Christmas and New Year HR Survival Guide
The Christmas and New Year festive season comes with entertainment, fun and parties and a general winding down from the corporate process.
But, for HR and people managers, it can bring an increased work-load in the form of season-related HR activity. For example, HR will have to deal with competing holiday requests, not all of which can be honoured, along with year-end appraisals.
Also, the new year, generally considered to be the busiest time of the year for candidate mobility, brings recruitment drives as employers look to hire the top talent that is flooding the market-place. Also, with the release of new budgets, new aspirations and goals will be born, which will result in an increased level of goal setting within the organization. Yes, as business goes to sleep for the festive period, HR will be cranking things up, just like Bob Cratchit, Scrooge’s hard-working employee.
But, it doesn’t have to be a scrooge like struggle for HR professionals this Christmas, because with the right planning and using powerful, labour saving HR software, the busy HR season can be a breeze for HR professionals.
For starters, lets look at the Christmas holiday booking process. We know staff will all be looking to take lots of holiday at the same time over Christmas, and coordinating it all can be a challenge, can’t it? Well, not if you use a modern, HR software tool with a highly automated holiday booking process. The best-of-breed systems allow staff to login and make holiday requests over the web which their managers can approve with ease in the system and the staff’s holiday records will be automatically updated, saving time. These systems usually have a team calendar so managers can see the impact of holiday’s on team continuity and plan multiple holidays effectively and quickly.
Next, are you having a Christmas Party? Sure you want your employees to have fun, but you don’t want to be dealing with grievances, as a result of alcohol-fuelled harassment at the Christmas party, do you? Such misbehaviour at Christmas work parties is a common occurrence, and can add to the HR burden in the new year. So, make sure to send an email reminder to staff asking them to read the Staff Conduct policy in the online employee handbook. If you don’t have an online handbook, get a cloud-based HR system with document storage and publish it there for all staff to read.
Year-end appraisals can create a huge amount of additional administration at this time of year, as you deal with excessive amounts of forms and appraisal meeting booking. You can ease the labour and administrative burden by abandoning your paper driven appraisal process and using either a specialist performance appraisal software tool or a HR software system that includes an automated performance appraisal module.
And in the New Year, if you don’t want to overwhelmed by the new year hiring activity, on your return to work, you really need to get some hiring software, known as an applicant tracking system (ATS). Best-of-breed ATS allow you to automatically post your jobs on jobs boards or on your website, from which CVs can be automatically uploaded to your system, saving you lots of time. They will also allow you to quickly search and filter candidates to rapidly build a short-list, and you can send out emails straight from the system. Using an ATS can revolutionize your new year hiring process and save you huge amounts of time and stress.
And finally, with the new year will come with it new business goals and HR will need to set new HR objectives to help it meet business goals. Well, some of the latest HR systems include an innovative goal setting systems which turns it into a kind of game, motivating your staff to meet HR goals in a fun way.
This article was submitted by Sat Sindhar MD at People a best of breed, cloud based HR system for small business built with 47 years of combined industry experience. You can read more about Sat’s thoughts on small business HR software by visiting his company blog.
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