Software helps HR staff at Bruce Power spend more time being strategic and less time answering routine questions from employees
The phones in the HR department at Bruce Power have quieted down quite a bit.
And that’s not because of a reduction in staff. In fact, the independently owned nuclear power plant in Kincardine, Ont., has been on a hiring binge, adding nearly 600 new staff since mid-2000 to bring its total workforce to 3,600 as it powers up two more reactors.
Nor are tyrannical policies that forbid employees from picking up the phone and calling HR when they have a question about things like compensation and benefits the culprit.
Tony Sheard, the HR manager for process improvement at Bruce Power, can point to a nifty little software package that allows employees to pose questions, in plain English, online. The answers are then retrieved from a knowledge engine, which is a database of cases and solutions the HR department has put together.
The software that powers the system, known as IQ, was built by Kana, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based software developer. Sheard said Bruce Power was approached by Kana about installing the software, and though he was skeptical at first he decided to take the plunge because it fit well with the employee self service model HR was pursuing.
Bruce Power uses SAP for its human resource management system and had gone down the self service road for minor transactional tasks, including things like online pay stubs.
“That went very well, but we found we were stuck in minor questions that were taking a lot of our time,” said Sheard. “We had traditional Web sites with hotlinks, but even with all that we still had (employees) who wanted to ring up a hot body.”
And because Bruce Power has workers on a variety of shifts, there wasn’t always somebody available in the HR department. But deciding to implement Kana’s standalone software was just the first step in weaning employees from the impulse to want to speak live to HR. Populating the system with the appropriate information for Bruce Power employees was the next.
“We took some of the older (managers) — the ones with more experience and greyer hair — and we asked them what sort of questions do you get on a routine basis and let’s have a look at them,” said Sheard. “From that we constructed cases and solutions to address those questions.”
It was a tough process because Bruce Power had to consider a wide variety of factors that were often difficult to measure. For example, the fact the system allowed employees to enter questions in plain English meant different employees looking for the same answer could pose questions in a myriad of ways. And they didn’t want employees to be presented with a ton of responses when a question was posed to the system either.
“So we set a goal that we would have less than 10 and ideally no more than five answers for whatever question you might ask,” he said. “We didn’t want people to get frustrated. We were trying to make it so that nobody was more than four clicks away from that answer.”
Sheard said there’s a real danger of turning off an employee if the answer isn’t readily available through the system.
“If people don’t find the answer quickly, they turn off and have a negative attitude about a lot of things, such as the company, HR and the process,” said Sheard.
There is very little HR-related information that is not available to staff through the Kana software.
“We had a big debate about what you’d put on the knowledge engine,” said Sheard. “But when we got down to it, there’s very little information that you don’t want everyone to have access to anyway. It’s not private information and very little of it was of such a confidential nature that you couldn’t throw it out to anybody.”
It took about three months start-to-finish to setup the system, and adding more information to the knowledge base is an ongoing process.
What questions are employees asking?
The company has put about 500 solutions on the system since it was launched in November 2002. The questions being posed by employees vary but at certain times of year some issues are more prevalent.
When the annual pension statement came out for employees, for example, Sheard said there was a spike in questions about beneficiaries. When summer time rolls around, there tends to be an influx of vacation-related queries.
“We try to predict a little bit what some of those questions might be,” said Sheard. “If we know something might become topical, we try and make sure we have addressed that by thinking ahead.”
If employees can’t find the answer they’re looking for they have the option of escalating the request to the HR department. They can send an e-mail to the HR help desk and will get a response back within 48 hours.
Once that is done, HR will go into the system and find why it didn’t provide the answer the employee was looking for and then update it with the information so the next employee will be able to find it.
“It’s a bit like a smoke signal of what is happening in our business,” said Sheard. “It connects more senior people in HR to the front-line people.”
When the system was first installed, Sheard said there were “hundreds” of escalations per day. That number has been reduced to about three or four now on a bad day. In terms of activity, he said there are about 200 to 250 cases being looked at each day by staff — a figure he finds interesting because the HR department never fielded that many calls per day from employees.
“Where did they go before for the answers? Either they went unfulfilled or they were bothering somebody else or the HR supervisors or whatever,” said Sheard.
Getting staff buy-in
There was some initial resistance among staff to using the system. When the implementation was in the early phases, Bruce Power ran a workshop with staff picked at random to gauge reaction to the philosophy behind this type of self service.
There were a few staff members who were adamant that they wanted to be able to pick up the phone and call HR and didn’t want to go through a computer to get answers. Sheard said there was one in particular who was extremely resistant to the idea.
“He was probably the most difficult person that we could have found,” he said. “He couldn’t sense why we were doing this sort of thing. But that’s probably one of our greatest successes because (once he used the site) he said he found it great and said it was really helpful.”
There was no huge announcement made to staff when the system was rolled out, primarily because Sheard wanted to ensure the system worked well before HR started bragging about it too much.
“What you don’t want is to make a big hoo-ha about it and find out it doesn’t work,” said Sheard. “We did a quiet rollout and then followed that by some articles in our employee newspaper.”
Employees access IQ through the company’s intranet site. There is an HR button on the home page that takes users straight to the system. Sheard said there was a lot of debates on how this page should be presented. In the end a simple, straightforward design won out.
“It has a few typical hot links, but the main part of it is just basically a box where you type your question in with a few supplementary questions if you want to answer them,” he said.
If an employee knows the information is in benefits, she could click on benefits and type the question. But the downside is that some people won’t know how HR has decided to categorize different items and for that reason users are given the ability to search without picking a category.
The cost factor
Kana issued an eye-popping press release when the system was up and running that said it was saving Bruce Power $10 million per year with the system.
But Sheard called that number a “truism” and said there really isn’t a savings to be had that is visible on the bottom line. That figure makes the assumption the system saves every employee 10 minutes every day, he said.
“But you’ve only saved that money if you’ve kicked people out the door by doing so,” said Sheard. “In terms of a hard-cash saving that goes to the bottom line, I can’t say that. If you did a pure calculation you could potentially say that, but only if you reduce your head count by X or you don’t recruit by X.”
Neither Kana nor Bruce Power would comment on how much the implementation cost, but a spokesperson for Kana said pricing for IQ starts at about $335,000.
But while Sheard can’t point to a direct bottom-line savings, the system has allowed the HR department to divert time and effort to tasks and higher priority work. An example of this comes in the massive recruiting that Bruce Power has done since it transformed into a private-sector firm. It was able to take HR staff who were tied up answering questions from employees and divert their energy into recruiting. And it has allowed HR to spend more time thinking strategically.
“We’ve had a bigger involvement in the organization,” said Sheard. “We’re doing a lot of change management type issues in helping them come to terms with the different environment that Bruce found itself in.”
Sheard said he’s now looking at putting more sensitive information on the system so that managers can access more information through the software.
“Quite often senior people are equally challenged in finding information, so we’re looking for a better way to provide leadership and HR guidance,” he said. “We’re embarking in putting this information in a day-to-day knowledge repository.”
The system has caught the attention of other departments at Bruce that are looking to emulate what HR has done. There is discussion about putting health and safety information up in the same manner as the HR information.
And that’s not because of a reduction in staff. In fact, the independently owned nuclear power plant in Kincardine, Ont., has been on a hiring binge, adding nearly 600 new staff since mid-2000 to bring its total workforce to 3,600 as it powers up two more reactors.
Nor are tyrannical policies that forbid employees from picking up the phone and calling HR when they have a question about things like compensation and benefits the culprit.
Tony Sheard, the HR manager for process improvement at Bruce Power, can point to a nifty little software package that allows employees to pose questions, in plain English, online. The answers are then retrieved from a knowledge engine, which is a database of cases and solutions the HR department has put together.
The software that powers the system, known as IQ, was built by Kana, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based software developer. Sheard said Bruce Power was approached by Kana about installing the software, and though he was skeptical at first he decided to take the plunge because it fit well with the employee self service model HR was pursuing.
Bruce Power uses SAP for its human resource management system and had gone down the self service road for minor transactional tasks, including things like online pay stubs.
“That went very well, but we found we were stuck in minor questions that were taking a lot of our time,” said Sheard. “We had traditional Web sites with hotlinks, but even with all that we still had (employees) who wanted to ring up a hot body.”
And because Bruce Power has workers on a variety of shifts, there wasn’t always somebody available in the HR department. But deciding to implement Kana’s standalone software was just the first step in weaning employees from the impulse to want to speak live to HR. Populating the system with the appropriate information for Bruce Power employees was the next.
“We took some of the older (managers) — the ones with more experience and greyer hair — and we asked them what sort of questions do you get on a routine basis and let’s have a look at them,” said Sheard. “From that we constructed cases and solutions to address those questions.”
It was a tough process because Bruce Power had to consider a wide variety of factors that were often difficult to measure. For example, the fact the system allowed employees to enter questions in plain English meant different employees looking for the same answer could pose questions in a myriad of ways. And they didn’t want employees to be presented with a ton of responses when a question was posed to the system either.
“So we set a goal that we would have less than 10 and ideally no more than five answers for whatever question you might ask,” he said. “We didn’t want people to get frustrated. We were trying to make it so that nobody was more than four clicks away from that answer.”
Sheard said there’s a real danger of turning off an employee if the answer isn’t readily available through the system.
“If people don’t find the answer quickly, they turn off and have a negative attitude about a lot of things, such as the company, HR and the process,” said Sheard.
There is very little HR-related information that is not available to staff through the Kana software.
“We had a big debate about what you’d put on the knowledge engine,” said Sheard. “But when we got down to it, there’s very little information that you don’t want everyone to have access to anyway. It’s not private information and very little of it was of such a confidential nature that you couldn’t throw it out to anybody.”
It took about three months start-to-finish to setup the system, and adding more information to the knowledge base is an ongoing process.
What questions are employees asking?
The company has put about 500 solutions on the system since it was launched in November 2002. The questions being posed by employees vary but at certain times of year some issues are more prevalent.
When the annual pension statement came out for employees, for example, Sheard said there was a spike in questions about beneficiaries. When summer time rolls around, there tends to be an influx of vacation-related queries.
“We try to predict a little bit what some of those questions might be,” said Sheard. “If we know something might become topical, we try and make sure we have addressed that by thinking ahead.”
If employees can’t find the answer they’re looking for they have the option of escalating the request to the HR department. They can send an e-mail to the HR help desk and will get a response back within 48 hours.
Once that is done, HR will go into the system and find why it didn’t provide the answer the employee was looking for and then update it with the information so the next employee will be able to find it.
“It’s a bit like a smoke signal of what is happening in our business,” said Sheard. “It connects more senior people in HR to the front-line people.”
When the system was first installed, Sheard said there were “hundreds” of escalations per day. That number has been reduced to about three or four now on a bad day. In terms of activity, he said there are about 200 to 250 cases being looked at each day by staff — a figure he finds interesting because the HR department never fielded that many calls per day from employees.
“Where did they go before for the answers? Either they went unfulfilled or they were bothering somebody else or the HR supervisors or whatever,” said Sheard.
Getting staff buy-in
There was some initial resistance among staff to using the system. When the implementation was in the early phases, Bruce Power ran a workshop with staff picked at random to gauge reaction to the philosophy behind this type of self service.
There were a few staff members who were adamant that they wanted to be able to pick up the phone and call HR and didn’t want to go through a computer to get answers. Sheard said there was one in particular who was extremely resistant to the idea.
“He was probably the most difficult person that we could have found,” he said. “He couldn’t sense why we were doing this sort of thing. But that’s probably one of our greatest successes because (once he used the site) he said he found it great and said it was really helpful.”
There was no huge announcement made to staff when the system was rolled out, primarily because Sheard wanted to ensure the system worked well before HR started bragging about it too much.
“What you don’t want is to make a big hoo-ha about it and find out it doesn’t work,” said Sheard. “We did a quiet rollout and then followed that by some articles in our employee newspaper.”
Employees access IQ through the company’s intranet site. There is an HR button on the home page that takes users straight to the system. Sheard said there was a lot of debates on how this page should be presented. In the end a simple, straightforward design won out.
“It has a few typical hot links, but the main part of it is just basically a box where you type your question in with a few supplementary questions if you want to answer them,” he said.
If an employee knows the information is in benefits, she could click on benefits and type the question. But the downside is that some people won’t know how HR has decided to categorize different items and for that reason users are given the ability to search without picking a category.
The cost factor
Kana issued an eye-popping press release when the system was up and running that said it was saving Bruce Power $10 million per year with the system.
But Sheard called that number a “truism” and said there really isn’t a savings to be had that is visible on the bottom line. That figure makes the assumption the system saves every employee 10 minutes every day, he said.
“But you’ve only saved that money if you’ve kicked people out the door by doing so,” said Sheard. “In terms of a hard-cash saving that goes to the bottom line, I can’t say that. If you did a pure calculation you could potentially say that, but only if you reduce your head count by X or you don’t recruit by X.”
Neither Kana nor Bruce Power would comment on how much the implementation cost, but a spokesperson for Kana said pricing for IQ starts at about $335,000.
But while Sheard can’t point to a direct bottom-line savings, the system has allowed the HR department to divert time and effort to tasks and higher priority work. An example of this comes in the massive recruiting that Bruce Power has done since it transformed into a private-sector firm. It was able to take HR staff who were tied up answering questions from employees and divert their energy into recruiting. And it has allowed HR to spend more time thinking strategically.
“We’ve had a bigger involvement in the organization,” said Sheard. “We’re doing a lot of change management type issues in helping them come to terms with the different environment that Bruce found itself in.”
Sheard said he’s now looking at putting more sensitive information on the system so that managers can access more information through the software.
“Quite often senior people are equally challenged in finding information, so we’re looking for a better way to provide leadership and HR guidance,” he said. “We’re embarking in putting this information in a day-to-day knowledge repository.”
The system has caught the attention of other departments at Bruce that are looking to emulate what HR has done. There is discussion about putting health and safety information up in the same manner as the HR information.
