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Shared Services and Employee Engagement:
Goes Hand-in-Hand
www.infosys.com
Abstract
Every organization has concerns about employee engagement and takes all eforts to keep its employees engaged. One of the important
factors, which afect employee engagement, is the services provided by an employer to the employee. Most of the organizations fail
to provide better services and whole service experiences to their employees, which in turn hinders the best employee engagement. A
simple and efective solution, for this problem, is the adoption of technology based employee shared services (ESS), and automation of
processes and integration of data in the shared services. This point of view discusses the importance of information technology enabled
shared services in better engagement.
- Dr. Manish Godse, Dr. Indranil Roy Chowdhury
02 | Infosys
Employee engagement is always the topic of concern for organizations and employees. From an organizations viewpoint, it is
an organizational commitment whereas for an employee it is an emotional attachment and intellectual connect with employer,
manager, and co-workers. Research has shown that there are three components of engagement - cognitive commitment, emotional
attachment, and behaviour (Richmana, et al., 2008). These components affect an employees job satisfaction, stickiness, work-life
balance, work behaviour, and loyalty towards the firm. Eventually, the overall effect is reflected on the efficiency and productivity
of an employee, thus reducing the profitability of the organization. This also impacts the recruitment and retention of employees.
Therefore, organizations always look to have an effective solution that may keep employees engaged. While there may not be a
single solution for employee engagement but there are a bunch of strategies which organization can seek to implement.
Organizations have always wanted to keep employees engaged and this has been a burning issue for quite some time. Therefore,
lots of effort has been put to device and implement various strategies such as work-life policies, working hours, work flexibility, work
rewards, work place facilities, freebies, skill enhancement training, and social activities. However, it has never been 100% successful
because strategies taken by employers for employees didnt consider issues with employee engagement in their entirety.
Employee Engagement
Shared Services for Employees
Shared service is a strategic organization model for consolidation of common services and offering these services to the employees
through a central unit at organization level. Instance of such units are accounting, finance, human resources, security and facilities. These
units are known as shared service units, and services provided by units are called shared services. These services can be taxes on salary,
personal loans provided by firms to the employees, organization policies, compensations, medical facilities, identity card or bus service,
etc. Traditionally, units offer shared services at their unit level across the organization or sometimes within certain geography.
Employee engagement is usually considered as the function of human resources unit. However, this isnt true. Other shared units also
have some role in the employee engagement as these departments also offer employee specific services to the employees. How these
units serve their shared services to the employee and create service experience on behalf of organization derives its impact on employee
psychology thus affecting the employee engagement.
Adoption of shared services promises reduction in cost because of consolidation of data, processes and system at organization level. It
also helps to rationalize efforts required to serve employees. However, the accrued benefits are always viewed from an organizations
perspective while the benefits accrued to the employee are generally lost, affecting employee engagement.
Infosys | 03
Fulfil Employees Needs: Services offered by shared units are essential for employees to fulfil their personal and on the job needs.
Traditionally, these services are dealt at a human to human level. Although at a certain extent technology has been adopted for shared
service units to deliver services to employees but technology has been adopted for conducting generic activities such as capturing
and processing data, and providing voice support.
Services without Hurdles: Employee services look very simple to implement, and are important for the firm from an economic
perspective however, for an employee, these are very important for personal and professional needs. If employee faces several hurdles
in getting these services then it hampers their emotional attachment with the organization. A paradox to be noted here is that the
executives who serve these services are also employees.
Create Memorable Experience: The employer-to-employee services have to be provided such that employees are satisfied. However,
mostly employees are dissatisfied. The executives who provide the employee services need to be trained and made aware that they are
representing the organization. They have to be well informed that if better services are not provided then it will affect the employee
engagement. The experience, which they are creating by providing services to the employees, should be outstanding. However, these
experiences always vary among individuals, thereby, needing intervention to make these individual experiences as standardized as
possible.
Fewer Service Encounters: A service delivery may have multiple processes involving multiple units and executives from those units.
Therefore, employees may have to go through several service encounters for getting a single service and may have to meet many
executives. Many service encounters and multiple executives negatively affect the psyche of employee. It wastes employees time,
further reducing productivity.
Control on Negative Sentiment: A service if not provided properly to cater to employees needs might create bad service experience.
Next time, when employee desires to use the same service again, then she or he may use it very cautiously or may be reluctant to
use it. A negative word-of-mouth of the same service to other employees has negative impacts on employee engagement. Imagine
a situation where most of the services lead to poor experience for employees, it may create a huge negative sentiment in the entire
organization.
From the above discussion, it is clear that shared services and employee engagement goes hand-in-hand. Therefore, the service experience
created by shared services is important in employee engagement and needs proper attention of the organization. Although experiences
are personal, they have to be as standardized as possible and should have fewer service encounters.
Control on
Negative
Sentiment
Fulfl
Employees
Needs
Services
without
Hurdles
Create
Memorable
Experience
Fewer
Service
Encounters
Role of Shared
Services in
Employee
Engagement
Role of Shared Services in Employee Engagement
Shared services support employee engagement positively if implemented in right way. The shared services can help organization by
various ways (Figure 1) as explained in the following points.
Figure 1: How Shared Services Support Employee Engagement
No Uniform Service: Service delivery by human executives may not be standard always. For well-trained service executives, it may not
be possible to deliver the same experience every time. Hence, providing a uniform service remains a challenge. Better approach is to
enable service delivery with the information technology (IT).
Distributed Workforce across Geographies: As organization become global, its work force gets distributed across many parts of the
world. Firm has to work for 365 days and 24 hours. Distributed teams across various geographies have to work during odd hours to
fulfil the needs of customers. This increases the need for providing employee services on a continuous basis and it is possible only by
an active use of technology.
Need of Services beyond the Physical Boundaries: Work time flexibility and work from anywhere is on the rise. Thus, providing
services in physical presence by service executive is becoming unmanageable and costly. Thus, technology is the only solution to push
services beyond the physical boundaries of office premises.
Talent Pool with Multiple Generations: Techno-reluctant (X-Gen), techno-adopter (Y-Gen) and techno-savvy (Z-Gen) generations
are becoming part of the global talent pool. In majority of the organizations, the percentage of Y-gen and Z-gen is on the rise, thus
adoption of technology is the de-facto need for providing better shared services and delivery experience.
Poor Service Experience: Technology has a bigger role in creating a whole experience of service delivery. Internet, mobile computing
and cloud computing has made it possible to deliver services throughout the year and on any kind of device. Therefore, access to
service, easiness in using and on-time delivery can be increased. Technology can and has improved service experience and enhanced
employee engagement. New technologies have also made it possible to connect heterogeneous systems seamlessly creating simplified
data flow and data integration. This has helped in better decision making through data analytics and automation of decision as well
as processes. Predictive analytics are also supporting to delight employees by providing better recommendation while using services.
The major advantage is that it is reducing dependency on human executives for getting the service. Thus, fluctuations in delivery of
services can be controlled.
Problem of Multiple Units and Multiple Processes: Sometime, it is possible that single service will have multiple processes, which
may be distributed across several units. Thus, this is multi-unit-multi-process problem. While using such a service an employee may
encounter multiple service points or in other words, employee may have to visit the executives multiple times if services are offered
physically. This problem can be overcome by adopting technology to deliver the services. By adopting technology, employees can
raise their request for service from their desk using computers or mobiles. They can check status and receive notification on their
machines. In short, employees can do anything and everything that is required to get the service from employer from their desk rather
than meeting in person to service executives.
In all above situations, technology adoption is easing out the hurdles in providing better services to employee by employer therefore
impacting positively on employee engagement.
Adopting Technology for Improved Engagement
It is essential to adopt the technology for various reasons (Figure 2) as explained in the following points.
Figure 2: Reasons for Adoption of Technology
04 | Infosys
Problem of Multiple Units
and Multiple Processes
No Uniform Service
Center
Poor Service
Experience
Distributed Workforce
across Geographies
Talent Pool of Gen-X,
Gen-Y and Gen-Z
Need of Services beyond
the Physical Boundaries
Why to
adopt
technology?
Infosys | 05
Single ERP Solution: Most of the organizations have adopted the ERP (Enterprise Resources Planning) solutions across the organization
having various functionalities of several units. However, implementer needs to understand that the ERP solutions are designed and
developed to meet the organization goals, and not the employees requirements. Thus, these systems mostly fail to provide necessary
services to employees.
Multiple Unit Specific Solutions: Some of the organizations have developed their own IT solutions to provide shared services while
others have purchased off- the-shelf solutions from the market. These solutions are mainly focused to provide certain functionalities
of the shared services. For example- HR unit may have single or multiple solutions to meet their shared services requirements while
Finance has their own systems. In majority of the cases, solutions are standalone or integrated partially if the same vendor provides
those.
In some cases, both, ERP and unit specific solutions are used. In brief, there may be multiple systems providing various shared services
required for the employees.
Effects of Poor Integration of Systems: Due to poor integration of systems across the organization, there is effect on the shared service
and its whole experience to the employees. The impacts of poor integration (Figure 3) are as following.
Shifting among
multiple systems
by employees
Duplicate and
not updated
records
Broken and
unmanageable
processes
Frequent
manual
interventions
Multiple
service
encounters
Efects of
poor
integration
Integration of Employee Shared Services for Better Engagement
We know that information technology is necessary for providing better shared services; however, if technology is not adopted appropriately
then it may not be possible to create the necessary impact on employee experience. While adopting technological solutions, organizations
are using single ERP solution across organization or implementing multiple unit specific solutions.
Figure 3: Effects of Poor Integration
The data fow may not be smooth across multiple systems thus there may
be duplication of records and data may not be update.
Processes may be broken and unmanageable.
Frequent interventions of support executives may be required.
Overall eect may be having multiple service encounters in single service.
Because of multiple standalone solutions of shared services, employees
have to keep shifting among these systems to get served.
This reduces the overall experience by the organization to the employees. Therefore, when organizations are looking for the IT as a solution
to provide better service experience, it is necessary to implement the right strategy and the solution. For this problem shared services, it is
necessary to have consolidated and integrated view of systems, which is very employee specific.
Infosys can provide state of art consulting for consolidation and integration of shared services from various shared services units.
Consulting will include:
Defining context and experience required for employee shared services
Design & develop UI from human centric perspective
Standardization and automation of processes, and alignment of processes to meet user expectations and organization strategy
Define workflows across heterogeneous units and systems
Develop self-help and necessary knowledge base
Infosys has capability to develop a customized platform to deliver whole service experience and better employee engagement. The
platform will have Learning Capabilities, Personalization, Predictive Analytics, User Preferences, Dash-board, Intelligent-Search, Feedback
Mechanism, and Delivery across Various Devices.
Infosys has successfully implemented customized platform to provide employee specific shared services to its employees.
Consolidated and Integrated Employee Specific Shared Services Platform
We advise to use a single consolidated and integrated view of shared services (Figure 4). It is a one stop solution for the employees to get
served from employer. It is the combination of business logic layer and user interface layer, which consolidate and integrate employee
services from necessary units and serves through a sole platform. For an employee, it is a single solution offering various services and great
user experience while on the backend it is the seamless integration of heterogeneous solutions. All the processes, which may be cutting
across various units, have to be managed well so that employee can experience it as a single process rather than as a combination of
multiple processes. This platform should have a single login. Data flow across the systems has to be smooth so that employee doesnt have
to fill or update same data in the multiple systems. This platform has to be designed such that employees can serve themselves without
requiring any physical support of executive. Work flows and processes across multiple systems need to be automated and well managed
so that manual intervention of executive can be eliminated and employee waiting time can be reduced.
Figure 4: Integrated View of Shared Services
06 | Infosys
Consolidation and Integration of Employee Specifc
Shared Services Platform
Finance &
Accounting
Facilities
Human
Resources
Information
Technology
Employees
Infosys | 07
Conclusion
Organizations have implemented employee shared services mainly to cut the expenditure, and forgotten the importance of it in the
personal and professional work of an employee. The inappropriate implementation of employee shared services creates bad experience
of services, thus it reduces emotional attachment of an employee with the frm. This negatively impacts employee engagement. Therefore,
for organizations it is essential to use employee shared services as one of the strategy for employee engagement. This new strategy would
not be successful if appropriate technology is not used.
Considering the dynamics of business and employee needs, shared services has to be enabled with information technology. However, in
most of the cases, IT enabled shared services have not leveraged up to the full extent because implementation is unit or solution specifc.
Thus, it creates heterogeneous systems and processes across the board of shared services. In such a situation, employee has to use several
IT systems of shared units to get their work done. Situation worsens when service dependents upon is This hampers employee efciency
and satisfaction. Hence, it is necessary to have a single integrated view of shared services as a front view and while backend should provide
a seamless integration of necessary systems.
References
Richmana, A. L., Civiana, J. T., Shannona, L. L., Jefrey Hillb, E., and Brennan, R. T. (2008). Robert T. The relationship of perceived fexibility,
supportive worklife policies, and use of formal fexible arrangements and occasional fexibility to employee engagement and expected
retention. Community, Work & Family, 11( 2), pp. 183-197
2013 Infosys Limited, Bangalore, India. All Rights Reserved. Infosys believes the information in this document is accurate as of its publication date; such information is subject to change without notice.
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Dr. Manish Godse
Manish is currently working as Research Analyst at Centre of Innovation for Tomorrows Enterprise in Infosys Labs.
He has wide experience as entrepreneur and leader across an industry. He has extensively worked in consulting
and product development in multiple domains and emerging technologies. His currents focus areas of thought
leadership are Smarter Organizations, Innovation Management, and IT Strategy. He holds Ph.D. in Management
from SJM School of Management, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.
Dr. Indranil Roy Chowdhury
Indranil is currently a Senior Research Associate with the Institute of Smarter Organizations in Infosys Labs. He is
a Fellow in Management (Ph.D) from XLRI, Jamshedpur. He has also been a Ph.D. Scholar at the Judge Business
School, University of Cambridge. He did his Bachelors in Engineering from VTU, Karnataka. Previously he has
worked with organizations like Microsoft Research Lab and ICRA (Moodys India). His main interests of research
are in the area of Technology in Services and Social Media. The broad area of his work includes designing Services
where human beings constantly interact with technology in some form or the other.
About the Authors