Bekkie Wetz
3 min read
What would you do with all the time in the world? At work, toiling away on administrative tasks can zap hours from your day, leaving little to no time to rejuvenate and engage your workforce. That’s especially true if you have a small team (or even a team of one!). But by using the right tools in your daily tasks, you can keep your workforce happy, while getting back a few hours of your work life.
Our Client Success Teams are tasked with helping our clients find ways to do their jobs better and faster by minimizing administration and increasing engagement.
With clients of all shapes and sizes, we’ve found that the smaller teams are (unsurprisingly) the most time-strapped.
Here are a few of our favourite suggestions to save time on a small HR team:
Plan recognition quickly and efficiently
For planned recognition initiatives, such as rewarding long service or birthdays, it can be a tedious time waster to constantly plan reminders and potentially miss out on recognition opportunities. By scheduling them in advance with a simple upload of one file with employees, dates, amounts and personalized messages, you can put together an entire year’s worth of awards in less than an hour. Or involve your data team and get a standardized report - even easier! Linking your employee reward system to an employee discounts platform means you can send vouchers for popular retailers to your employees as a “well done” for their hard work.
Use search smarter
Recently, we’ve upgraded search capabilities on our SmartHub® employee engagement platform to include more search terms to be able to quickly find the latest news and search specifically within all platform content . The best part is that it’s updated in real-time, so once content is uploaded onto a platform, it will be accessible via search right away. So if your new hire wants to know about options for hotel discounts, it will be easier for her to search rather than answering queries in your inbox.
Create campaigns in advance
You’re well aware of how much time goes into planning a communications campaign to launch new initiatives, such as a new benefit, platform or recognition program. But what if you could schedule all your communications, including a whole refresh of your platform’s homepage, well in advance? If your engagement tool has an auto-scheduling feature, you can “set it and forget it” for inflexible dates and big announcements such as open enrollment or seasonal reminders.
Save time on payroll administration
Too often, HR administration is spent on a myriad of different benefits portals or confusing and clunky intranets. But what if your benefits were all in one place? Our payroll administration portal for salary sacrifice allows users to combine all salary sacrifice products under the Reward Gateway umbrella (Cycle to Work, SmartTech, Childcare Vouchers and Holiday Trading) all in one central, manageable place. HR can quickly auto-approve employees budgets for salary sacrifice benefits based on an allowance or their actual salaries, reducing the worries around non-compliance risk and saving valuable time.
Get employee feedback digitally (fast!)
Polling employees at a quarterly staff meeting or other staff wide function is a great idea, but for a dispersed workforce with a variety of office locations or a large number of remote workers, it can be difficult to get feedback in real time. Creating a poll to host on your platform can get real-time feedback from your staff on topics like general happiness at the company, whether they understand a new benefit or even what Halloween candy you should stock the office cafe with.
We’re always on the lookout for new ideas to improve our platform’s capabilities and help improve HR’s day to day. Tell me, what’s the biggest time waster in your week?