Handling increased headcount

After significant headcount growth and the subsequent increased workload for the HR Shared Services team, HR consulting firm Ranstad thought it was time to investigate ways to achieve workflow management efficiencies.

Already familiar with the Freshworks offering, the IT team capitalised on broader business buy-in and opted for the Freshservice solution.

Brooke O’Keefe, HR Manager at Randstad Australia, explains how Freshworks helped solve challenges that arose because of the pandemic and a move to remote work.

1. What challenges were Ranstad facing and how did Freshworks factor in to meeting those challenges?

As a business, we have been working with Freshworks for a few years, primarily in our IT department. Following significant headcount growth and an increasing volume of work within our HR Shared Services team, we found that managing all enquiries through a shared inbox was no longer feasible and the manual processes we previously had in place became too time-consuming.

As our IT team was already familiar with Freshworks and we had buy-in from the broader business, we extended our partnership to generate workflow management efficiencies and automate cumbersome processes within our HR and Services department.

Implementation was very straightforward — Freshworks enabled us to build efficiencies quickly and inexpensively, created increased visibility across the business, and the self-service HR model empowered leaders and managers to reach their full potential and make decisions.

2. Why did you create the pandemic taskforce?

Over the past 12 months, Randstad Australia made over 300 new hires and experienced exponential growth. During this time, the COVID-19 Delta strain took hold of Australia, spurring national lockdowns.

With 25 locations around Australia and differing needs and restrictions across states, our workload increased as we fielded queries we had never experienced before, from immigration to talent sponsorship to work from home.

To tackle this workload burden, support new hires and ensure employees had the support required amid COVID-19, we set up a COVID-19 taskforce powered by Freshworks’ ITSM product, Freshservice.

The taskforce encompassed leaders from across the business and aimed to resolve issues relating to COVID-19, including onboarding, immigration, long-term WFH and restriction compliance, and served 1000 corporate employees.

We now use Freshservice for our service desk, which helps to automate processes, manage employee requests and sort queries into topics, streamlining the entire process. This was particularly beneficial due to our geographical spread of workers and the fast-moving pace of changes we were required to respond to, such as new LGAs of concern or issuing permits to workers.

3. How did the partnership help you during the pandemic and what initiatives did it enable?

The company’s customer service attitude is very solution oriented and there is a clear understanding of our business, which is obviously beneficial. The ticketing system and increased insights that we now have access to have also helped greatly, but the real game changer is the workflows the Freshworks team created and built into the backend for us when we asked for process improvements. This bespoke service and the creation of new solutions, such as a bot our legal team leverages to create contracts for new starters, has resulted in a myriad of efficiencies.

4. What are your future technology adoption plans?

Our growth is set to continue into next year as we make further changes to the way we work and deliver on our commitment to providing the best experience for managers and leaders.

Following the successful implementation of Freshservice across our HR Shared Services department, we are looking for additional ways to utilise Freshworks across the business. We are exploring HR Integrated Management System (IMS) and are hoping to integrate our contract generator bot into our HR processes.

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