McMaster faculty, staff and community members had an opportunity to learn more about the recently concluded Human Resources Review at a town hall meeting open to everyone.

Members of McMaster’s leadership team shared a summary of the HR Review process, recommendations and implementation plan during the October 28 event.

Faculty and staff heard from Acting President David Farrar, VP and Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences Paul O’Byrne, VP Administration Roger Couldrey and AVP & Chief Human Resources Officer Wanda McKenna, and had an opportunity to ask questions and learn more about next steps.

“The university encourages periodic reviews, both academic and administrative,” said Farrar, “and the HR review follows the previous Research Finance and Technology (IT) reviews. We assembled an excellent review panel that included internal stakeholders and external experts in human resources at other universities. The review panel spent many months listening to the McMaster community and hearing from stakeholders across the institution.”

The presentation outlined a focus on four key areas of recommendations: payroll processes, overall policy and process standardizations and simplifications, revisions to the HR service model and recruitment support.

“McMaster is a complex human resources environment,” said O’Byrne. “I’m supportive of the recommendations coming from the review and agree that we need to reduce complexity and deliver a better HR experience for everyone, creating better alignment of services across the entire university.”

“We’ve had very significant challenges with payroll processes in terms of duplication and sometimes triplication of work,” said Couldrey. “And we have significant opportunities with regards to use of technology, workflow and processes, benefits simplification and increased self-service. With collaboration and cooperation across the organization, we will make strides in delivering against the report recommendations.”

The leaders emphasized their support for the HR community across McMaster as they implement the recommendations of the review panel. They acknowledged that McMaster has grown significantly in the last decade and that current HR processes and systems no longer reflect today’s employee expectations for an accurate, secure, user friendly experience from their HR systems.

The report is available on the HR Review website.