HR director
Services:
About the company and myself:
I am the HR director of the Russian division of a globally known American brand. We have 85 stores across the country, around 16 cities and 700 employees.
Yes, before you there was another provider, but only for payroll. With you we went further. We carried out a restructuring and there was a need for support for HR functions too, mainly HR administration and military registration. The decision to change provider was partly due to quality and communication problems with the previous company. I joined the project right after the test parallel calculation finished.
My previous experience was more about remote outsourcing, so here I saw a big advantage in people being in the office, present alongside my team. Of course, the process was different from how I had worked before.
We were interested in building the process together; each side wanted to make it better, more transparent, more correct and compliant with legislation. We had tasks, and I can see how we solve them thanks to the excellent qualities of the company's employees.
One of UCMS Group's strengths is that you really try to deliver the right service and be a partner.
We are doing a common cause.
At the moment the HR manager who was focused on working with the provider has left, and it so happened that those responsibilities passed to me. I am in the process of changing that. We are assigning one HR administrator on the company side so that there is a single contact point through which communication with the outsourcing company will flow. Right now we are struggling precisely because every HR partner has to interact with colleagues on HR administration matters, and that takes a lot of time.
There is a certain admiration and respect for your company in the way you select people for the team. All the employees are well-mannered, intelligent and responsive, and we built relations quickly. We can call at any time and get a professional answer. We make no distinction between how we work with an outsourcing company employee and our own person sitting at the next desk. We are a very dynamic company with genuinely high turnover, dismissals and hires every day and a fast pace of work. Because of that we need specialists who can energetically fit into our atmosphere and requirements. Retail is a very fast-moving sector: sales staff change, some work seasonally, some work during the holidays. Reducing turnover is a big task for us. So far we are not coping with it very successfully.
Wonderful. Elena is a wonderful specialist and a wonderful person, an incredible professional. The period when we faced the coronavirus problem was very telling.
No one could give any advice or consultation, things changed daily, government decisions diverged from current legislation. Elena was always with us; I could call at any moment and ask her opinion.
After that I went back to our legal department, we commissioned a very expensive study or consultation with lawyers outside the company and got practically the same answers that Elena gave me. That is priceless. I really like that Elena always finds the right approach and the right wording for the rationale of why something should or should not be done, and convinces us what is best.
Do you have any specifics or unique processes?
What may set our project apart is a heavily modified 1C system. We have in-house IT people who modified the system, created self-service portals and added many modules to the standard system.
I have always admired and respected UCMS Group and the employees who work with us, especially during the period when we had technical problems.
We were very glad that UCMS Group offered us 1C support with its own resources; it really was like light at the end of the tunnel. Now any technical problems are resolved by UCMS Group rather than our internal IT, who were hard to find or did not have the necessary technical capabilities and knowledge. So now I am confident that everything will be clean and tidy, because that is very important to us. Any calculations must be perfect and correct.
The best! I have had a lot of experience with providers and I have never seen such a genuinely partnership-based relationship.
We have a lot of wishes and always short deadlines. The coronavirus has of course made serious adjustments, but we plan to complete the automation of very many processes, for example bonus calculation. We want to automate as much as possible, and now that depends heavily on IT support from UCMS Group and how quickly the 1C adaptation happens. We would of course like to add some labor protection modules.
It should be ideal precisely in the correctness of the calculation, in accuracy, in compliance with legislation and in the absence of errors.
The highest level is when it notices the shortcomings and errors made by the client.
There is always a human factor, and we may accidentally put the wrong thing in the timesheet, for example. Attention to detail matters. Who works matters. Any people who are in the office must share our values and create a healthy working atmosphere. It matters that people fit in, make friends, find common ground and respond quickly to any problems and requests.
