Does the admin associated with managing your people take you away from actually managing your people?

Sometimes, one of the most tedious and time consuming things about managing your people are the administrative tasks that go with it.

As your business grows and so too your team, things like recruitment, on-boarding and payroll tend to demand your resources even more than they used to in the beginning simply due to the increase in workload associated with managing a larger team.

This isn’t necessarily a bad problem to have, because obviously a growing business and team indicate that things are going well! However when the ‘paperwork’ and administration associated with managing your people take you away from actually managing your people (and managing them well!), it may be time to look at how you can do things more efficiently with the help of a system solution to automate now inefficient, manual processes.

Let’s take recruitment as an example. If you’re hiring multiple jobs at once, and if those jobs attract large volumes of applications, keeping track of them via your email inbox can be a bit of an administrative nightmare! It doesn’t allow you to easily manage or communicate with candidates or move them efficiently through the recruitment process – anyone who has posted a job ad online could probably attest to this.

For the person responsible for recruitment in your business, whether they’re a dedicated HR resource or not, implementing an online recruitment system will literally change their life… at work anyway. Sounds dramatic we know, but trust us, completely life changing! Instead of sorting through and keeping track of applications manually, a recruitment system will largely do this for them, which means they can focus on the actual recruitment and bringing in talent rather than just managing applications.

There are a number of clever, cost-effective HR system solutions out there to help make your life easier and many go beyond just the task of recruitment and can help with other HR processes like on-boarding by automatically generating contracts and handling your payroll.

Like with most things, it pays to shop around and find the right solution for your business. Keeping things simple is also the key. A lot of vanilla solutions offer basic functionality, which in a small business environment is often all you need. If you can’t find a solution that can cope with the complexity of your HR processes then this might be a sign that you need to review your existing processes in order to simplify things – introducing a new system solution is a good opportunity to do this.

Just remember though that a system isn’t necessarily a quick fix to all of your problems. When recently helping to implement a recruitment system, one of the questions asked by the project team around the benefits was whether it would ensure that the business hires better quality team members. Luckily the CEO of the business was quick to step in and appropriately pointed out that no matter how great the system was, if the people interviewing candidates weren’t any good at recognising and hiring talent then the system would not make a difference and they’d likely continue to hire poor quality team members regardless.

A system solution to automate your manual processes will only do so much and isn’t a substitute for great team members. Instead, a good system solution should facilitate efficiency and buy back time to allow your team to get on with more important tasks rather than the time consuming, tedious administrative ones that they would probably be happy to never have to do again!

Janelle McKenzie and Abiramie Sathiamoorthy are the founders of HR firm E&I People Solutions.