12-months of employee relations transformation data

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Transforming employee relations to drive business success

Since its launch in 2021, empower® has already transformed the management of employee relations in numerous leading organisations, including BT, Sainsbury’s, Currys, and Argos

To follow are some highlights of the staggering successes we’ve achieved with our customers that demonstrate the benefits of people-empowered business transformation.

Managers empowered to own people process

Across all of our empower® clients, over 90% of employee relations tasks are driven by the line manager, instead of HR

We recognise that some people processes, such as suspensions and grievances, are more complex than others and benefit from a greater degree of HR expertise. So, we’ve built empower® in a way that enables the right level of support for all issues, depending on the appetite for risk and the complexity of the subject matter.

This graph illustrates how manager ownership breaks down across the key policy areas for our clients over 12 months.

Over half of cases are self-served by managers

empower® has enabled over 50% of all cases raised and concluded to have no HR involvement whatsoever.

The flexibility of the empower® model means that where HR involvement adds greater value (for example, grievance cases), or where the experience of the client’s line managers is at an early stage of development, the model flexes to prompt HR engagement at appropriate points in the process, mitigating risk.

empower cases closed with no HR contribution

No HR involvement required for 3 weeks

In cases where HR do get involved, on average they aren’t involved until 3 weeks after the case has opened.

This finding supports the empower® mantra that line managers, with the embedded guidance and coaching within the guided journeys, are confident and capable of handling the early stages of cases.

HR involvement is preserved for more complex processes, or those aspects of process where their expertise and experience adds the most value.

Days between a case opening and HR involvement

Significant cost efficiencies realised

Adopting empower® can lead to significant reductions in your employee relations costs, allowing you to either realise a budgetary efficiency or repurpose your spend to more strategic and value-added initiatives.

A retail client of ours was able to realise a 62% reduction in its employee relations case advisory team profile, whilst uplifting service quality and engagement at the same time. This enabled them to achieve cost reductions and also reallocate resource to more strategic initiatives.

Process improvements delivered

empower® delivers material reductions in process cycle times and end-to-end case length. Through in-the-moment guidance, prompts, notifications and escalations, empower® drives timely intervention and engagement.

Line managers are supported in having more positive conversations about matters that would otherwise be escalated to HR.

These illustrative results show the efficiencies achieved by one of our empower® clients.

Returns optimised within 3 months of launch

You don’t have to wait long to realise these benefits. During the implementation phase, our team of experts will work collaboratively with you to embed new way of workings effectively in both the HR team and in the wider management community.

On average, it takes no more than 3-4 months to reach target line manager ownership of people management tasks, as illustrated by the following anonymised data from two of our customers.