When you created your HRIS, who did you consult? Your HR team, vendors, consultants, possibly the IT team and senior management as well? What about the people who will actually be using the system?

In designing an HRIS who better to ask than the people that will be using the system. That's exactly what REA Group did as part of their effort to give their own people the same superior experiences they were delivering to their customers.

Watch this video below from HR Tech Fest 2016 as Barb Hyman, EGM People and Culture at REA Group, reveals why User Centred Design Thinking was a key element in understanding what their HRIS should look like.

Transcript

We went back to user-centred design, and it just presents a really simple formula, because there's nothing too complicated, in how you understand what makes your people tick. You have to talk to them, you have to understand them, you have to listen to them, and it involves going out there and seeking to discover what they think. For instance, HRIS, we don't have an HRIS; we're a company of 1,500 and we don't have one. Would you believe? We also don't have an ATS. It's one of those things that you imagine when you join a digital tech company that all the technology in HR will measure up with what you offer to your consumers, but it wasn't quite like that.

We started the process of saying, “What's going to work?â€' These are very expensive systems and they have enormous potential to help you really develop talent, to move talent around and to grow talent, which is critical for us, because talent is the number one thing that's going to enable us to succeed and it's the scarcest resource out there.

So for our HRIS we went and ran discovery workshops and we did this with the people who do UX design for our consumer sites, so we partnered with people in their business who were really expert in design-led thinking, and we went out and we asked them to write on Post-It notes what they felt about the current system.

We went through that process over a series of weeks, and what that did, apart from giving us really critical information about what kind of system we needed to solve what problems, it also created trust and connection and a partnership, so that already we have 50-60 people just in Melbourne alone who feel really connected and invested in where we end up on our system, so they're our ambassadors if you like for that system. Because any HRIS is not for us in HR at all, it's actually for our people, and if we can't get them to use it and be the ones to embrace it and look at it on their mobile, then it actually isn't going to serve its purpose.

About the Speaker

Barb Hyman leads people and culture for REA Group in Australia, Europe and Asia.  With more than 20 years' experience working in business strategy, Barb brings a highly innovative approach to leading organisational change, shaping culture and driving business results in fast-paced, highly collaborative organisational environments.  Barb works closely with senior management and her peers to attract and develop top talent, and to create an environment where everyone can perform at their best.