HR case management isn’t an exact science. Ask ten HR managers to walk you through their case management process and you’ll get ten (radically) different answers.
There’s regulatory nuance to consider too: UK employment law is universal, but if you work for a small organisation in a highly regulated sector like finance, where HR departments are responsible for ensuring that employees maintain the required competencies, you’ll have very different case management processes to a 50+ person HR department that deals with relatively low-skilled employees in the retail sector.
All this to say that, from a process perspective, HR is a highly varied field.
But the absence of a universally ‘perfect’ or ‘model’ case management process doesn’t excuse a liaise-faire attitude to continuous improvement. While it’s tempting to hand-wave inefficiencies and explain common chokepoints as an inevitable consequence of your organisation’s unique culture, the truth is that we can - and should - always work to refine internal processes to maximise efficiency – and ensure that we’re always delivering the best possible outcomes.
We have plenty of useful resources to draw on too: While HR case management is a relatively woolly discipline, case management best practices from a specific sector - such as health and social care - provide helpful advice and/or models that can be leveraged to level up our own processes.
Here, we’ll explore some of those models in detail, and look at actionable tips for refining HR-specific case management processes.
Before we dive into the fine detail, it’s worth looking at the key drivers pushing HR managers to improve and refine their pre-existing case management processes. Increased regulatory pressure, and heightened employee expectations have created a landscape where even minor missteps can lead to significant consequences.
To get into the weeds and have a meaningful discussion about actionable routes to refinement, we need to assume that you already have a documented case management process in place. If not, it’s worth spending 5-10 minutes reviewing our introductory guide to case management before you dive in.
While it’s attractive to think about rolling out the perfect process on day one, iteration is always the key to success. Here’s a step-by-step guide to fine tuning your HR case management protocols focusing on three key pillars: process, technology, and people.
First, a general point: Efforts to deliver continuous improvement only work if you’ve
• established robust mechanisms to capture and analyse data pertaining to your outcomes and the quality of your case management process
• built in a process for isolating key insights
• planned to implement improvements based on those insights.
If you jump straight to implementing new technologies or sharpening workflows without a way to capture and feed insights back to you and the other key decision makers on your team, you’ll never know whether you’ve really delivered positive change. Future refinements will be made blind too, so it’s worth thinking about how you’re going to create feedback loops within your department.
As a case in point, the Case Management Society (CMSUK) produces a robust set of standards and auditing tools for healthcare providers. While a lot of this document is given over to advice for frontline workers, a substantial portion focuses on enabling continuous improvement by equipping managers to measure service quality and the outcomes generated by frontline case managers.
It’s well worth reading through the document; despite its focus on healthcare delivery, the way it’s structured and the processes it describes do translate to our domain. Specifically, the idea of building a very structured audit process, and dedicating time to examining both the quality and outcomes of our cases is tremendously important and can be done in a relatively straightforward way.
Once we’ve implemented these feedback loops, and are fully confident that we will actually be able to evaluate the impact of any further changes, we can start making more targeted tweaks.
A great many HR departments are locked into a reactive mindset: responding to issues as they arise, instead of taking the time to look at trends and preempt problems in the process.
This approach is inefficient, and increases the risk of overlooking critical details and failing to address underlying problems.
As an example, let’s imagine that we’re running an HR department that supports an ambulance service in South East England. We’re inundated with absence cases, and, knowing that these cases are putting a lot of pressure on the service, we have made ourselves very busy reacting to individual cases instead of looking for opportunities to intervene more strategically.
If we peel back, and focus on profiling cases that have been resolved with a positive outcome, or cases where we’ve managed to get members of staff back into work quickly, we can start to develop a playbook for this type of case that actually improves the long-term prognosis instead of simply jumping from emergency to emergency.
Borrowing from NHS England’s guidance on providing proactive patient care, there’s a real value to learning how to scrape case management data for key insights and, following that process:
• Learning when and how to intervene in complex cases
• Building a clear understanding of what good interventions look like
• Making sure that we can track and measure the impact of our interventions
This almost always starts with an exercise designed to help you pick case management KPIs and metrics that’ll let you understand what’s going on on the ground, but you’ll also need to think about:
• Leveraging Data: Where data is concerned, modern HR departments are often sitting on a goldmine. Once you’re armed with a list of useful metrics, you can start pooling data about case times, outcomes, employee satisfaction etc, and interrogating it for opportunities to intervene early. Deloitte have published a fantastic guide to reaching analytical maturity and making data driven decisions that makes for a great jumping off point here.
• Implement Early Intervention Strategies: Once you’ve found opportunities to be more proactive with your case management, you can start planning targeted interventions. This involves providing training to managers on how to identify and address specific problems, and arming frontline workers with the knowledge needed to escalate specific cases more quickly.
• Foster a Culture of Open Communication: Creating an environment where frontline case managers feel comfortable raising concerns about - or improvements to - your early interventions is essential for early detection and resolution of issues. This involves promoting transparency, building trust, and ensuring that employees are aware of their rights and responsibilities.
Returning to the Case Management Society’s Standards and Best Practices, it’s worth noting that a good 40% of this document is devoted to highly-specific checklists that can be used to build standardised workflows for routine case management tasks.
Now, it goes without saying that these checklists focus on the delivery of medical interventions and don’t really provide much of a framework for HR specific case management practices.
But the underlying principle, which is to say the idea of building standardised workflows for common case types like performance improvement plans, disciplinary actions and investigations? That’s something we can and should bake into our thinking.
Standardised workflows take the guesswork out of management, improve efficiency and (most importantly) reduce the risk of errors
The checklists are pivotal too: Documenting everything, and ensuring that frontline workers can record the steps they’ve taken to meet regulations is key to guaranteeing compliance.
Putting our HR hat back on for a couple of minutes, we’d also add documenting clear escalation procedures to the list of important refinements re: workflows.
Everyone knows that certain case types will need to be escalated at critical junctures, but taking the guesswork out of the actual escalation process, and providing rails for front-line workers that need to move something up to the next level is another key refinement that will pay dividends down the line.
One last note, borrowed from the Case Management Society’s approach to delivery: We’ve already waxed lyrical about the importance of feedback loops, but building in a specific process to audit individual cases is also vital. As you can see from these best practices, the best process in the world can (and will) derail itself if line managers aren’t looking at how well the individual workflows are functioning – and working hard to close any gaps.
There’s nothing particularly glamorous about building really effective workflows, but it's here that you can deliver real efficiencies so it’s well worth investing in the process.
You can build effective workflows, and plan strategic interventions, with a notebook or spreadsheet but it’s tough. Really tough. To refine and improve on processes you need data – standardised data recorded in a central repository that you use to make informed decisions.
You need dedicated HR case management software but we don’t want to turn this blog post into an advertorial so we’ll simply say that it’s essential and - for those who don’t already have a system in place - point you towards our guide to picking the right case management solution.
If you’re engaged in a very driven exercise to refine and improve your processes, you may also find it helpful to read our guide to building a comprehensive HR tech stack. Case management software is often the lynchpin, but there are other tools that you can use to simplify and optimise daily tasks.
Back in 2018, the Global Social Service Workforce Alliance’s Case Management Interest Group published their Core Concepts and Principles of Effective Case Management.
Again, the focus here is not on HR, but reading the document, it’s clear to see that the GSSWA understands that frontline workers are the people who really drive and deliver efficient case management.
Subsequently, large portions of their guidelines are dedicated to explaining the importance of supporting those frontline case workers; equipping them to deliver good outcomes and ensuring that they know how to meet and exceed your expectations.
To condense, their recommendations boil down to:
• Providing Comprehensive Training: Ensuring that HR and managers are adequately trained on case management procedures, legal compliance, and best practices is a no-brainer, but peripheral training, to help people think systematically, deal with large data pools or interrogate processes can help your department to skill up and deliver more effectively.
• Fostering a Culture of Continuous Learning: Encouraging staff to stay up-to-date on the latest developments in law, best practices, and technology is key to ensuring that they can deliver, but it also helps them to ‘buy into’ what you do and guarantees a certain level of interest and commitment that is really key to going above and beyond the basics of case management.
• Promoting Collaboration and Communication: Fostering a culture of collaboration and communication between HR, legal, and other departments ensures everyone is pulling together, that insights are fed back to the right people, and that your department can actually learn and grow.You probably don’t need to be told that investing in a robust and efficient HR case management process yields significant benefits for your organisation, but it’s worth remembering that there is a very real reward for working on the five improvements listed above.
Generally speaking, departments that invest in continuous improvement benefit from:
• A reduced risk of legal challengesHopefully the above, pulled together using best practices documents from a range of fields, provides both a model and a roadmap for effective refinement but if you have any specific questions about improving HR case management processes, we’re always more than happy to hear from our readership.