Building your own HR Toolkit
Breathe people teams, we've made it through another month.
For me, it's the end of what can be politely called a peak season with lots of change and transformation, with more, as we are very aware, on the horizon.
As the complex march onward stretches the "HR Generalist" moniker to further and further extremes, I feel we need more and more advantages to be able to keep up with the demands of our modern stakeholders.
Back when I created The HR Engineer model, one of its core philosophies was to take traditional HR models and empower them by utilising the same advantages, tools and resources that are more commonly invested in operations or technology.
I have my own workshop of tools, old new and in the oven (whats the expression: Let it cook?)
All of which I use to great effect to save time, money add value to the business I humbly serve.
How did I do this, and more importantly how can you do it?
The three steps in the model are Measure, Control, Change
Every business when they measure their service will find different opportunies to solve. Every patch is different and there's quick and complex wins that you discover in that all important measurement step.
However there's some universal wins across sectors, roles and services that you can pack for.
Every engineer's toolbox has a hammer, screwdiver, wrench right?
Why should we be any different?
Here's my current take on HR essentials:
The Screwdriver - Data tools -The tracker to end all trackers
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Aka, what exactly can't I build in excel?
I'm well known for my love of all things excel and more recently it's close cousin, google sheets. It's a comfortable tool in the toolbox with multiple use cases. It's a database, it's a tracker, it's a calculator. Because there's so many uses for it and a low barrier for entry and understanding the mechanics it's probably the most common platform for data in the world.
For the generalist on the go, you'll commonly fire and forget a bunch of excels a day, your people data will download in an excel for you to use as you need it, maybe you'll be fancy today and turn that data into a pivot table.
Here are two of my highest rated excel tools across businesses that are pretty simple concepts:
The Mastersheet
HR holds an absolute shed ton of documents, SoP, templates, contracts, policies. I could write an entire article on good file directory practice alone, but instead I offer you a cheat sheet.
One excel, many links, grouped by category. Common categories are templates, platforms, common tools, manager guides and playbooks. A contact list for internal and external stakeholders. All centralised, all in one place at the click of a button. It's a simple feature but will save a lot of downtime and allows for all staff to read from one source of truth, a useful feature in organisations who've been through a lot of change or documentation versions.
My usual use case for this is introducing new HR members into a business. I have a lot of information to convey and they have a burning desire to hit the ground running, but it can be a useful launch pad for new managers as well.
The Process Inventory
This one is my secret sauce when it comes to HR Engineering and comes with a few medium to complex formulas to get running.
In it's purest form it's a table of everything HR does, broken down, row by row into tasks. Add in a column for how many times it's done a week and how long roughly it takes and you can start to estimate how many hours your HR service is taking you, which is a very good way to start measuring your service.
In HR Engineering, I use a version of this tool to showcase to senior stakeholders where all the HR time is spent, highlight where it can be saved and predict and mitigate future costs to a service. Yes, it's true you are spending that much time clicking buttons!
The Wrench - Your documentation - Lost in the sea of templates
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Aka, I don't want to type anything twice
I wasn't exaggerating when I said we control a shed ton of documents. At it's worst, it's physical drawers, binders and literal boxes of the stuff. I've seen legacy companies with rooms filled to the brim with towering paper-scrapers, the corperate version of "it might come in useful one day"
Most companies in today's world will be digital with only the odd tree slice floating around and there's a lot to be said on the efficency of a good filing structure.
But today I want to highlight a feature that most good HRIS (HR Information systems) will deliver on and that is:
Dynamic document templates.
Those of my generation will remember (or maybe still use) the mail merge feature on microsoft word. This enabled us to set fields that would read from a table and generate a bunch of letters to different employees very quickly. Well now it's even easier and a lot less awkward.
I'll use my current provider Bamboo HR as a great example of a modern use case. I have a bunch of templates for repeatable processes, one of them being outcomes to meetings.
With Bamboo, I can upload the document to be a "signature template" with dynamic fields that I can set, it allows for a free text fields where managers can enter text before its sent to employees.
This allows me to have one document that I can send out to one or more employees at the touch of a button.
Other platforms may vary with this feature or similar, ask your account manager if you have something or the equivilant
The Hammer - AI - It's not just a phase mum I swear
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Aka, I want clarity first time, every time
This past month I managed to achieve a big milestone that I set out at the start of the year and that was to launch a fully AI-integrated tool to my workforce that wasn't just a gimmick, but a legitimate new use case for AI search function that wasn't document generation, advisory or work prompts.
I created a new suite of policies, a new company handbook and uploaded them to our internal platform Guru that uses AI search terms to scour the documentation and answer direct HR queries.
It's a great way for employees to take a large and often complex subset of data and find what they need in seconds rather than trawling and interperating clauses or asking via the medium of the HR team's inbox
Again is it perfect? No, it's a small data set and sometimes keywords or create search prompts are needed to get an exact answer. But is it better experience than reading through a 36 page document? Undoubtably!
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