2003 was a year of change for the Laboratory's Human Resources (HR) Division.
Laboratory employees began seeing improvements in HR services last year as the division continued its transition to a new "service-delivery model" for employee and management services, said Judy Ackerhalt, acting HR Division leader. Improvements will continue this year as more facets are added to the model, she said.
The division's efforts support the Director's Performance Improvement Program, an initiative designed to improve the delivery of services at the Laboratory.
"Incorporating a new service-delivery model will enable us to meet two specific, long-term division goals," said Ackerhalt. "Our first goal is to radically improve our effectiveness and efficiency in processing HR transactions. Second, we are striving to provide a broader range of strategic, customized HR services to our customers."
The division intends to meet its goals through a three pronged approach: creating a customer-focused HR Service Center; making more strategic use of deployed HR generalists; and having corporate HR functions such as compensation, training and development, staff relations and workforce data analysis focus on the development of institution-wide programs and policies.
One component of the Service Center is the Benefits Service Center. The Benefits Service Center, part of Benefits and Employment Services (HR-B), has gone through significant change, including dramatically increasing access to benefits representatives. Now, customers have a direct connection to benefits representatives by calling 7-1806, where previously, all traffic was funneled through a two-person front desk. The new system has seen great improvement to direct customer access, said Chris Binns, a team leader in HR-B. In 2002, about one to two out of 10 people who called the benefits office spoke to someone on their first attempt. Most callers went to voice mail. In 2003, seven to eight out of 10 customers spoke to someone on their first attempt to contact the office, Binns said. While HR-B will continue to improve its access, the new model has improved customer service without adding additional staff, he added.
The other component of the HR Service Center, 4myhr (pronounced "for my HR"), will allow transactional work – such as hiring new people, changing salaries or job classifications for employees or determining classifications for new positions – to be performed at a one-stop service center. Managers can use 4myhr to take care of routine tasks that might normally be done by an HR generalist in the field. At this time, the division has dedicated six full-time employees to the center, which is located near the HR Division Office on the second floor of the Otowi Building in Technical Area 3.
4myhr started as a pilot program for the Strategic Research (ADSR) and Threat Reduction (ADTR) directorates at the Laboratory. The remaining directorates, and five additional 4myhr staff to support them, will be phased in over the next three to four months. "HR will continue to update and improve processes as the transition continues, and will identify additional services 4myhr can provide in order to better meet customer needs," said Diane Kean of Staffing (HR-S), team leader for 4myhr.
Technology will be used within the HR Service Center to improve case management support, to provide real time HR transaction updates to deployed HR staff and later to customer organizations and to continually improve the support provided by the HR Service Center.
The implementation of the new 4myhr Service Center allows HR Division to become more customer focused and service oriented in other ways as well, said Ackerhalt.
"HR generalists deployed to individual organizations are beginning to transition to becoming 'strategic business partners' within their respective organizations," Ackerhalt said. In other words, since deployed generalists no longer will be working on routine transactions – transactions that can be taken care of through 4myhr – the generalists can work with managers on strategic initiatives, such as organizational strategic planning, setting and accomplishing long-term hiring and staff-retention goals, or reducing employee attrition if it is an issue within an organization. Recently, a pilot group of 16 HR professionals completed a 24-week intensive development program in support of this effort. A similar program will be offered again this year.
The division's third improvement initiative calls for re-creating "corporate" HR groups. These groups will act in an overarching, strategic capacity to plan and develop HR strategies and institutional programs for the Lab as a whole. For example, Compensation (HR-C) has started working with some divisions to update their job classification and compensation plans to meet the challenge of strategic recruitment and retention issues that are fundamental to the future success of the Laboratory.
"HR Division already has received positive feedback on many of our new initiatives," Ackerhalt said. "The changes people have seen in the past year put us on the right track. We will continue to solicit feedback from our customers in order to build on our successes in refining HR processes that support customer needs and are in line with other world-class businesses and organizations."