Note: If you’re reading this in the southern hemisphere it doesn’t matter what way these time drains spin, you can flush them all the same.
With more and more being asked of People Ops and HR departments, leaders are finding that they’re managing teams lacking the bandwidth to effectively perform the truly impactful work they got into the industry for. When your team’s productivity is getting pulled down by time-intensive processes they simply can’t invest in initiatives that could be positively impacting the employee experience at your organization.
Instead, you and your team spend hours navigating clunky and outdated tech systems and tangled spreadsheets trying to do their day-to-day tasks manually and hoping they aren’t succumbing to clerical errors or compliance issues. Not only does this negatively impact employee satisfaction within People Ops and HR teams, but it also affects the level of service you can provide to the entire employee population which may lead to lower retention rates, reduced productivity and reduced profitability.
But not all hope is lost. These are just a few of the time drains that you can wash off your list of headache-inducing to-dos today.
1. Training and Development: Unlocking Employee Potential
Training and development initiatives play a crucial role in enhancing employee skills, engagement, and organizational growth…they are also a major time commitment to do on your own. Virtual training tools and online learning platforms can greatly benefit your bandwidth while enabling you to deliver more targeted and personalized training programs to your peeps.
This not only saves you time, but it increases your ability to deliver better professional development opportunities. Less work and a more skilled and engaged workforce? Down the drain goes handling training and development on your own.
2. Administrative Tasks: Automating for Efficiency
HR software has come a long way, and not taking advantage of the latest and greatest could mean you and your team are trying to push your goals through a clogged drain (we’re running out of plumbing puns…don’t worry) Don’t let administrative tasks impede you and your team from focusing on the strategic initiatives that can influence your org’s bottom line.
Automated solutions can take the burden of managing employee records, payroll processing, and benefits enrollment off your plate for good, freeing up valuable time, reducing errors, and improving overall efficiency so your team can impact overall organizational success.
3. Employee Support: Empowering Self-Service
How many times in a week do you think to yourself, “Here, let me forward the email I already sent out covering this exact question?” Making it easy for employees to self-serve can free up a tremendous amount of time your team would otherwise be spending on addressing employee inquiries and requests. By implementing employee self-service portals, you give employees access to a slew of opportunities that makes everyone’s lives easier.
Maybe it allows them to update their personal information in your database, or request time off. Perhaps you’ll have a portal where they can submit and retrieve important HR documents so you aren’t worried about rogue email threads or data security. Alleviating the HR workload and allowing employees to easily get the info they need delivers a frictionless and effective experience to employees while freeing up the hours for your team needed to do more impactful work than fielding emails.
4. Analytics and Reporting: Data-Driven Decision Making
Gone are the days of manual data collection and analysis. *checks around* They won’t be missed. Leveraging analytics tools allows you to make informed decisions, identify areas for improvement, and ensure that your team’s strategies and initiatives are aligned with your organization’s business objectives.
Perhaps more importantly, by ditching all the time drains in this blog you’ll actually have the time to take action on these informed decisions and put in the hours required to improve the areas you’ve identified. With automated data collection, analysis, and visualization, you can turn a sea of information into pretty digestible reports, which will help tell your story and get buy-in from leadership.
5. Leave of Absence Management: Streamlined Employee Support When Needed Most
Leave of absence management is one of the biggest wildcard time drains HR and People Ops teams are responsible for. From maternity leave to bereavement leave, there are countless scenarios your team is responsible for understanding and managing, but adopting capable leave management software allows you to automate and standardize the leave journey for all parties involved.
No more manually tracking start and end dates in a spreadsheet, no more Googling leave laws in states you’ve never stepped foot in. A better leave experience has been proven to enhance employee satisfaction, keep you compliant, and ensure your energy and time are devoted elsewhere while your employees get support when they need it most.
Flush your time drains away
Leveraging the right technology can be the difference between your team trying to stay afloat in a sea of manual administrative tasks and a team that lets tech do the dirty work while they support employees in ways that make the biggest impact possible. You might not be able to flush everything all at once, but identifying your biggest time drains is a must if the goal is to one day unclog what’s been backing your team up.
About Tilt
Tilt is leading the charge in all things leave of absence management through easy-to-use tech and human touch. Since 2017, our proprietary platform and Empathy Warriors have been helping customers make leave not suck by eliminating administrative burdens, keeping companies compliant, and providing a truly positive and supportive leave of absence experience for their people.
