by Robert Hicks, group HR director
If your organisation is on the smaller side (or if you’ve got a small team), likely one of the largest frustrations you’ve got is wasting valuable time answering questions such as:
- Where can I find that?
- What does this mean?
- How much holiday time do I have?
- When’s that new benefit going live?
If you’re anything like us, you’d prefer to spend it doing the more impactful parts of HR: interviewing and hiring talented employees, engaging your workforce and doing everything you can to make the world a better place to work.
But too often you may find yourself bogged down by administrative work — answering fellow colleagues’ questions, checking (and rechecking) your data entry and spending too much on the phone with your IT department to integrate yet another new platform.
And that may be because some of your HR programmes such as employee benefits, reward and recognition, wellbeing, internal communication tools, etc., are located on different technology platforms that don’t interact with one another.
An all-in-one employee engagement platform such as Reward Gateway’s helps centralise HR initiatives and eliminate those outdated concepts. When I joined Reward Gateway, I was delighted to start using our all-in-one engagement system, which places all these pieces under one roof and removed the need for greater admin that I’d dealt with in the past.
A centralised system helps me:
- Reduce administrative tasks
- Cut down on paperwork
- Make it easier for employees to find out information with having having to ask
- And boost employee participation by shining a steady light on HR initiatives.
But just how does it accomplish this? By solving your issues with these three Cs: consistency, consolidation and communication.
ConsistencyHere’s a scenario you don’t want happening at your workplace: You launch a new employee recognition programme that allows employees to nominate their peers for an award, but it’s on a separate network from your other HR programmes.
So to participate in the programme and nominate their peers, employees are required to visit a new website, create a new profile and enter a new password. Months later, you decide to implement an employee discounts scheme for an extra benefit to stretch your employees’ income, on a separate platform.
When employees could be ticking off the boxes to engage with a recognition programme and also shopping for their dream holiday (at a discount), they instead get confused and frustrated, can’t find the website(s) or have lost their password. Instead of spending your time refining your next employee engagement initiatives, you’re resetting passwords and continually explaining to employees platform features.
A centralised employee engagement platform gives you magic: SSO (single sign-on) is a lifesaver for the forgetful and a key win for your hard-working IT teams. It helps create a cohesive experience that utilises a single profile and password for each employee. Because absolutely nobody likes juggling a million passwords.
ConsolidationPrinting can be a big cost to a business, especially when content gets continually updated and redesigned as your company evolves. With every little change, updating the pages is a burden on whatever team is handling the edits, and you almost always run into a version control issue.
Besides your employee handbook, think about what else you typically have to print: Payslips, employee share information, benefits overviews … the list goes on and on. HR technology such as SmartHub® can help you consolidate these clunky printed pages into more user-friendly digital pages where you can host links to important information, such as your induction, leadership team bios, employee stories and more.
If something is outdated or needs to be updated, simply update it or delete it within the platform and be assured that no one will access any old information ever again.
CommunicationIf you’re going to invest in HR programmes, you need to ensure that employees take advantage of them and prove the ROI to your leadership team that your investments were worth it. One of the biggest roadblocks to engaging your workforce? Communication.
You need an internal communications strategy that informs and educates employees about the benefits you offer. A centralised engagement platform is a key component of that strategy. It aggregates all of your initiatives into a central hub so that employees are reminded of every initiative each time they visit and use the platform.
It also allows you to create focused, targeted messages aimed at specific segments within your organisation so you can deliver the right message to the right people.
By using your platform to cut down some of the time spent on communicating and storing information on your HR initiatives, you can further prove a return on investment (ROI) in the platform for benefits that extend beyond the employee experience.
At the end of the day (or night) I always find myself wishing for more hours. The right kind of technology that helps me do my job better — and faster — is a no brainer that helps me make the most of the limited hours we’ve got in our workdays.
