A standing ovation for HR teams who are so often the unsung hero’s. 2020 is without a doubt the year HR teams will not forget in a hurry. HR professionals have faced an unparalleled flood of demands on their time, knowledge and expertise and have risen to the challenge. Working tirelessly to not only manage the well-being of employees but meet the demands of the business too.
Keeping up with compliance has always been an integral part of any HR teams’ remit ensuring that all employees are treated fairly and legally. However, this year has firmly placed the spot-light on the management and adherence of legislative updates and that’s why this is number one on the HR Christmas Wish list.
Responding at speed
Normally, HR and payroll get plenty of notice to plan forthcoming legislative changes and impacts that affect employees. But these have not been normal times, as the Government introduced new schemes, with scant detail, with a drip-feed approach to the details. The result? A sprint to update systems and implement legislative changes. In many cases, HR teams had no alternative but to resort to using excel and workarounds, leaving them with potential compound risks and Excel Hell. For many this has been a realisation that their legacy HR systems just couldn’t cope, systems that are inflexible and unable to accommodate changes as speed.
Remember 31st October 2020?
A date that many HR and payroll teams will remember all too well, as the government announced their U-turn. The Government gave businesses 6 hours’ notice (on the 31st October, and on a Saturday evening at that!) to push out the Job Support Scheme (JSS) and extended the Job Retention Scheme (JRS). There were many HR professionals whom had just tucked into their first glass of wine, after issuing all their end of furlough letters and transitioning them from JRS to JSS to then have to unravel it all.
Strength in agility
Businesses have accelerated their digital transformation initiatives, and HR systems are high on the wish list. With so many changes, and layers of complexity, accurate record keeping is essential. HR are navigating fuloughs, redundancies and adjusting to mass remote working. They are creating business continuity plans and communications strategies that may need adapting and updating at a moments notice. This also comes with Brexit on the horizon.
More than ever before HR need agility in their systems and processes to handle the enormity of their workload and change requirements. HR leaders tell us they need to stop firefighting and invest in a future-proof approach to their HR systems and software. The pandemic has revealed legacy systems that are simply not able to accommodate rapid changes. They recognise that they are storing up risk and data debt by using workarounds, where corporate memory may become and issue. Our record of deploying updates at elementsuite is 5 days. 7 Tips to successfully implement HR technology remotely
Data in one place
Having the data is one thing, but can it be interrogated as a single source of truth? Organisations of all sizes are realising more than ever, the need to have data in one place rather than stitched together. Businesses are seeking people insights and dashboards that enable risk mitigation, but more importantly, that demonstrates legislative compliance. Analytics and data should not be siloed, that’s where problems arise, especially when you are managing constant change.
Through digitising your legislative updates, you’re creating transparency and a strong audit trail for all. Mistakes are made, when data is siloed and human intervention extracts the data and stiches back together. This is where HR technology really takes the headache away.
Mitigate Errors that may result in non-compliance
We’re all human and unfortunately mistakes do happen. The more we remove the burden of manual keying, the easier it is to mitigate errors and reduce corporate risk. Mistakes can be corrected, but businesses are rightly concerned about the potential HMRC penalties that could be imposed, be it genuine mistakes or ‘furlough fraud’.
Using your HR software and systems to digitise legislative updates, mitigates your risks and removes human error. But its more than that, it simplifies the complexity for HR, lifting the burden whilst providing transparency.
If these challenges sound familiar and you need some help successfully digitising Legislative updates to mitigate your risk, you’re not alone. This is on the HR wish list for many businesses, please email santa@elementsuite.com
