optimization Hr cycle

Océ satisfied with OTM HR cycle pilot web tool

When evaluating staff, you should not spend too much time on administration. With this in mind, in 2006 Bas van Dinther, HR manager at Océ Nederland, went in search of support. He brought in Online Talent Manager (OTM) and since September 2007 the first 40 line managers have been getting to work with a new tool. Mr Van Dinther explains:

“A manager evaluating a team of 25 staff with almost identical role profiles on the basis of their results wants to be able to talk about performance with those staff. He wants to substantiate his evaluation and formulate new objectives from a joint analysis. If it goes well, he can therefore fully focus on the behaviour and competencies of the employee. In practice, administering role profiles, general objectives, task objectives and KPI scores had become a pretty big job. Nobody wanted it that way, but all the paperwork was progressively taking our eye off the main aim: evaluating performance.

We were already working with Online Talent Manager tools for staff support and development. Together we thought about how we could support the annual evaluation cycle as well. Here, OTM proved to us they were good listeners. After a year's preparation, in September we went live with a new tool whose name precisely describes what it's supporting: OTM HR cycle.

Easier evaluation
By providing a link to the personnel information system, every manager has online access to the details of his staff. He can choose between two environments. He can work on notes as part of the Personal Development Plan and on insight analyses into competencies throughout the year; plus he can evaluate the aims and tasks set on the basis of Key Performance Indicators.

In an insight analysis, the employee and the manager answer questions about competencies. The differences between their answers form the starting point for a discussion about the competencies required for the current or future job. Should the manager wish to spend an hour or so on his evaluations, he can do this wherever and whenever he likes via our site. So the manager always has the latest information about the HR cycle and his staff available online.

Saturday 13 March, 2010

OTM HR cycle takes a huge amount of work off the manager's hands. Its simplicity makes the tool accessible. I can train a manager in an hour, and that really is all it takes to put it into practice: you can make good documents, do the administration and archiving, and quickly analyse differences. The documents look really good and can be printed in colour. Our staff really appreciate this.

Optimising means working together
We worked closely with an OTM development team led by system architect Richard Still. They helped us with the design, and we gave continual feedback on what we were shown. Meanwhile, the linkup with the personnel system was set up. Dealing with security and privacy actually took much more time than the build. OTM takes care of hosting and technological management, and have plenty of experience and expertise in these areas. But on our side there are many different stakeholders. So we had to carefully explain it and put it in writing. Which is logical, because we're dealing with confidential data on 24,000 people in 30 countries.

Pilot: half the work
Around 40 managers now support their evaluations with OTM HR cycle. Currently we are also launching it in Belgium, England and our head office in Venlo (the Netherlands). The initial results have been entirely positive: there are of course requests to adjust content and layout, but the time saving and convenience for managers are obvious. Next year we will be using OTM HR cycle throughout Océ Nederland and in a number of other countries. And the nice thing about this online software is that you can roll it out without too much effort involved for the local IT departments.”