HR departments are increasingly favouring a shared services approach for transactional work.

According to global HR services outfit, Hewitt Associates, HR Shared Service Centres (SSCs) already in place are in a growth phase, with 84 per cent of organisations that use them having plans to extend their scope in the near future, both in terms of activities performed (payroll, benefits administration, HR Information Services etc) and internal clients served.

The success of the HR SSCs offering, said Hewitt, is finally freeing HR from the administrative burden giving HR more time to focus on strategic matters, yet this has given way to an ‘us-versus-them’ culture with HR often viewing administrative tasks as no longer their business. A mindset, said Hewitt, that hinders the realisation of efficient processes and related cost savings.

Iain Slater, UK & Ireland practice leader, human resource effectiveness at Hewitt Associates, said: “For years HR has been preoccupied with trying to put its house in order or dealing with criticisms of past performance. This has come at the cost of preparing for important issues or building a closer relationship with the business. By ensuring that routine HR activities are carried out in an efficient and effective way by SSCs, an organisation’s HR function can service the business much more effectively.”

The findings reveal that there is a renewed focus on customer satisfaction. The top priority of those polled was to improve end-user satisfaction (78 per cent), with cost reduction as a secondary priority (70 per cent).

Also, 40 per cent of respondents confirmed that they do not currently use customer satisfaction indicators to measure performance. Just under a third of the respondents were dissatisfied with the management information available to measure performance.