Criticising is easy, but building is hard.
I have worked as a software developer for several years at various South African companies; ranging between start-ups, mid-size and large organisations. At each company, I got to work with the coolest technology. But the star of the show, the thing that leaves me with the most memories, are the people. For every company, people are the most valuable asset. They are the life, the culture.
The department tasked with managing this valuable asset goes by different names at different companies. Mostly to reflect the phase the company is in. These names include Human Resources, People Operations, Employee experience etc. Despite the different names, the job is usually somewhat the same; to manage the company's most valuable asset. From hereon, we will refer to people in these departments as People Managers.
People Managers in South African companies are heroes. They have to manage valuable company assets, and in a way are responsible for how well a company does, without adequate tools to do so. They have to wrangle multiple pieces of inadequate and unsuitable software with no interoperability just to achieve the minimum. There is a website for just the list of people employed, a different desktop app for payroll. Emails and a spreadsheet for leave management, because the people software was built in Europe for American companies. Even more different software is needed for performance reviews and culture building.
This is obviously a mess and a big problem because if the company's most valuable asset isn't properly managed, a lot can go wrong. Let me know if any of these issues sound familiar.
Personnel data is duplicated across multiple systems, so if you want to change someone's surname; after they get married for example, you have to remember 6 different places, otherwise their payslip has a different surname to their name tag. All this work to keep these disparate data sources in sync is generally done manually, which is error prone and wastes valuable time.
People receive their pay before their payslips, because the software that generates their payslips needs a lot of manual input each month, taking a lot of valuable time and leading to a lot of confused people. Possibly with a few enquiries to respond to regarding the unexpected amount of pay.
Everyone is confused about how much leave the company designer has left because she returned early from her last time off and leave is tracked on a spreadsheet that has been edited way too many times. Sorting all of this out takes a lot of people's valuable time.
The star developer was hired months ago but she is still not productive because her onboarding was not handled properly. She doesn't know who the right people are to ask questions about her job. She is spending so much of her time sending emails to HR and asking what a social security number is because the HR software won't let her submit without it, as it was not made for South Africans. Getting her settled in and productive ends up costing the company a lot of time and money.
The laundry list of problems doesn't end here. When employees depart to a different challenge, they remain on payroll and with access to private company information because offboarding is not formal.
A problem I faced myself was trying to find proof of employment from 3 jobs ago because my latest employer's background check required a complete history of the previous 10 years. I had to become a master PI to locate information that is truthfully mine.
You would think that we have covered all the problems already, you would be so wrong. We haven't even touched on the issues with tax compliance and mismanaged people's leave that expose the company to legal compliance issues and just outright unnecessary costs.
There are many other problems that People Managers face. I hope by now we are on the same page on the scale of the issue and that something needs to be done about it.
This lack of supporting tools for People Managers in their quest to manage companies' most valuable assets is a problem we can no longer ignore. It is a problem that needs to be solved so that People Managers can focus on keeping people happy and doing their best.
Without a proper solution, HR departments waste a lot of time and money wrangling unsuitable software instead of managing people. They waste an inordinate amount of time on back and forth emails attempting to keep employee data up-to-date. Companies are left prone to security risks from multiple fronts, people left in systems they should not be in, with access to things they shouldn't have access to. How many times have you heard issues with "ghost employees"?
To top it all off, since the pandemic there is a heavy shift towards fully remote working conditions; which can leave new joiners feeling isolated and mismanaged, which is obviously bad for employee morale and productivity, which wastes company money and time.
An ideal solution to these problems is a homegrown, purpose built Human Resource Management System (HRMS). That is what we are hoping Juno is going to be.
But instead of just building what we believe People Managers want, we are planning to take a different path. We are going to build Juno together with the community. We are going to meet with as many People Managers in South Africa as we can, learn what their biggest pain points are and target a solution that doesn't try to be the hero but allows them to be heroes at what they do best. We are going to use this blog, writing frequently, to document every aspect of this journey.
If you are a member of an HR team in South Africa, or know someone who is, we invite you to subscribe to this blog and we will get in touch for a conversation.