City of Sydney's HR uplift to help career management

The City of Sydney’s has "reinvigorated" its SAP SuccessFactors deployment, helping it drive a more personalised approach to its staff career management. 

Chief of people and culture Chris Youness said when he arrived at the council in mid-2022, he found an instance of SuccessFactors that "wasn't configured very well for the time."

"I started ... to ask some questions about it," he said, adding there were “some basic things that we should be doing in our systems that were not happening.

After meeting with SAP regarding the system's apparent lack of capability, the council elected to "kick off a journey of reinvigoration” for the platform.

"What we started to learn was: this was more about whether we had taken advantage of what the system could do for us, versus whether the system could or couldn't do it," Youness said.

Partnering with Discovery Consulting, an implementation and advisory firm for SAP and cloud-based solutions, a “health check” was undertaken with 32 recommendations identified.

This has led to HR process improvements.

“We've reduced the amount of time a recruiter, a hiring manager or a manager generally has to participate in the system," Youness said.

“Anytime we do ask them to participate in the system, it is very natural, it makes sense."

Youness said the administration load on staff first dropped by 27 percent however, has potentially now reduced to “probably 35 percent at the moment.”

HR goes back to basics

Youness said the work has enabled the team to focus on core HR tasks rather than managing the system.

“If [HR teams] are spending more and more time trying to get a system to work because we've implemented a system rather than doing the work that they need to do and having the system support them, then we are wasting our time. We're spending time in the wrong areas.”

Now, teams such as learning and development can spend time asking “what are the capabilities that our people need”.

Payroll is another "great example" of improvement, according to Youness.

"I've pushed very hard to move as much as we possibly can into automated processes: time and attendance systems, self-service kiosks where you can submit your time sheets and approve your things, as opposed to having to submit paper-based forms and have our teams click in information into a screen and then submit it for you," he said.

This led to “a huge change in the way in which our payroll runs” with a “significantly less stressed team.”

Council is also chasing improvements to internal career pathways, enabled via SuccessFactors.

“The most important pressing product or solution looking to solve at the moment is how we truly meet people where they are from a career management and development perspective," Youness said.

“Our goal at the moment is we need to design career development, career pathways and mobility in such a way that meets people where they are.

“Then being able to personalise, automate and enable our people to choose their next best development opportunity or option in order to enhance their career from where they are now,” Youness said.