3. November 2022
WATCH: 5 Busy HR Managers Share How They Save Time for What Matters
Between planning for next year, a rising cost-of-living crisis for employees and a more-than-challenging recruitment market, it’s a busy time for HR managers the world over.
Along with surveying 10,000+ HR managers and employees across Europe, we also chatted to five busy HR managers to find out how they save time on common HR tasks and employee queries and most importantly – how they find more time for what matters in the long-term.
Hear what HR managers from companies like Statista, TravelPerk, 360Learning, JumpCloud and of course Personio had to share in the videos below:
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Tips for Saving Time on Common HR Tasks
1. Follow ‘Ruthless Prioritisation’
Ruthless prioritisation is essential. So I’ve recently asked myself: ‘what’s the most important thing I can be doing right now?’ And then I make sure that’s where my energy is focused. Once I check that off, I can move onto additional tasks.
- Katy Flatau, Director of Global Talent Attraction, JumpCloud
2. Automate Your Processes
Talk to experts in Excel and other optimisation tools. They can help you automate processes and make sure that your processes are as efficient as possible.
- Julia Geigle, Team Lead, HR Operations, Statista
3. Keep Notes Short and Sweet
Just make your notes ready to go. So write the notes as you do the work and send them out the moment you’re done. Never go back to your notes to revisit or rewrite because that’s where you start doing too much quality for your own good.
- Nicholas Wagner, Chief People and Culture Officer, 360Learning
4. Centralise Important Information
It’s really good to just have one centralised place where you write down all your to-dos, where you have all your resources and pages linked up and organised. Because you can really save so much time by not having to browse through like 200 different windows.
- Alicia Swanepoel, Leadership Development Coordinator, Personio
5. Get the Right System in Place
“Having a robust HRIS that facilitates data-led decisions is key to using my time effectively. Looking at my experience today in TravelPerk, this is even more critical due to the fact that we are in a fast-paced environment and scaling up.”
- Miguel Delgado Alonso, Global HR Director, TravelPerk
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Tips for Saving Time When Managing HR Enquiries
1. Maximise Your Instant Messaging
We utilise all of our methods of communication and we’ve actually really started to utilise Slack heavily. So that means we can get things done as efficiently as possible and we’re not, you know, duplicating efforts or chasing emails.
- Katy Flatau, Director of Global Talent Attraction, JumpCloud
2. Start Up a Ticketing System
We introduced a ticketing system that we’re using for our team that helps us in keeping track of all open tickets that we currently have so that it’s easier to communicate.
- Julia Geigle, Team Lead, HR Operations, Statista
3. Always Document Your FAQs
What helps really is to create transparency by having clear policies. You host AMA sessions and you post the recordings. Whenever you have questions, you log the questions and in a Q&A that you annex to your policies to make sure that they answer the questions you’re getting.
- Nicholas Wagner, Chief People and Culture Officer, 360Learning
4. Schedule ‘Reply Blocks’ Into Your Day
Resist the urge to get distracted by just constantly replying to them as they come in. Instead, I’m now scheduling a bulk of time at the beginning of the day and the end of the day to go and answer those messages.
- Alicia Swanepoel, Leadership Development Coordinator, Personio
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Tips for Saving Time in the Long-Term
1. Streamline Every Single Process
We really should always focus on what we can improve, what we can automate and use things more efficiently. The focus of HR should be on people and providing the best possible service to them.
- Julia Geigle, Team Lead, HR Operations, Statista
2. Focus on Simple, Effective Problem-Solving
As there’s always a thousand projects we could be doing, figure out the simplest, most effective way to bridge the gap or solve the problem and then do that.
- Katy Flatau, Director of Global Talent Attraction, JumpCloud
3. Build a 12-Month Roadmap
Build a 12-month roadmap. When you focus on the day-to-day just of the next quarter, you set a limit to your ambitions. So you’re focusing on what you can do with a very short timeframe which is good for efficiency but not so great for ambition. And if you don’t have a roadmap, you also go all over the place.
- Nicholas Wagner, Chief People and Culture Officer, 360Learning
4. Do a Calendar Deep-Dive
In Google Calendar it’s quite easy to see and analyse how you spend your time and then actually see if it is being prioritised according to what you think is the most important project.
- Alicia Swanepoel, Leadership Development Coordinator, Personio
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What Could You Do With More Time for What Matters?
1. More Time for… Automation
I’d focus more on automation and streamlining. There are tonnes of ways to get your systems to talk to each other so you can get the cleanest possible data set. You’re trying to make sure things get done. And so with more time I’d go back and set up more of our automation.
- Katy Flatau, Director of Global Talent Attraction, JumpCloud
2. More Time for… Coaching
I would do a lot more ‘brain dumps’. Basically putting what I know in courses and blog posts. And also more individual coaching so I can help more and more durably.
- Nicholas Wagner, Chief People and Culture Officer, 360Learning
3. More Time for… Thought Leadership
I would use the time to have more exchange with other people in the HR field but also with experts to be maybe even a thought leader regarding HR trends and maybe just introducing new topics to the company.
- Julia Geigle, Team Lead, HR Operations, Statista
4. More Time for… Your People
To sit down with more people and meet more people from the company and understand their context, what they’re going through. Having that moment of face-to-face meeting can bring a lot of insights.
- Miguel Delgado Alonso, Global HR Director, TravelPerk
Hannah Popham
Hannah is a Senior Content Marketing Manager at Personio. She loves writing about the ever-changing ways that we work and how they intersect with our lives outside work.