Swiss telecoms provider Sunrise outlines how HR can show its worth

The measure of success

That’s not to say that HR has been lacking in useful metrics in the past. Recruitment and retention data, for example, can illustrate the function’s ability to help secure business-critical skills and avoid costly employee turnover. Employee performance data reflects the success of HR’s recruitment techniques and helps to refine them.

Similarly, employee satisfaction data secured from regular pulse surveys and larger studies can showcase HR performance in driving engagement and fulfilment.

However, many of these traditional HR metrics have not always resonated at C-suite level as strongly as intended. ”The key is to focus on the metrics that are most relevant to C-level colleagues and support them to make decisions, thereby showing how the HR department contributes directly to business success,” says Foster.

Enabling business value

The current focus of Sunrise’s HR team on clarifying ownership and accountability shows how the function can contribute directly to business objectives.  

Through the merger with telecommunications provider UPC five years ago, Sunrise became Switzerland’s second-largest telecoms business. However, market saturation means growth cannot be achieved solely by attracting new customers. Customer relationships and customer loyalty are therefore becoming more important. As a result, Sunrise is focusing on innovation, service quality, and rewarding loyalty in order to improve customer retention and relationships.

To support this objective, Foster’s function is driving a change-management exercise to clarify ownership and accountability along the entire customer journey. The objective is to ensure that the right teams are empowered to deliver best customer experience, from onboarding to regular service, and inquiries or complaints.

“We’ve agreed the outcome we want to achieve together with our colleagues from the business unit and then mapped who is responsible for contributing to that outcome and how we measure it,” Foster says. “In doing so, we’ve looked at which systems or processes might be hindering those contributions and helped different business units to work together to achieve the best results and meet the objectives.”

As the HR department plays a key role in organizing business units and improving processes, it can make a significant and tangible contribution to increasing customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, and thereby to achieving strategic objectives.

Foster and his HR team also plays an active role in strengthening cross-functional collaboration.

“Collaboration really matters to all of us and is imperative to achieving strategic goals,” he says. “In practice, HR has aligned its own objectives to support collaboration between different teams and units in the organization with those of the company’s executives. This is a typical example of how HR and the C-suite are working on the same strategic business targets.”