 90% of the department’s activities. There will always be situations where people need consultancy or advice, but for many other transactions it’s more efficient for everyone if employees and their managers can be more self-sufficient.”

This, in turn, would free up time for HR planning on a more long-term, strategic level, through the harnessing of critical management information from the centralised BT, HR system.

Sam Hill belongs to a small, virtual team of business and IT experts that support the HR function across the BT group. There are two areas of focus – to develop management information systems (MIS), and to match the capabilities of BT’s HR software systems to the requirements of the business.

With the HR function back in-house, BT selected a software package as its core HR application and intranet portal that would give employees access to their own personal HR records as well as general HR related information.

“Our role was to establish customer requirements and to implement the system – develop it, test it and roll out the functionality,” Hill explained. It was at this point that Hill and the Head of HR Systems Gavin Meyer brought in a package to help turn employee data into management information; and to elevate the HR function’s contribution to the business.

The company’s HR, IT team knew they needed a robust reporting environment that would be not only extremely powerful and flexible, but also very easy to use to ensure maximum take-up and optimum payback.

“We began by building standard reports to enable HR Professionals and Operational managers to extract key information quickly and easily,” Hill remarked. “This was the exciting thing for us – our customers could instantly generate easily understood reports. In the most recent month over 4,000 of these reports were produced by our customers – and that volume is rising each period.”

The Benefits:
There is a combination of point in time and defined period reports – these can be run as people listings or in summary form, supported by graphical presentation. These can be generated whenever they are needed.

The software’s reporting functionality is available to around 14,000 BT supervising managers, plus a further 600 HR and business analysts who need access to in-depth and wide ranging reports. Feedback on the programme, which went live at the beginning of August, has surpassed all expectations.

“The reaction has been fantastic. People can go onto the web, click a few buttons and have the report produced for them instantly – this is very exciting. Our customers think it’s an excellent solution – one they’ve never had before.

“In the past, they’d wait up to three days for a basic report. Now, they can run the report, download it, incorporate it into another report if required, or analyse the information further. People are enthusiastic – they now feel empowered.”

He emphasised that usability was crucial: “We wanted to avoid the necessity to develop and run training courses – we wanted people to be able to go into a system and find an intuitive route to their desired output. And that’s exactly what we’ve got.”

As well as enabling BT to fulfil its higher HR goals, the software’s sophisticated yet easy to use reporting capabilities have contributed directly to the bottom line. “Since each report previously would have incurred a charge, we can demonstrate a cost saving of over £100,000 per month.

“Not to mention the fact that the reports are now available immediately and are right first time, saving on the often additional costs of having to produce a second or third report. I would expect the whole solution to pay for itself within 15 months. Everything from that point on is pure saving.”

Managers’ job satisfaction has increased too, now that they can generate customised reports rapidly without having to ask someone else to do it. “Now they’ve got information they didn’t have before,” said Hill. “This gives them more control over their area of work, their sphere of influence.”