New, Easier Way to Get Answers from HR

The Human Resources Service Center team can answer routine questions about a wide range of human resources programs, policies, and procedures, such as enrolling in a benefits program, flexible spending accounts, tuition remission, employee status change, leaves, the hiring process, and new employee orientation. Photo by Melissa Ostrow

Have a question about vacation time or dental insurance? Need to check out how much vacation time you’ve accrued or how to enroll in the BU retirement plan? The new Human Resources Service Center, which opened earlier this month, can answer all those questions and more. Human resources promises the new center will deliver better, faster customer service to all BU employees.

“The Human Resources Service Center is a key component in our work to improve human resources services to faculty, staff, and University leadership,” says Carolyn Brownawell, executive director of human resources. “There will be one place where employees can call for answers to different types of questions.”

To access the Service Center, employees can either email their questions to HR@bu.edu, call 617-353-2380, or send a fax (details for faxing appear at the end of this story). The email and phone number are the same for employees on both the Charles River and Medical Campuses.

The Service Center—staffed by 14 people and located within the human resources office at 25 Buick St. and on the Medical Campus at Crosstown Center, 801 Massachusetts Ave., Suite 400—can answer routine questions about a wide range of human resources programs, policies, and procedures, such as enrolling in a benefits program, flexible spending accounts, tuition remission, employee status change, leaves, and the process of hiring and new employee orientation.

“An HR service center is a benchmark practice for any large organization, and we’re one of Boston’s largest employers,” says Dietrich Warner, human resources operations director, who cites similar centers at MIT and Boston College. “This program has been in the making for about a year and a half.”

The change is a “key component” of human resource’s larger, three-to-five-year plan for how HR delivers services to the University, and the HR Service Center is the foundation for that change.

The HR Service Center consolidates different service areas that were previously handled across the department, Brownawell says. When you visited the human resources website, “you’d see several different names and phone numbers to call if you were having a baby, for instance,” she says. “Now there’s one number to call and one email to have these questions answered. We have a state-of-the-art system behind our team as well, which helps us track questions, share information more easily, and provide responses faster. We have also expanded our hours to better serve faculty and staff. These types of changes are an important component of supporting the vision of ‘One BU’.”

More complex questions can be directed to a school or department’s human resources business partner. The kind of queries requiring additional assistance might include questions about career development, relationships with coworkers, performance issues, and resignations or exit interviews. To find the HR business partner for your school or department, click here and enter the name of your department.

“As a result of rapid improvements in technology, HR customer service is changing, and people are expecting answers faster and automatically where possible,” Brownawell says. “We hope confusion about whom to call is eliminated, and now there is one place where people can get answers to multiple types of questions.”

The Human Resources Service Center is open Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., and can be reached by email (HR@bu.edu), by calling 617-353-2380, or by faxing 888-975-1568.