For any modern-day HR professional, technology is now considered to be a necessity within the organisation’s software stack rather than a ‘nice-to-have’.
When integrating savvy tech into existing HR processes, it is vital that your in-house team is able to log every Employee Relations (ER) matter so that you can track, analyse and report on key information, in real-time.
Throughout our ongoing conversations with HR and ER professionals, we understand that workforces are developing and enhancing their technical knowledge and that has led to many organisations believing they are outgrowing their legacy IT systems.
So, what they are being left with is the challenge of battling through manually intensive spreadsheets and/or a basic admin system that is not meeting their forward-thinking needs. And when HR leaders are being challenged to make swift, strategic decisions – with mountains of case notes, voice recordings and CCTV footage building up – that must be addressed sooner rather than later.
To provide further support, we are rolling out a series of advice-led blog pieces for users of our ER case management tool, MyHRCases. As well as our technology, which already enables HR professionals to escalate in-house matters to their own ESPHR legal advisory team – we are continuing to make more system developments to further empower ER teams.
Following the popularity of her first blog, our head of HR systems, Teresa Riley, has pulled together some top tips to help you utilise MyHRCases by managing time, resources and budgets more effectively when it comes to documenting complex ER matters.
1. Addressing training needs
Every piece of information that you record is stored securely on MyHRCases in one, easy-to-use cloud-based system which not only provides your HR team with real-time visibility over the progress of cases, but also informs as to whether further in-house development and resources are required.
By analysing the types – and categories – of ER issues that you are experiencing as a business, you will be able to establish the gaps in managers’ knowledge that are giving rise to this. For example, there may be an unusual amount of discrimination issues that highlights a requirement to upskill your leaders in the area of equal opportunities. Or perhaps you have identified an upsurge in sickness absence issues because they are not being handled effectively on a daily basis?
Such trends can be accessed in your Dashboard when you login or via the ‘My Reports’ section.
2. Identifying resourcing requirements
By logging all your ER activity onto MyHRCases – using both the ‘In-House’ and ‘ESP Matters’ sections – you can spot trends and patterns in employee behaviour and assess workloads throughout the year.
This is a great way for leaders to utilise the real-time insight and effectively plan – and justify – any team staffing needs and whether more training needs to be provided. It can also go a long way towards addressing productivity and helping individuals who might need additional support to manage their assigned cases.
3. Assisting HR leaders to understand local issues and carry out organisational mapping tasks
When many companies are operating from multiple locations – particularly during the current climate – it is sometimes difficult to keep on top of who is responsible for each individual ER matter. Admin users of MyHRCases can easily ‘Manage Users’, giving varying levels of access to users across multiple locations and enable them to quickly see which cases are assigned to whom.
To support this, MyHRCases allows you to easily replicate any type of corporate structure, however complex. Recording this information against the matter in question enables your management information to take on a completely new dimension when generating reports. The below structure tree gives an example of what is possible when it comes to analysing caseloads by region, area and city.
4. Using tags to enable bespoke reporting opportunities
As a MyHRCases customer, you can attach ‘Tags’ to your matters which provide another way to ‘slice and dice’ the relevant data. Users can create their own keywords so they can continue to effectively organise each case into manageable categories, and keep track of all issues – and their progress – accordingly.
5. Accessing our enhanced Employment Tribunal (ET) claims tracking function – coming soon!
Our next release of software development brings with it the launch of our enhanced ‘ET Claims’ recording and reporting capability. This has been designed and built in close collaboration with one of our customers for whom we are tracking the progress of their cases – and most significantly the costs that are involved. This will provide a crucial step towards assisting leaders to further control their HR budgets. We will have more on this for our MyHRCases customers soon.
Our support team is always on hand to help with any reporting queries you might have regarding MyHRCases, and we can work with you to build your bespoke settings and reports. Additionally, to find out more information about ESPHR’s ER case management tool, watch our 90-second video.
