HR Systems for Scaling - Five HR Tasks Every Small Business Should Automate

Hey, welcome. In this video, I'm going to walk you through 5 simple automations that every company that's trying to go should have in place, and just simple workflows from an HR perspective that will make your life easier as a small business owner, as an entrepreneur, and allow you to free up time and maintain compliance without spending, uh, too much thought or energy around it. So The first thing I'm going to talk about is employee onboarding. So as you're hiring and growing, there's a ton of moving parts in the onboarding process. Twitter actually says that from the time they have a yes to someone sitting at their desk, so someone has accepted an offer, until the time they are in their seat, there are 75 steps. And so what you want to do is obviously get as much of that automated and put into lists and processes as possible. And what we have done is created a system here that will allow you to keep up with all this and alleviate some of that pain and get rid of some of those cobbled-together processes. Um, the reason why this would make sense for you is that organizations with a strong onboarding process are actually proven to increase their new hire retention by 82%. So think about that. Employers with a strong onboarding process increase their employee retention by 82%. That is huge. So what we want to do is really make as much of that automatic as possible. And as you can see, we can walk through here step by step by step and allow for a very simple process. It'd take you about 2 minutes to set someone up in here if you were adding a new hire. But one of the cool things about this is if I go into the settings and I look at the onboarding task component, I can set up as many different tasks as I want for my new hires. They can be however many days after hire date as I want, months, weeks. They can be before, they can be on hire date, they can be assigned to their manager, they can be assigned to the new hire, to a specific individual. I can select from my company documents that I've set up for e-signatures so they can e-sign any of those forms you have that aren't standard. So whether you've got a confidentiality agreement or a non-compete or whatever it might be, we can easily set that up and have as many different lists as we want for new hires. Whether we've got multiple locations or full-time and part-time or different roles that require different things over the first 30, 60, 90 days, we can set up different onboarding task lists in here. So once again, we set it up once and I'm actually going through this right now. We're hiring a new person on Monday and all I have to do is come in and enter her information and that's it. She completes everything on her side. The tasks get assigned to the team on what needs to be done. And we're up and rolling, and I can do that in about 5 minutes. So tremendous automation there. And probably the cooler thing is once they complete all this stuff and they come on board, all that new hire documentation automatically flows to their profile here. So their W-4, their I-9, um, any other documents that they uploaded, the signed handbook, and completing the offer letter. So get rid of all the DocuSign, get rid of get rid of all the paper and get rid of all the email workflows and things like that and just have one single place for all that information and a seamless process. So the— so if I come to this employee and I've completed all this new hire information like I have here, I've gone through step by step by step and added in everything and now she's ready to go and I simply click send invite and then she's going to be able to complete all this new hire documentation directly from her mobile device or from a laptop. So once again, automating onboarding is going to do a couple of things. It's going to obviously save you time, save you energy, help you to maintain compliance by making sure your documents are stored properly. And then also it's going to help you to increase your employee retention and engagement because the data proves that by having a formalized onboarding process, that's what we're going to do because we're going to help to get our people up to speed quicker. And help them to learn and grow as fast as possible. So onboarding, definitely one you want to automate. Next up, let's talk about performance reviews. Most small businesses either don't do performance reviews at all, they're inconsistent, or they've got, you know, wonky policies where it's once a year and it's tied directly to a raise. And then we've got biases that creep in like recency bias and the halo effect. So what we want to do is put in place a simple to process or simple to follow process for employee onboarding that allows for us to set it and forget it, right? So that's one of the reasons why so many organizations are inconsistent is because it's, it can be tough to keep up with. But the reality is that reviews need to happen more frequently. Employees want them, they crave them, they want the feedback. So what we can do is set up our performance reviews to happen every 3 months, every 6 months, or every 12 months. And we can add our employee questions in here and our manager questions. So we've got a self-assessment and a manager assessment. And now once we've set that up, they're going to get notifications with the questions, when to complete them. They're going to get a follow-up notification when they don't complete it leading up into the due date. And so once again, we've got an automated process that's going to give our employees the information, the access to feedback that they need and crave, and we're driving paper and spreadsheets and Word docs out of the process. So now we're taking a process that didn't exist or was inconsistent and putting it on autopilot. And as a result, your people are improving because you've invested in managing their success. So thing number 2 we want to automate is performance management. Our people are our number 1 asset. We want to make sure we spend the appropriate amount of time managing that asset. All right, so number 3 is document management. A lot of people still have employee files that are paper or they're in PDF folders in Dropboxes or ShareFiles or wherever. And then oftentimes we just have people filling out these forms and they go into that Drive or they go into that DocuSign or there's just a lot of manual maneuvering on how that stuff gets where it needs to go once it's done. And so, and also then what happens when a person leaves, we've got to track these things down. If we maybe have an unemployment claim or whatever. So one system of record will help us to alleviate that concern. And how we do that is by giving employees not only, you know, we can have them sign and execute their documents right from in here. So if I uploaded this work from home document, I can very easily set a due date, send it to my entire staff, And in about 2 seconds, I'm up and going and I've got a document that's ready to be executed by everybody. And how I do that is I went ahead and I set this document up. I, I can upload any PDF, I can drag and drop signature fields, date fields on here, and have my employees sign that. And then the best thing is that just goes right back once again into their file where we just looked a moment ago when we were looking at Pam. And so not only do I get documents and all that information in one spot, but I also have this single system of record where I keep up with notes about the teammate. So if I sit down and have these more frequent feedback and performance conversations between those quarterly reviews, I can add a note. I can even hide it from the user. I can upload those old PDFs on the fly and, you know, simply upload them here. I can, once again, I can set them to be hidden from the user. I can even set them to be hidden from their manager if we want. We've got multiple tiers of access in here, so admins, managers, and employees. So we can set up those user rights. Kind of a cool thing in here we set up is you can even add expiration dates to documents. So if there's some sort of certification or license that you need to keep up with for your team, then you can do that here as well. So we want to automate as much of that document management process as possible. We want to get out of that cobweb of places and files and ways of collecting information and put it all in one simple place. So document management, definitely something you want to automate and put one simple tool in place to handle. And then so that's number 3. Let's look at number 4 would be timekeeping. So tracking employees' time is something where a lot of organizations either use too much automation or not enough. You might be using Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, back of the napkin, or online systems that are not speaking to any of the other systems. So we do see a lot of these really good timekeeping systems, but they don't actually, you know, the person onboarded through one system tracks time in another and then does payroll in another. It's very confusing for the employee. And then obviously, if you're not tracking time at all, we want to make sure that we are getting an accurate capture of data. I mean, if you think, even if you're giving up 15 minutes a day over the course of a year to an employee, uh, you know, that adds up, that adds up quickly. So we want to make sure that we're getting accurate data. We want to give our employees the tools to manage their time and energy, and this is a great way to do that. So you can see here that I can even set this up to clock in and out of different locations or jobs. I can also set it up to automatically log the person out. So if this is like a kiosk environment where they're going to walk up and clock in and somebody else might walk up behind them to that same machine, then we give them the ability to automatically be logged out. Now the other cool thing is that instead of going all or nothing, one of the challenges we had with timekeeping systems in the past was that you could either set it up where an employee could edit their time card or they couldn't. Uh, so in this world we can actually add a new record, but what it's going to do is it's going to send a request to my manager to approve that. So I can go in and add my hours after the fact, And then my manager is just going to have a little approval button over here next to those hours when they review them. And so we've automated a bunch of the front end of this. And then what we ultimately want, right, is once we approve these time cards, we want them to very easily be able to export to payroll. And if you're using Payroll Relief, these hours can be exported directly into payroll. So we also have the ability to export some Excel reports out of here if you're not using Payroll Relief. So definitely Awesome. We can track time, manage time for all of our teammates, have that approved, and then feed directly into our payroll system. You know, we've moved from a manual process into an automated and integrated process, saving us time and getting much more accurate information. So number 4, we want to automate that timekeeping as much as possible. And so for number 5, I switched over here to an employee login. I've been logged in as an admin from the client employee at And one cool thing about this system is it's going to have your logo, it's going to have your information here. So the employees don't get an email that says, welcome to our company. They say, they get an email that says, welcome to Dunder Mifflin, because that's what they care about is where they work, right? So PTO management, we can set up policies in here that can accrue at different rates. They can carry over, they can be as complex or as simple as you want. That's one of the interesting things that I've learned over the years about PTO policies is that there is no two that are the same. And so we set this up to be very flexible, but most importantly, you know, we want the experience for the employee to be simple. So they can come out here, they can request time off, they can see their time off requests, they can see their available balances, and they can see how they got there. So when I come to my profile, I can actually dive down into this a little bit deeper and click on this and see how it accrued and what my starting balance was and actually understand how we got to that calculation. How many times have you got a question from an employee? Oh, hey, I've got 26 hours. That's wrong. And here's why I think it's wrong. And so giving them that, that empowerment from a self-service perspective to be able to come out here and track their own information and see how that got to where it was, along with a simple request and approval process. So over on the other side, you may have noticed when I was on the dashboard of the admin, I had these to approve. Directly inside the system, and I'm getting notifications. So we've turned what was otherwise a manual paper process of people sending emails or filling out PDFs and automated that and empowered our employees and our managers to get full visibility into the process. So these are like the blocking and tackling of HR for small businesses. Nothing that you've seen here is some tremendous process that you need to some convoluted system for. These are the basics. You want to make sure that you get down the automation workflows on things that are very simple. And this is your starting point. If you don't want to deal with setting any of this up, we can also talk about ways that our team can do outsourced HR where we actually manage these systems for you. But hopefully this was a good explanation into a few of the things that you can do to set up and automate HR for your small business. And let me know what feedback you have. I'm excited to hear how you put some of these things in place and what we might be able to do to help you with that. Thanks so much for your time.