Member Article

How to declutter your life as an employer

Being an employer comes with a certain amount of administration and paperwork which can easily become tedious and time consuming to manage, especially in a small business where you don’t have a dedicated HR person. Here are 5 tips to streamline your HR tasks and declutter your life as an employer.

1. Streamline your staff holidays

The problem: Most small businesses manage staff holidays via email, spreadsheets, or paper holiday request forms. This can be a real burden as you have to manually maintain everyone’s holiday records and totals and deal with queries from employees about how much holiday they have taken and have left. Additionally a spreadsheet doesn’t allow your staff to see when their colleagues are off so you can end up with multiple holiday requests for the same period.

The solution: There are a number of low-cost online systems in the marketplace that can automate this process for you (including OneTouchTeam). They allow your staff to request holidays online, manage the approval process and automatically maintain everyone’s holiday records and totals. They can also give visibility to everyone in the organisation of who is off when and provide a centralised holiday calendar.

2. Keep all your employee information in one place

The problem: As an employer you accumulate various information and files about your employees over time. This information typically ends up in a number of different places - in a filing cabinet, on your hard drive, in emails, on spreadsheets, in a draw…does that sound familiar? Then when you need to find something such as someone’s employment contract, date of birth, salary, home address or their last appraisal, you can’t find it…or it’s on your colleague’s computer who is not here today. It’s frustrating, I know, I’ve been there myself!

The solution: Store everything electronically in a single, secure place where you can your co-owners/directors can easily access it. There are various options to achieve this. Most HR systems provide you with online employee files where you can securely store information and documents for your team, and they are increasingly affordable for small businesses. Or you could use an online file storage facility such as Box.com, Dropbox for Business or Google Drive, although these focus on document storage rather than data.

3. Automate sickness certification

The problem: Whenever an employee returns from sickness, you are supposed to get them to complete a self-certification form in order for them to receive sick pay. Many employers don’t bother with this because it’s an administrative hassle and involves more paperwork. However, getting employees to complete a well structured self-certification form every time they are off sick is a proven way of minimising staff sickness as it shows them that you are taking absence seriously in your organisation.

The solution: Some of the online holiday planning software or HR systems mentioned above include a handy facility which automates the self-certification sickness process. So you just need to tell the system that the person was off sick and it will automatically email them an online self-certification sickness form for them to complete. Job done.

4. Keep on top of absenteeism

The problem: Absenteeism is far more common than employers realise, but it often fails to get spotted because many small employers don’t monitor their employees’ absence levels. This is understandable as traditionally it involves maintaining yet another spreadsheet!

The solution: An easy way to monitor your employees’ absences is to use a simple calculation called the Bradford Factor. This takes into account the number of times an employee has been off rather than just the total number of days they have been off. So it picks up on people who, for example, take frequent single sick days as opposed to an employee who was off for a week with genuine flu. Whilst you could build a spreadsheet that works out the Bradford Factor calculation, that’s not the point of decluttering your life! Instead, use an online holiday planning system or HR software that automatically monitors the Bradford Factor for you, as well as helping you with points 1-3 above.

5. Use email rather than letters

The problem: Because employing people has legal implications, much of your correspondence with employees needs to be in writing. This includes offer letters, confirmation of changes to contracts (such as salary increases, promotions, changes in working hours), disciplinary warnings etc.

The solution: ‘In writing’ doesn’t mean that you have to write a letter which can be time consuming. It’s perfectly acceptable to send the person an email which is much quicker and easier for both parties. Just make sure you save a copy of the email where you can easily find it it later (see point 2 above!).

Written by Stuart Hearn, CEO of OneTouchTeam

OneTouchTeam is an online HR and holiday management system designed especially for small organisations. Find out more on our website.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Onetouchteam .