What were the main challenges you wanted to solve with an HR system?

When I started as a new HR manager at Uddevallahem, I spent quite a lot of time talking to all managers, safety representatives, trade unions, and other people in the company to understand the current situation, challenges, and opportunities for development.

It became clear that we had challenges linked to the follow-up of statutory certificates and training, clarity, and knowledge of job descriptions, and employee development in the form of various conversations and clear management of objectives.

In what way has Heartpace helped to overcome these?

Compared to other HR systems on the market, I found that Heartpace had features that could help us digitialize and professionalize all the parts I was interested in developing. Each employee now has a clear personal profile where job descriptions, mandates, and responsibilities are shown.

We can also follow the status of our time-limited statutory training and certificates very simply and receive reminders when it is time to renew. Through the interview module, we create uniformity in the organization so that all employees have the same conditions for well-prepared and qualitative interviews regardless of their manager.

Goal management has also taken several steps forward, despite being a slower (more difficult) change process that is still ongoing.

What are your next steps?

We are actively working on developing our HR system, and now several things are going on in parallel.

After launch, we connected the HRM module, where all employee data are now collected and stored in one place. We can produce reports and analyses regarding e.g. age distribution, staff turnover, length of employment, etc. What remains there is the integration with our payroll system and our AD. With that, we will be able to use Heartpace as our system for master data, where all employment begins and ends. Additionally, we will have an integration with Scrive to be able to handle employment contracts and signing in Heartpace in the future.

We have also added the Onboarding module for handling all our on- and off-boardings. Currently, we are working on building processes for different types of pre-, on-, re-, and offboarding. It will professionalize the employee experience in important stages of employment, which is what start-up and termination actually are, and provide good support to managers and support functions in what needs to be done in connection with these processes.

Recently, we have conducted our first employee survey through Heartpace’s Employee KPI survey for sustainable work life. We are very pleased with both the user-friendliness, content, and focus of the survey and the feedback on the results included in the service. In the future, we will look at connecting the Pulse module for more regular follow-up of certain KPIs – on parts of the business or for the entire company.

Which three tips would you want to share with other companies starting their HR digitalization journeys?

1. Proper analysis of actual needs
Do not buy an HR system because it is trendy or a colleague in the industry recommends it. Instead, make a proper analysis of what the business actually needs now and in the long term, and make decisions based on that. Preferably in collaboration with several internal stakeholders for the sake of anchoring.

2. Prioritize the preparatory work
If time and resources are available – prioritize the preparatory work before a system is launched. Minimize the first thresholds by building the system as well as possible for the users so that they get a direct feeling of what the system can give them and how it can facilitate them. That being said, not all features need to be in place right away – on the contrary, I believe in releasing a well-developed narrow version in the first release and working up module after module thereafter.

3. Slow and respectful change management
Move slowly and respect that change processes and digitalization are difficult and challenging for many. Since it is more about behavioral changes than you might first think, it requires safe change management, a lot of dialogue, and long-term patience. Be kind to yourselves!