The majority of human resource (HR) departments manage a vast amount of sensitive business information and often the processes associated are paper or spreadsheet based and notoriously very tedious, error-prone and time-consuming. For HR managers like yourself, this can provide a range of issues including human error, loss of information, unnecessary time spent locating data, resolving problems and communicating internally. But there is a solution, implementing an efficient business software system can save valuable time and money through the automation of these five HR management processes.
Holidays
The employee annual leave request process is an enormous task in larger organisations, and it’s easy for miscommunication to occur, or for employees to have holidays booked at the same time or a member of staff to take more days than they have in their allowance.
An automated software system will administer the booking, approval and notification of all employee holidays; it offers the visibility to department managers to know who is on annual leave and when, and also allows employees to see how many days they have taken and how many they have left from their entitlement. The main benefit that automation provides to this process is the ability to remove human error; the system automatically detects if someone else has already requested the same dates and will notify management or could stop this from happening at the source.
Sickness and Absence
Employee absence is a large cost for every business and efficient handling of all employee absences from day one until their return to work is crucial for both business and employee wellbeing, not to mention regulatory compliance. For HR managers that are trying to reduce the overall employee absence rate, implementing an efficient and easy to use business process could help you achieve your goal and save money at the same time.
Creating a structured process that accounts for both business and staff wellbeing is important, once you have established this process implementing it through a business platform using automation ensures everyone follows the procedure. The right system will send automatic notifications or reminders to the appropriate users regarding certain stages of the process and help your business actively work towards decreasing your absence rate not to mention improving the health and wellbeing of the workforce.
Policies and Procedures
HR departments usually store and distribute a range of policies and documentation throughout the organisation, this can be a costly process if you are printing hundreds of copies over time. With out of date handbooks and policies in circulation, this becomes a risk as well as an inconvenience. In many cases publishing policy information on an intranet only reaches a proportion of the workforce with lower grade staff, more remote workers or people on customer sites with little or no access to the information. It is often this user community that has the greatest need to access the company policies and procedures.
If you implement a software platform that allows you to upload and version control all of your policies and procedures onto the system, it will be able to automatically notify new users and all existing users when a policy is updated; this will help you to reduce costs with regards to printing and distribution. The best systems will allow employees to access the information they require any time of the day or night not only via a Web Browser but by stand-alone mobile application too.
Employee Information
The management of substantial amounts of data whether it’s in a physical or digital form can come with a host of problems. Physical data is costly to store, time intensive to file and locate and at risk of being lost or damaged. While digital data in the form of a spreadsheet document is only accessible by one user at a time, prone to human error and often version issues occur where different people have different versions of a single report. Even corporate quality HR systems come with their own problems including data only being accessible to the HR department, which becomes a bottleneck for system updates and accuracy of information.
Storing your information on a system or pulling your information from an external source to the platform will help your team to update and maintain employee information efficiently. But it will also send automatic notifications to new users asking them to input the required information and send regular reminders to all users asking them to check and update their data, which will save a substantial amount of time and ensure your information is up to date and accurate. Also, managing employee information through a secure system keeps sensitive and confidential information safe. Once implemented and managed well this HR information can then be the enabler that allows so many other internal processes to operate quickly and efficiently underpinned by HR.
Reminders
Although you might not see reminders as a process, HR departments handle dates for renewals, training, accreditation, appraisals and probation periods, significant milestones can be missed if these dates are forgotten or not managed effectively, and procedures are not adhered to continuously.
Implementing the right software solution will allow you to remove the risk of missing deadlines for any task by creating automatic notifications to be sent, by exception, to the relevant member of staff or yourself, this will increase your departmental productivity and ensure that you are complying with procedures.
