IT x HR: How can you facilitate this crucial collaboration for your performance?

I'm delighted to talk to you today about my experience of the relationship between IT and HR departments in the startups and scaleups we work for on a daily basis.

I hope my feedback can shed some light on your decisions regarding this important lever of your company's performance, especially if you're in a rapid growth phase! 📈

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Onboarding: teamwork between HR and IT 🤝

In the life of an employee in your company, after the recruitment phase comesonboarding.

The new recruit takes advantage of this key period to :

• get to know your teams ;
• make your company premises your own;
• discover internal procedures and means of communication...
• and so much more!

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In reality,onboarding is a process made up of many stages, all of which are important for the successful and serene integration of your new employees.

And what we really don't want is for the IT part of onboarding to cost you time or force you to deal with emergencies... Especially as the rest of onboarding is highly dependent on the rapid availability of the necessary IT equipment!

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But who is in charge of this onboarding phase?

An employee's first point of contact with your company is the Human Resources department. Its role is to manage employees and ensure they have the tools and framework, to be effective and fulfilled in their role. 🦾

For its part, the IT Department is responsible for managing the information system, and therefore the computers, access and software used by the company.

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There's one area where both departments need to work together : the workstation . This includes:

• equipment (computer, monitor, mouse, office furniture, etc.) ;
• software (office tools, ERP, CRM, etc.) ;
• and access (for example, to Gmail, Slack, Notion or many other tools).

The workstation is one of the keys to your employees' productivity. It depends directly on IT, but also on HR in the case of onboarding.

So it's a bit complicated!

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Between IT and HR: who does what? 🤔

So, between IT and HR, who does what in the traditional onboarding scheme?

But also :

• How do you pass on information?
• How do I order a new computer?
• Who takes care of it, where and how?
• How far in advance do I need to order a computer?
• Who defines the type of equipment, the allocated budget and the required delivery date?

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These are the many practical questions that arise in most of the companies we meet. What I observe is that processes often remain ill-defined. 😣

The result? Everything goes well, as long as the team is small... But misunderstandings, friction and wasted time quickly appear, as soon as the team expands.

And this is particularly true during phases of hypergrowth!

What's needed to solve these problems is a tool to "guide" practice.

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Focus on offboarding! 🛫

When an employee leaves, the IT department is not responsible for recovering the equipment, for legal reasons.

Indeed, offboarding must be managed by Human Resources, to guarantee the security of computer data and the good condition of hardware. This is particularly important in the event of a conflicting departure.

But until the IT team has physically recovered the hardware, it's hard to know where and in what condition a specific computer is! This can quickly turn into a headache.

IT & HR collaboration: 3 steps to improve processes

Step 1: Define scope of responsibility

I'd also like to draw your attention to the importance of more fluid collaboration between IT and HR teams.

In concrete terms, this means precisely defining the scope of each team's responsibilities.

A range of issues need to be openly and explicitly addressed and resolved, such as the following:

• Who manages computer-related invoices?
• Who is responsible for ordering new IT hardware for a given department?
• Which department is responsible for offboarding?

This first step is fundamental to ensuring that the rules are defined and known by the whole team.

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Step 2: Improving communication

IT and HR departments most often communicate with the usual communication tools provided by their companies: email, Slack, Notion, Typeform, etc. ✉️

These tools are useful in many cases, but are not ideal for centralizing information about your IT assets.

For this, you need a dedicated solution designed specifically to handle this mission.

If your company uses an all-in-one IT asset management platform like Rzilient, your teams hardly need to communicate on the subject any more. Everything is defined upstream, centralized and largely automated!

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Step 3: Automate and centralize IT asset management

To get organized, many startups create templates, or standard orders, enabling teams to define their needs in terms of IT equipment. 📄

For example, a computer developer will receive a 16-inch Mac with special features, or a web designer will benefit from a larger screen and a high-performance graphics card.

It's usually the IT team that defines computer performance, according to employee functions.

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How can you facilitate the purchase (or rental) of your IT equipment? Whether you work for HR or IT, you can create your product catalogs according to your organization's profiles. And all directly from our platform in the purchasing interface! So you don't have to ask yourself any more questions: your references are pre-filtered according to the profile of your next recruit. It's that simple!

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You might ask: what about a simple Excel or Google Sheets file?

There are many problems with these files:

• reading errors ;
• WASTE OF TIME;
• accidentally overwriting important information ;
• forget to perform certain actions...

Information about your IT assets must be visible to the people who need it!

Why do we advise HR and IT teams to use the Rzilient platform?

The key advantage for your teams of using the Rzilient platform is to offer them a space to manage your IT assets independently.

Whether in HR, IT or the departments themselves, any employee or manager is able to order the necessary equipment autonomously, provided they have received prior authorization. ✔️

What's more, the catalog is pre-filtered according to profile. So there's little risk of equipping it with under- or over-performing equipment.

Rzilient gives you peace of mind: you have a centralized view of arrivals and departures, computers in stock, their condition and status (ready or not), and so on.

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You'll also save an enormous amount of time during offboarding. The tool enables you to effectively manage the closing of accesses (Slack, messaging and all other IS-related areas).

I'd like to take this opportunity to mention one last interesting aspect of using Rzilient: international deployment. An expanding start-up doesn't always have a dedicated IT team in every country where it operates. This can make it difficult to manage local stocks of computers. But not with Rzilient! With our platform, anyone can take charge of managing a computer stock, without having to have advanced IT skills.

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In short, without Rzilient, managing HR and IT links generates losses:

• money (poor inventory management) ;
• time ;
• productivity (long time to give employees the tools they need).

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