In a small business, most of the tasks related to personnel management can be done face-to-face—but when the company starts to grow, all of this becomes very difficult.
The risk of making mistakes or losing information along the way becomes very high—including the risk of upsetting your staff due to inaccuracies on their pay slips or delays in responding to their requests.
In general terms, since personnel administration becomes a more and more complicated task, companies with over 15 employees need to introduce structure in the management of their human resources.
How to avoid the phenomenon of tasks piling up?
Just think of how many requests each of your human resources might make to their direct manager during any particular quarter: an urgent need for a few days off to deal with a family problem, an answer on the issue of planning vacation time so that their family would be happy and they wouldn’t lose the special holiday deal they’d found, an absence due to illness and the processing of the medical certificate, a request for a few hours off to pick up their son’s report card, a travel delay due to a train service malfunction, etc.
And there’s even more: time off for maternity leave, the processing of requests for workplace injury compensation, requests for a leave of absence, the approval of overtime for the week, keeping track of vacation days still unused, and so on.
If we multiply this whole range of possibilities by the number of your employees and co-workers, you can see that things can get complicated fast!
Furthermore, when employee activities are taking place off-site (for instance, in the case of salespersons), it becomes impossible for them to clock in and out without a terminal or a device that offers geolocation functions.
And it’s not just clocking in and out: uploading certificates and various documents can be a difficult operation to perform remotely if you are not using the right technology. However, nowadays, thanks to the Internet, smartphones and cloud-based solutions, physical location is no longer a limitation.
Don’t panic! Managing personnel can be a simple matter
Most modern employee management platforms put the individual employee at the center, by giving them access to a personal area from which they can carry out all tasks that concern them, including from their smartphone. They can request holidays and leave days, get approval for overtime, clock in and out, resolve anomalies involving them, etc.
At the same time, such solutions offer managers the ability to personally take care of their team, responding to requests in a timely manner and keeping the situation always under control.
With such solutions, the Human Resources department won’t have to go into panic mode at the end of the month when they need to answer all the requests they’ve received, ask for missing documents, request the approval of extra time, cancel hours representing delays which fall outside the tolerance ranges approved by the management, etc.
Furthermore, the process of issuing pay slips, whether managed internally or outsourced, will no longer bring any unwelcome surprises for anyone.
Benefits for everyone involved
Making the employee a protagonist in the management of their requests and problems will make them more proactive and responsible: they will feel that they are part of the process, as opposed to being at the mercy of outside events.
A more involved employee is also a more satisfied one. Furthermore, a more engaged employee means that the Human Resources department and the management will have less work to do.
Ultimately, the process of collaboration and sharing involving all departments will lead to an improved internal climate in the company, reducing the time needed for management tasks as well as the possibility for error.
At the same time, those at the head of the company will always have an updated overview on the current attendance situation and on the predicted future availability of their employees. In this way, the scheduling of shifts, projects and expenses will be accomplished on the basis of solid data.
Written and developed by SoftDoit
