A Major Financial Institution
Our client is a global Investment Bank headquartered in New York. Their European operation is based in London and employs over 6,500 people across the UK and Europe.
It is a business that places a high value on its workforce and in September 1999, undertook a strategic review of its HR function, which broke down their HR services and assessed their outsourcing potential. Faced with the need to enhance the HR service provision to the business, the function realised it was unable to drive business decisions due to the heavy administrative burden affecting HR staff at all levels. There was a high attrition rate and a high reliance on temporary labour to provide HR administration support, which had a consequential impact on quality of work and staff turnover.
A decision was taken to establish an external employee HR service centre and to outsource the HR transactional, learning and development, employee benefits and health and welfare administration. Capita was chosen as their partner and a phased implementation commenced in December 1999. The service is delivered remotely from our Edinburgh office, and over the past two years additional services have been added, including the implementation of five European offices. Although cost was not a primary driver, there have been reductions both in terms of headcount and overheads to the business.
The service demands a high level of interaction with the internal HR community, current employees, past employees and potential applicants. The service offerings are branded and integrated in such a way as to make the outsourced service “invisible” to the client community. In addition, the partnership is continually looking at new processes, working to identify and implement innovative ways to streamline and improve the service, including evolving towards self service options.
There are well established governance mechanisms (framework services agreement, service reviews, administration guides and documentation, together with team procedures). Considerable emphasis is placed on customer relationship management, with regular reviews, communication and open reporting on performance. Standards of service are rigorously built into all activities and are reported on a monthly basis.
Since the partnership began the standards of service has shown measurable improvement and the HR service centre team has enjoyed lower levels of turnover.