SHARED SERVICES TRANSFORMATION

About the Program

Category: Personnel Management, Employment and Training (Best in Category)

Year: 2017

Over the past year, the Fulton County’s Department of Human Resources Management has gone through an evolution and has reinvented itself as strategic partner rather than a provider of back-office administrative support. The Department developed and implemented a plan for the delivery of HR shared services. This plan freed almost $1.2M of County’s resources, centralized HR staff under one umbrella but, more importantly, created an environment to streamline and standardize the HR functions within the County. Within the first year of shared services implementation, the County has been able to reduce its time to fill positions from 160 calendar days to an average of 72 days. With this new level of efficiency, the Department of Human Resources Management has created an instrument for departments to improve the services to the citizenry of Fulton County while, simultaneously, increasing morale by reducing the burden on County employees who felt over-tasked. The benefits of the Department’s role in establishing a shared services environment within the County have already been felt. But beyond the shared services function, this Department’s leadership on various initiatives, to better position the County to be seen as a “best place to work”, has not gone unnoticed. Under the leadership of the Department, the County’s Personnel Board and the Board of Commissioners adopted a classification and compensation study. This study was a three year undertaking which was implemented in July 2015. With its implementation, the County has 700+ brand new job specifications that better reflect the current organizational needs. Further, the County invested $5M to adjust the base salaries of 1,500 employees to the prevailing market rates for their functions so as to ensure that the County is in position recruit and retain talent in this very competitive market.