Top 5 Benefits of Service Level Agreements (SLA) in HR Service Delivery (Updated for 2023)

Do you use an HR Case Management or HR Helpdesk tool to enable HR to deliver services to your employees? Are you benefiting from the HR Service Level Agreements (SLA) functionality that these systems provide? If not, you are missing an opportunity to improve services for your employees and increase HR productivity.

Let’s begin with a recap of what an SLA is:

An SLA is an agreement between two parties, that describes the service provided, documents the Service Level Targets (what the service will be measured against), and specifies the responsibilities of the Service Provider (HR) and the Customer (Employees and Managers).

In a nutshell, an SLA is all about improving the quality of service you provide your employees. It is the HR Case Management SLA functionality that provides the means by which you can achieve this.

Quick Example: If an employee does not receive their pay on payday, that is likely to be considered a high priority, and in some organizations HR will want to rectify this issue the same day, or within 8 hours. Therefore the SLA resolution time would be 8 hours. You might also record how often you should keep the employees updated on the progress of their issue, in my example, I would suggest hourly updates. The applied SLA on this case will help HR keep track of these hourly updates and the total time used to resolve the employees question.

As you can see from this example, having SLAs automatically applied to incoming cases within your HR Case Management tool will provide great monitoring and tracking benefits.

But that’s not all. There’s a multitude of benefits to your organization. Here I list my top 5:

1. Improved Employee Service Management
   • An SLA may be automatically applied to any incoming question or issue that an employee raises with HR. When this happens the SLA will prompt the HR case owner when it is time to update the employee, and to keep the case on track for resolution within the agreed SLA timeframe. Not only can the SLA automatically prompt the owner, it may also prompt HR management who might be required to step in and assist the case owner before the SLA is breached (uses all of the resolution time allowed). The result is a focus on the employee, and their level of service after they have logged the question or issue with HR and an improvement in the service delivered to your employees.
2. Uplift in Employee Experience
   • Today, employees expect the workplace technology experience to match that of their consumer lives. Employees’ experience of interacting with Google, Facebook, Instagram and other consumer tech is driving this demand. And HR Service Delivery need the tools to replicate this ‘consumer-grade’ technology experience at work for their employees. An SLA is one such tool. By providing HR with the means by which they can deliver faster response rates and greater case transparency to their employees along with the visibility they need to continually improve HR services, an SLA helps meet the expectations employees now have of their workplace technology.
3. Increased HR productivity
   • Imagine you are an HR Service Center advisor managing 20 open cases. How do you decide which case to work first from which employee? The one shouting the loudest or the one with the most urgent issue? How do you determine the most urgent issue? With SLA management, the HR Case Management tool not only applies the most appropriate response and resolution time allowance, but also sorts and displays the cases in a list by predetermined priority levels. This results in the HR team focusing their efforts in the correct order, making HR more productive and enables HR to deliver higher SLA Compliance ratings.
4. Efficient Resource Allocation
   • Are you having difficulty meeting or exceeding your SLA targets? A probable cause is that resource allocation is not optimized or that you don't have enough resources to satisfy the demands of the SLA . Using the SLA Management feature of an HR Case Management solution, you will gain visibility of resource constraints. These new insights can be shared with senior management, making the case for changes in SLA targets or allocating appropriate resources to meet SLA demands.
5. Improved Team Performance and Morale
   • SLA Management sheds light on which teams and individuals are your true champions, and areas of potential training and coaching opportunities. Monitoring your results also enables you to adjust targets appropriately in order to better serve your employees. For example, if you consistently deliver above 95% on all priority one cases that have an SLA of 24 hours or three business days to resolve, perhaps it is time to increase the target, and aim for 16 hours or two business days. Using SLA management will allow you to spot trends and take action that creates a team culture of achievements and success, where organizational/ departmental goals, and rewards may also be a result of the team performance.

How do you feel about my top 5 benefits of using HR Service Level agreements in HR Service Delivery? Comment below and tell me what your top 5 benefits are.

In my next post I will provide details on how Dovetails SLA Management module provides these 5 benefits to our customers.