Leave the HR Paperwork Behind: How HR Software Can Streamline Your Business

By Generational Equity

10/09/2017

Most business owners hate paperwork, and the paperwork associated with hiring, promoting and firing employees can be among the most time-consuming and confusing of all.

If you’re still managing your workforce with a disorganized mix of spreadsheets, post-it notes and paper documents, it’s time to up your human resources (HR) game.

HR software can improve the accuracy of any required reporting for regulatory compliance and reduce the amount of time it takes to manage employee benefits and wages.

Simplify on-boarding

Rather than hand a new employee a bunch of paper forms to fill out on their first day, think how easy it would be to give them a link to an online portal. Cloud-based HR software lets your new employees easily enroll for their benefits and allows existing employees to make changes to their benefits without involving your or your HR specialist.

This means you’re freed from handling paperwork every time someone gets married, has a child or needs to change their withholding. The employee simply logs on and administers their own account, and can find answers about their benefits 24/7 without asking you.

Self-administration also improves employee satisfaction since they can handle simple issues quickly.

Data you can use

HR software can help your company more quickly quantify turnover issues for particular managers or job titles. Since replacement costs can vary from 30% of annual salary for an entry-level employee to 400% for an executive, reducing turnover offers significant ROI for your time and attention.

Pick a human resources software with automated goal-setting functionality and performance reviews, and you’ve added another way to track and motivate your staff.

HR software can also help your company stay on the right side of wage and hour compliance. Especially as federal, state and local regulations continue to grow and change, HR software makes it easier to ensure you’re meeting all necessary laws.

And, if your business grows across state lines where regulations may differ dramatically, HR software can keep your company compliant and penalty-free.

Workforce management

Despite the fact that your company has grown from 5 to 50 employees, do you still use a wall calendar to manage your team’s vacation and sick days? What worked when you were small is now likely time-consuming and error-prone as you record, approve and check each employee’s time-off balance.

The right HR software will automate this process, helping you identify a host of workforce issues like seasonal staffing shortfalls.

Such software can also help your company recognize a host of workforce issues, including when overtime costs have built to the point that it’s more cost-effective to add employees. Proper tracking can help your organization make informed decisions and plan for growth, so that you’ve got the right number of hands on deck to deliver promises to new customers.

Improve data security

Automating your HR department protects your business in the event of a natural disaster or burglary better than keeping a file cabinet full of paperwork.

Imagine if your company got flooded during Hurricanes Irma or Maria or burned in the wildfires of the Pacific Northwest. You’d spend significant time and effort replicating your HR files in a paper-based system.

Further, you are responsible for maintaining the security of each employee’s personally identifiable information, which is something much easier to do with a secure cloud-based software.

Finding an HR partner

Feel like you need more than expertise than software alone provides but don’t want to hire more staff? Explore the possibilities of partnering with a professional employer organization (PEO).

These companies support businesses with as few as five employees and provide a host of HR support services such as workforce and succession planning in addition to managing payroll, compliance reporting and other HR administrative tasks. The best PEOs will offer software to keep your HR paperless in addition to their human resources experts.

Partnering with a PEO may also allow you to offer big company benefits while you’re still a smaller-sized business.

A well-oiled human resources department will help you sell your business when the time comes. The savvy buyer will want to analyze your workforce for its longevity, talent and potential – all information that HR software can help you maintain.

By Jessica Johns Pool.

© 2017 Generational Equity, LLC. All Rights Reserved.