HRIS Horror Stories

The spookiest time of the year is here and we have some HRIS Horror Stories that will make you shudder! The team have pulled together some of the scariest things they've come across throughout their HR & Payroll careers. Read our 12 scary stories below. Mwa-ha-ha…

What a Load of Sheet(s)

One of the scariest HRIS horror stories that still plagues us to this day is organisations who manage their HR and payroll on multiple, disparate spreadsheets. The risk of losing data and lack of compliance is enough to give anyone the heebie-jeebies!

The Nightmare of Date Formats

There once was a client who had employees in both the UK and the US. When submitting their data load, they included all employees from both locations in one spreadsheet. The Excel document was frightened by the different formats and messed up their date data. What a nightmare to rectify!

The Excel Nightmare Before Christmas 

Another Excel related nightmare, this time featuring haunting VLOOKUP’s and pasting errors, when an annual task of ordering shopping vouchers turned ghastly.

Most of the information needed was readily available in their HRIS, but a VLOOKUP was needed to gather additional address information for the vouchers to be distributed to various locations. On this fateful day, the file was somehow sorted without pasting the formulas as values and as $’s were used in the formulas to arrange ranges of data, unbeknownst to the beholder, the data became muddled and sent on its way.

A week later, on the last working Friday before Christmas, it was discovered that every location had received the wrong vouchers. After a day of working out what vouchers belong where, organising overnight couriers to get them to the right place and driving around to hand deliver to local locations, the user was scared for life and never to make that mistake again!

Moral of the story: when sorting in Excel, make sure you capture the entire range of data you need to sort and ensure that any formulas are pasted as values first or set up to refer to the correct range of information post-sorting!

Ghosts of Systems Past

For some people, there is nothing scarier than change. This organisation wanted to implement a new system, spending valuable time, money and resources, but didn’t want to change or improve any internal processes and keep everything working the same as before. Even with a brand new system, they wanted the ghosts of the past to remain.

Critical Updates from the Dead

An organisation once went live with a new payroll system while still relying on critical data updates from an antiquated and unsupported HR system. But not all stories have a ghastly ending; luckily this organisation soon realised their mistake and opted to implement a new HR system too.

Weekend Zombies

Working outside of your designated hours is terrifying enough but to have to work every weekend because your employee data is not integrated across the globe is another level of frightening.

These HR admins had to spend their weekends manually consolidating siloed data from each of their global locations into a manually collated report pack to present to the board on Monday morning. We wonder if the board received coherent messaging or sleep-deprived grunts and groans.

The Phantom Project Manager

In a corporate world not so far away, a client-side project manager joined their scheduled meeting, appearing briefly on screen before vanishing into the void, turning their camera off and putting themselves on mute. Questions were met with a ghostly silence and it was later discovered they had embarked on a casual shopping spree instead of participating in their meeting.

Just a Pile of Bones 

There once was a selection and implementation project being driven by the HR team with little consideration for the big picture. Processes and technical input from the IT team wasn’t considered until it was too late, which left the team in a mess and the business with a sub-standard solution that required more of a team to run it than originally proposed.

A Plank Minute 

During a full day of new systems training, the client set an alarm for every 2 hours to do a 1 minute plank. If you think a minute goes by really fast, you’ve never done a plank.

The Vanishing HR Director

Being hired to migrate from one HRIS to another within a fast-paced startup sounds exciting right? Wrong. Having joined at the end of the selection process, which was conducted by the HRD, this new hire had to implement their vision! 2 weeks into the job, the HRD went on holiday never to return, and as the role progressed, it was soon clear why!

The Night of the Leaving Unread

Communication is key, especially when selecting and implementing a new people system but after initiating the project, this client decided it was no longer their problem and proceeded to ghost any further questions.

BOO!

Nothing could give you a fright more than fully scoping a project than multiple global locations are added without warning!