This
past summer I interned at Aon Hewitt as a Setup Configuration Specialist for
Human Resource Outsourcing aligned to a large market client. My team managed
the HR information of the client’s 250,000 employees, including their payroll,
medical, retirement, and other benefits that they are provided. This
information is stored in a secure database and we use a combination of several
programs to manage this data. We sustain an ongoing relationship with the
client, making changes to their plans and benefits delivery structure in our
database and our benefits portal. The team is divided into Operations and Tech,
where operations manages trends in workflows and interpreting client needs into
business requirements, while Tech works to translate those requirements into
the database and online portal and to correct any recurring errors. Therefore
there are effectively three parties at play, the client, the operations side of
the team, and the tech side of the team. My particular role was on the Tech
side, and I was primarily tasked with testing new changes that the client
wanted to be added before they were moved into the real time environment and to
identify and debug any defects. At Aon Hewitt, I noticed a unique relationship
between the merging of the organization and its transaction costs.
Before Aon Hewitt was Aon Hewitt, there was Aon, an insurance and
risk managing company, and Hewitt, which provided business technology and HR
software and support. Prior to being acquired by Aon, Hewitt had a relatively
large and young work force, but after being acquired, things changed. Aon had
felt that Hewitt was “fat” and that it could operate more efficiently with a
smaller, so they cut the number of employees per team and almost entirely
stopped hiring new employees. The long-term impact of this brings us to now,
where they are having to hire huge classes of students right out of college to
make up for the lost time. It almost felt like an entirely new generation
because there was about a seven-year difference between the last class of new
hires. This generation gap created many issues in the workplace. To start, the
older employees were not able to relate to the younger ones, either through a
failure to communicate or differing work styles, and thus team cohesion was definitely
damaged. Additionally, some of the older employees had fallen into the trap of
just clocking in and clocking out; delivering an acceptable product but not the
best product. The structure of each team is relatively lateral, but those with
more experience held positions with more responsibility, and each person held a
specialized role on the team. This led to times when projects would be bottle
necked by certain more experienced, but complacent, employees.
Transaction costs on my team existed in the form of policing and enforcement
costs. Our particular client was rather tricky in that they have had a lot of
customizations over the 12 years they have been with Aon Hewitt. These
customizations have occurred through a lot of turn over on the team, of which
good and bad team members have cycled through. The bad team members have coded
changes poorly, and thus it is a constant struggle for the team to identify
these defects and correct them while depending on them to make further
customizations. The Operations side of the team was always heavily tasked with
monitoring that the Tech side was actually implementing the business
requirements they were given, and the client too frequently had to make sure
that we were implementing the changes they wanted and abiding to the contract.
Despite these tensions within the work place, teams do manage to
produce a product that is one of the best in the market. The Human Resources
Outsourcing Market is definitely an economy of scale, in that only a few giants
in the market are able to compete because they have the capital and labor
capacity to manage large market clients. Since the services provided to its
clients are experience goods, Aon Hewitt is able to differentiate its product
from others through its reputation and other services it can offer. Many new
clients come in through Aon Hewitt Consulting, and after seeing the quality
product delivered they trust Aon Hewitt to properly manage their benefits
distribution and add that on as an additional service.
It's kind of ironic that you're a tech guy, yet this post was very difficult to read because of the black font on a dark background. This didn't happen in your previous post, so I'm not sure what is the explanation. But I hope you can fix it and that it doesn't happen in subsequent posts.
ReplyDeleteA mystery with what you described - if they were short of staff were there also new hires of your vintage or were most of them interns like you. It wasn't clear from how you described things. And if there were young new regular staff, how were they treated differently from interns, or were they?
The general issue you raise about how much personnel do you need and what factors determines that is interesting and something we should definitely discuss in class. An issue that is relevant here is how much training is needed for a new employee to be productive in the work. That might be something to comment on. If it takes a while to get truly competent to do this sort of work, some redundancy of the staff might be efficient as a way to manage difficult to forecast upticks in demand.
Fixed the text color, which was rather odd that it needed to be because it had always defaulted to grey in the past... I will be sure to check that next time.
ReplyDeleteTo answer your question about the staff, essentially what had happened is that they had gone about seven years without hiring any new personnel. In the last two years they hired slight over a hundred new employees, so as an intern, I was in a similar age group as my still relatively "green" coworkers. I was only one of ten interns. That being said, I noticed that the younger employees were either placed in scenarios where they were anticipated to be performing at the level of a 10+ year veteran or not expected to perform well, and would frequently have their work redundantly reviewed. Furthermore, on my particular team, I was under the impression that the newer team members were under utilized because there were not enough experienced members on the team to manage the complicated components of assignments. Essentially, you would have a lot of new guys do the work they would be assigned and then pass it on to someone more experienced. However, since there were fewer experienced members, there was a bottle neck in the work flow and the older members capacity would limit the completion of projects.
It's interesting that you brought up training, because only in the last two years of hiring has training been taken more seriously. For the full time version of my position, there is an intensive twelve week training program in a classroom like setting. Since all of the software is proprietary, training is integral for new employees to be successful. Before this training program was set up, the new employees were expected to train themselves, which I believe led to a wider variance in abilities at the time since training was not standardized. One could argue that even contributed to Hewitt being seen as "fat" because some employees were simply not as capable after training themselves than others.