HRIS is Not a Drive-Thru

Stop taking orders. Start leading the system.

Dani from Texas reporting back from the TOLA RUG (Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Arkansas), and the Customer Sharing Movement (CSM) Sharing Café,...

In last week's Sharing Café poll, we offered four choices:

Two themes surfaced from this poll:

• Interruptions

• Politics

  
  

At TOLA, we talked about it head-on. HRIS professionals are tired of being pinged constantly, deprioritized repeatedly, and asked to deliver strategy without the space to build it.

You can’t run a roadmap if your day is a Slack feed of “quick asks.” That’s why it's important to rebuild the way we work.

But before diving in…look at this Workday crew at the TOLA RUG in Dallas!!!

A ton of Workday experience all in one room:

Politics is a System Problem, not a People Problem

HRIS struggles with politics more than we would like to admit:

• Competing priorities

• Leadership opinions dressed as requirements

  
  

We've all been there.

Here’s the truth most teams avoid: The best way to combat politics is with process.

A robust intake form is harder to argue with than your gut.

A scoring system gives you backup when someone “just wants it done.”

Governance isn’t red tape. It’s armor.

When your process is respected, you don’t have to fight as hard to be respected.

Step 1: Define the Work

We tracked everything:

• Slack pings

• Tickets

• Meetings

• Approvals

• Fire drills

70% percent of our time was spent reacting, not delivering.

So, we redefined the work into three categories:

Tasks

• Low-effort, low-impact

• Example: Pulling one-off reports or helping with errors

Projects

• Require testing, configuration, and cross-functional input

• Example: Launching Workday Assistant, building new comp letters

Steady-State

• Recurring cycles that return every quarter or year

• Example: Open enrollment, comp reviews, Workday releases

Want to see how we structured it? Dive into the video!

Once we named the work, we could start protecting time for what mattered.

Step 2: Score the Politics Out

Not all work is equal. And we stopped pretending it was. We introduced a scoring model with five criteria:

Since you will find 90% of projects fall into “important” get ready to force rank within that category.

We scored based off criticality, company goals, effort, risk, and visibility.

The score wasn’t just a number. It was our shield.

Suddenly, politics had a process to answer to.

Step 3: Govern with Intention

Governance doesn’t stall progress.

Lack of governance does.

What we implemented:

• A non-negotiable intake form

• A cross-functional review rhythm

• Executive ownership from CHRO or CIO

Governance doesn’t mean projects need to get complicated. But it does mean slowing down to redefine how you work.

TL;DR? Here’s ideas of what you can do tomorrow to combat politics and constant disruptions:

• Achieve one thing on your backlog

• Say no to a request that skips your intake process

• Ask: “what outcome does this support?” If they can’t answer, you already have your answer

Final Thought

HRIS isn’t about saying yes faster.

It’s about building what matters, without burning your team out in the process.

What are your thoughts? Comment below or on my LinkedIn post.

Author: Dani from TX