Leveraging on technology to maximise HR productivity

With productivity rising extremely slow in recent years, the drain on existing resources which are already overstretched is getting more and more apparent.

Our productivity stagnation came about a few years ago and when a survey conducted by JobStreet was done in 2013, 60% of the Singapore workers surveyed feel mental fatigue at work.

The sentiment should maintain or be even worse by now.

The built-up has led to the findings by Randstad Award employer branding survey that 3 in 10 employees in Singapore are thinking of resigning this year.

Let’s face it.

Much as every government official is singing the same tune, improving productivity is not an overnight task.

It calls for a massive scrutiny of the existing business models and processes. And the new ones might not even work, putting you back to square one.

But still that is required for the longevity of the business. Meanwhile you can still find ways to shave a few hours here and there so you can achieve more with the same or even less.

The easiest way to do so is to leverage on technology to reduce the amount of effort or time that is usually taken to do the same amount of tasks. But not just any kind of technology. Implementing a monster like SAP will take a dynasty change before it materialises.

It is much easier to adopt bite-sized cloud solutions that target on a specific segment.

Plus it is usually much cheaper so you can afford the mistakes and most cloud solutions providers no longer have tie-in periods for competitive reasons.

Since I’m more in tune with HR, here are 3 HR spectrums that you could save massive amount of time by going to the clouds:

Recruitment
Writing the job description, putting it out on different portals, going through hundreds of resumes one by one, contacting the ones that are suitable via phone/email/sms and we have not even reached interview scheduling.

The above will consume hours from any given day. And unless you can hire within a day of turnaround, you have to repeat this almost every day until the position is filled.

That is when you pray the one hired will be there long enough so you can do other work.

Solution
Applicant Tracking System is the way to go. It can’t help you automate drafting of a job description but the right one could help you push the content out to multiple portals at the same time, rank the resumes based on a Boolean or Semantic score card, and only surface the right candidates for you to see.

Even interview arrangement and contacting of candidates can be done at scale, leaving you with more time to deal with other more important HR work.

StaffOnDemand is a cloud recruitment platform that helps you to recruit staff faster and easier, giving you full control and overview of your entire recruitment process.

Employee Benefits
The thing about employee benefits is that it can be limitless.

To be competitive in hiring, many companies go beyond and offer tangible items that employees can procure and use. Some provide health supplement allowance, others perhaps reimbursing you on optical accessories.

And each of them has to be given a spending limit relevant to the item. Tracking it for an entire company can be painful and error-prone.

Solution
Make use of employee benefits intermediaries to contain and provide your employees with ease and variety of selection. Tracking is automated and there will always be consistency between all parties on what is available and what is exhausted.

Rewardz offers a comprehensive solution for your HR team by consolidating all staff perks into a simple online portal, accessible by employees from any physical location.

Payroll
You only need to do it once a month but it is once a month too many.

Filing the paper receipts, especially the taxi ones that fade away, entering the right variable amount to the right person on the right schedule. And finally sending out the payslips, only for it to be returned due to inaccuracies. Another day of productivity sucked away by another monotonous task.

Solution
There are payroll solutions that you can buy but you would still need to do the manual entry. Recently SPRING Singapore put together a panel of vendors that fall under a HR Shared Services Scheme. Within it you could select a payroll outsourcing vendor and get up to 70% funding at the same time.

AGHRM is one of the selected vendors and their solutions also allow e-administration of leaves, claims, and attendance.