Workforce Support Services Demand Diversity

HfS had the opportunity to visit NGA HR’s rapidly-growing shared service center in Granada, Spain, where it is the largest employer in the Andalusian city of nearly 240,000 on the edge of the Sierra Nevada mountains, an hour from Malaga on the Costa del Sol.

More than 800 service professionals there from 32 different nationalities help support nearly 8 million employees of firms that NGA HR provides outsourced payroll, benefits, HR administration, and application management services to worldwide. Granada is one of NGA HR 12 centers, representing one tenth of total NGA HR employees globally and expected to continue to expand. Granada is known for its universities, including the leading technical institute in Spain, and the highest number of Erasmus grants from the European government for students across the Union to study abroad, which make it a strong base of human capital investment. A relatively lower cost of living, weather, and its cultural diversity keep many graduates there and is working well for NGA HR’s talent pool quality and retention.

As important as its attractive location to work and visit and multi-lingual staff, however, is the diversity and inclusion the facility shows in NGA’s strategy to support a holistic positive and productive workforce support capability. This includes diversity of solutions across all facets of the employee experience, including adoption of new self-service and cloud solutions from SAP, SuccessFactors, Oracle, and Workday, as well as the help desk and master data managed services around them.

As our pending Workday Service Provider Blueprint report research shows, many traditional outsourcing and system implementation firms now targeting HR SaaS services space fall short in supporting the full employee experience, stopping after “Phase 1” implementation or providing only basic technical application management services. In the cases where they do offer managed services, some lack an integrated team and services approach, often awkwardly handing off on-going support to lower-skilled staff in Asia, or are limited in international capabilities, references say.

Markedly, NGA HR’s multi-cultural, multi-client physical center offers a diverse set of full-service capabilities, actively promoting collaboration and problem solving across the teams supporting NGA HR clients’ employees. In this way, they are helping to ensure faster resolution times in client issues to get workers back to serving their own customers more quickly and providing an-going approach and forum for sharing best practices across customers and countries as companies wrestle with complex global change.

At the same time, NGA HR’s Granada center provides clear career development opportunities for the NGA employees and fosters cooperative client-service provider team culture, which was palpable on the visit. As HfS research shows, providing career paths and meaningful opportunities for the staff expected to deliver more compelling solutions for clients is the lynchpin for future success of the business services industry.

And while the majority of NGA HR leadership is male (not to the mention the vast majority of advisors and analysts in attendance), the visit had strong presence from two women who have risen through the ranks at NGA HR: Anita Lettink, who now leads enterprise strategy and offerings, and Olga Rodriquez, managing director of the Granada shared service center. Of note, two of the three HR/workforce transformation case studies shared as a part of the meeting were led by women, so gender diversity will also be a key component of the broader perspectives needed to transform HRO itself into a more value-driven global employee support services business.