Human Resources in any company is a major exercise in the management of paper, just as much as it’s about managing people. The average employee generates a huge amount of paper related to their employment every year. From their initial contract and health and safety forms all the way to their everyday requisition orders, keeping track of it all can be a nightmare. There are plenty of content management systems on the market that can help HR manage their paperwork once it has been digitised, but what about the employee at the other end of the line? Most current systems put a lot of the responsibility for dealing with paperwork squarely in the lap of the HR department, when they’ve already got plenty to be getting on with. Wouldn’t it be better if most of that work could be done easily by the employee instead?
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The problem
We’ve already shown how much time a HR department spends dealing with employee paperwork, but that’s not even the whole problem: The paper itself can be an issue too. Even if you absorb the time and monetary cost associated with HR paperwork, your team still has to factor in the cost of producing, storing and destroying all that paperwork too. Firstly, your company must spend money on the paper itself and the ink needed to produce those sheaves of documents. Next that paper needs to be filed and stored somewhere in your building, taking up valuable floor space or external storage. Finally, once time has passed or the employee leaves, that paper needs to be professionally destroyed by a compliant data handling company. All of this has to be factored into stretched HR budgets or shared with other departments, when those resources could be spent on better projects elsewhere. So what can HR departments do to cut out some of that waste?
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The automation solution
Did you know that a lot of the everyday tasks that your HR department undertakes could be handled by automated data collection instead? Depending on the type of industry you work in, a lot of what your department does may be focused less on the high level stuff such as dealing with disputes or writing policies for staff and more on handling forms and applications. Rather than having a human on the other end of the line, processing all the information on those forms, all of this work could easily be done by an automated system that gathers all that information and files it where you can use it.
A solution that’s as simple for your employees to use as it is for your HR staff could see the human element totally removed from more everyday work such as equipment requisitions, company car requests or health declarations. Instead of physically completing some paperwork and handing it to HR to be processed, it’s possible for employees to fill in digital versions of these forms, which then automatically log and sort the data they enter so that it can be used to run reports or form part of a budget or inventory further down the line. This not only cuts out the physical paper, it also means that your HR team don’t have to devote any brain power to dealing with this information, and there are no human delays in the process of approving whatever it is the employee is trying to achieve.
The benefits of automation
The positives of moving to automate data collection can be easily summed up as: transparent, efficient and organised. From a transparency perspective, HR data handling can be greatly improved by automatic data collection because there’s no room for human error or gaps in the data that could make it less clear what is happening in any given situation. The more that certain systems are controlled by people, or only exist in the minds of a few expert HR professionals, the more room for mistakes and confusion there is. With automatic data handling, every step from the employee filling in a form to the request being carried out is contained within a defined system. So you can always see who asked for what and how that data was handled.
On top of greater visibility over the whole process, automated data collection is much more efficient. In some businesses there is a huge burden on HR to deal with a variety of equipment and medical forms, particularly in fields like construction or healthcare, and having enough spare manpower to deal with this data in person just isn’t practical. Using data automation employees can ask for a huge variety of things, including equipment loan, uniform requests, health declarations, mileage forms, remote working forms and a million other things, without ever having to bother HR. This not only takes the burden off your staff, it also allows the actual process to be automated so that it happens faster for the person making the request too. Everybody wins!
As a result of the first two benefits of automated data collection, organisation follows naturally. With great visibility over the whole process and an efficient system of creating and resolving requests, it’s a lot easier for your HR team to have complete control of the whole system at all times. No more blind spots, no more bottlenecks, no more delays or holdups caused by a lack of capacity. That means no panics, no missed deadlines, no stress and no worries for you and your team.
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How Tapapp can help
So what is this amazing way to automate data collection? Introducing Tapapp! Unlike most of the existing ways to incorporate data handling and automation into your business Tapapp is flexible and easy to use, so it’s just as good for HR as it is for employees. There is an unlimited variety of forms that can be created using the app to perfectly align with your business, whatever you need. So whether you need it for reporting, running surveys, creating forms or running electronic reports, there are loads of options available to you and your HR team. The fact that it comes as an app makes Tapapp incredible user friendly and flexible, especially for staff in the field, so there’s no trouble filing field-based reports either.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that a data app like this must be really expensive to buy or run, but another one of the amazing innovations that Tapapp uses is the pricing structure. You only pay for the data storage you use, not the number of users you have or the number of forms you create, which makes it unlimited and really scalable. It doesn’t matter if you’re a huge multi-national corporation or a single site operation, you can get full use out of the product for a reasonable price and with no limits to any of the features. One of the biggest benefits of this is that you can really use our product to its fullest potential by integrating it throughout your HR setup, because it doesn’t cost you any more to do so. The sky really is the limit in terms of how you use Tappapp, and it can slot in nicely in a function like staff recruitment and onboarding just as easily as it can work for equipment loans or vehicle inspection reports. The key is that you’re not held back by cost.
Alongside the benefits to your HR team, Tapapp also provides a suite of cost-effective and powerful tools that work alongside the app’s main functions to make your life easier. Security is a big issue for HR professionals, which is why Tapapp deploys a range of passive and active security measures to keep your data safe. A robust and simple to use roles and user system let you easily decide who can have access to which parts of the app, so nobody can see anything they shouldn’t see, and we regularly provide updates and patches to protect your business against the latest security threats. It also works as a powerful analytical tool thanks to its filtering capabilities, so not only can you collect your HR data automatically, it’s never been easier to sort it into a useful format so you can make quick conclusions and analyses.
Tapapp is designed to be flexible and useful for remote workers, allowing them to be as engaged with the HR function as office-based employees are, and we have a range of tools to help them too. It works offline, so it’s easy to use when you have bad signal, and it has Geotagging, event notification and time stamp features that just help to make life a little bit easier for you if you’re trying to sort HR issues on the road. Many of these features might just be helpful little additions that make work easier for remote staff, but they all add up to make Tapapp one of the most user-friendly yet powerful HR tools on the market.
If you’re fed up with paperwork taking over the lives of your HR team, and you want to help your employees engage with HR at the same time, give Tapapp a try!
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