You have HR questions. We have answers.

Not sure where to start for answers to your employment questions? The Human Resources Service Centre has a new service desk intake system with a guaranteed status update within 48 hours and a tracking system for your query.

Just email hr.mcmaster@mcmaster.ca or call extension 222-HR (22257) to reach the service intake team who will answer your question or direct you to the person who can. Emails are all tracked through a JIRA ticket system to ensure they are assigned to the appropriate person and resolved.

The suggestion to implement this system came from discussions with department administrators across the campus to increase clarity around HR contacts and to provide uninterrupted coverage when individuals are out of office. The idea was spurred by data in the Uniforum benchmarking study that looks at service delivery compared with other universities around the world.

The service had a soft launch in August to test and learn about common questions and what’s working best to answer them for the university community. It’s part of an ongoing continuous improvement initiative within the human resources department.

Delia Hutchinson is an administrator with the department of Anthropology. She says the new email ticket system has made a difference in her daily human resources work, giving her time to work on less task-oriented items.

“I am more efficient with the new set-up because I can use the email JIRA system to track my pending hires instead of yet another spreadsheet,” she says. “The system also allows me to quickly prompt and follow-up if needed. I also like that I receive notifications when items are completed.”

Christine Speare-van Vugt, administrative assistant with the School of the Arts, agrees that the new system has made her life easier.

“There’s a great deal of follow-up, letting me know that it is being looked at, implemented, or resolved,” she says. “I interact with HR dozens of times a day. I am very impressed with their service.”

Since the launch, the new system has received about 400 user reviews with an average rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars.

In the first three months, the upgraded service desk had:

• 3707 tickets created
• 3469 tickets resolved (93% resolution rate)
• 238 tickets currently in progress
• Peak month was September with a total of 1439 tickets created

In addition to emails, the service intake team answered a total of 1582 calls to 222-HR during the same time period. The top employee inquiries include recruitment and payroll-related questions as well as employment verification requests. After the successful soft launch, the service is now open to all employees, who are encouraged to use the hr.mcmaster@mcmaster.ca email and 222-HR phone line as a first point of contact.

Departmental HR administrators can use the service to track a wide variety of tasks such as payroll direct deposit updates; interim, teaching assistant, and sessional faculty hires; and one-time and continuing special premium payments.

Franca Berti-Bogojevic, Director, HR Strategic Partnerships and Initiatives & the HR Service Centre says the new service intake system does not replace contacting your current HR representative but helps to triage questions to the right person and answer common, straightforward questions right away.

“Relationships with our HR Advisors, HR Managers and FHS HR Consultants are still extremely important,” she says. “And the new intake system frees them up to address more complex HR matters more quickly, while we can track all questions, trends and our response time as we strive to deliver more seamless service across our McMaster community.”

Related: Human Resources launches new website