People Management: The Missing Link

Posted on February 6, 2020 by Jonathan Kidd

People managers are unsung heroes. They often have to influence decisions, drive favourable outcomes and manage several factors to ensure key appointments are made and the organisation functions optimally. They are essentially the backbone of the operation. But people management is not as straightforward as it seems given the lack of digital transformation and a scattered operational view. In this blog, we take you through three key ways people managers stand to benefit from using a Business Process Management (BPM) solution.

Accountability and Transparency

Accountability is perhaps one of the most overlooked aspects of human resource management. With the sheer number of requests being fulfilled and their ad-hoc nature, keeping track of these tasks and accounting for the work that goes behind them is crucial in understanding efficiency. Moreover, people managers are not aware of the tasks handled by individual team members at a given time. In other words, they suffer from a lack of transparency and are unable to assign or collaborate with team members to close an allocated task.

A BPM solution helps people managers in many ways. With a comprehensive BPM tool, they can keep track of requests as they come in. Even in the case of more complex tasks, people managers have complete transparency on what each of their team members is working on and where bottlenecks or obstacles are. Essentially, each task is accounted for and the manager can delegate and collaborate on tasks based on availability and employee skill sets.  

Operational structure

The importance of operational structure cannot be overlooked. One of the most pressing challenges that people managers face is aligning their daily functions with the organisation’s Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). More often than not, most human resource functions are reserved to an on-paper approach and are not integrated into the digital nature of the present-day workspace. This not only allows a lot of details seeping through the cracks but can also result in a loss of efficiency due to improvisation.

A BPM, without a doubt, helps add some much-needed structure to these processes. Each process is aligned with organisational SOPs and has a clear path laid out. Adherence also becomes easy to enforce as each step in the process is mapped out with checklists, approvals, and proofs of completion. Variations are also accounted for and alternative steps are put in place to avoid the need to improvise.

Communication

Be it customer on-boarding, employee success, resource management, organisational management, or any other variation that involves people management, communicating with the end customer or stakeholder is vital. A lack of communication can result in instability, mismanagement of expectations, and can cause conflicts. Stated along with points #1 and #2, the need of the hour is to have a system that allows various stakeholders to communicate with each other and derive favourable results.

This is exactly what a BPM brings to the table. A comprehensive BPM lets stakeholders come together to drive service requests to completion. The end customer is provided with a glass pane view of their service request and is kept informed with periodical status updates as their requests flow from one step to the next. At this stage, an effective BPM solution also ensures contextual communication between collaborators and end customers through detailed checklists, custom forms, and proof of completion at every step.

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