How to manage HR when you're hybrid working

Full-time office work is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. While the pandemic may have forced us into working from home, businesses have seen the benefits of going remote – on overheads, operational agility and employee motivation.

As a result, many firms are choosing to adopt a hybrid working model, with staff working from the office for part of the week and at home the rest of the time. But while this gives people greater flexibility in their set-up, it can make company logistics and employee wellbeing much more challenging to coordinate.

So, how do you run HR effectively in a hybrid working environment?

For many businesses, the best way to handle human resources when your team isn’t face-to-face is by taking everything online.

Here are some of the key benefits to embracing online HR management software:

Access to HR workflows everywhere

One of the key issues with traditional HR tools such as word documents and spreadsheets is accessing them remotely. It’s very easy for someone to accidentally save an important file to their desktop, so it can’t be opened by colleagues. Or for team members to end up working on different versions of the same document.

With an online HR management system, data is stored in the cloud, which means every team member can access the same, up-to-date information whenever and wherever they log in. Your HR personnel, senior leaders and department managers can create and update critical HR workflows from wherever they choose to work. These could include:

Onboarding new starters and managing their induction process
Scheduling employee appraisals and gathering feedback from their colleagues
Managing and resolving employee grievances
Introducing and sharing new company policies – for example, creating or updating your remote working policy now that more people are home-based more often

Managing HR online also enables you to check the status of all your live activities. So team members know how workflows and cases are progressing, which actions are sitting with them, and the date that tasks are due.

Complete compliance in every location

Hybrid working environments test HR management in two ways. The first, as we’ve already discussed, is the set-up and maintenance of core processes that keep your company operations flowing.

The second challenge to coordinating HR in a remote environment is compliance. When you’re not based in the office 100% of the time, you can’t just print your policies and put them in a folder on the shelf. You need another way to make sure staff are aware of the latest company policies.

Online business HR software helps your organisation to stay on the front foot with policy and process updates, as you can load all your critical documents to your digital portal. Moreover, you can publish updates to the whole company, letting them know something new has been released, asking them to confirm when they’ve read the documents.

Managing HR policies centrally isn’t just an efficient way to keep your workforce on the same page; it’s important for company compliance. If you ever face an audit, your team knows exactly where all your legal and procedural files are saved.

Everyone manages their own HR record

HR is a very admin-intensive role. And while some processes need to be managed by a human resources specialist, there are elements of HR which are just record keeping.

Taking your HR system online liberates HR personnel to focus on more complex tasks, delegating responsibility for keeping employee records up-to-date to each member of staff.

Every colleague in your organisation can be given their own log-in to maintain their profile – for example, changing their address when they move, updating their emergency contact details, and viewing new skills and certifications as their careers progress.

HR personnel can also allocate tasks and cases to team members, to share the overall workload. For instance, department heads may have certain protocols to run through whenever someone new joins their team, or the authority to sign off their team’s holiday requests. They will also need to be involved in the challenges and successes of day-to-day staff management; participating in disciplinary procedures if an employee has broken company policies, or providing evidence to support someone’s promotion to a higher role.

With an online HR management system, every single person plays their part in building a strong, cohesive company culture. And the leading software on the market will allow you to tailor how much system access each person has – so people are only able to view areas that are relevant to their role, and they can’t see other people’s sensitive information.

Using online HR tools to build a strong company culture

When your team is working virtually at least some of the time, it’s more important than ever that you have a strong company infrastructure in place, to help them feel secure in their role and bonded with their colleagues.

Moving your HR documents online will make sure that your whole team can access the information they need to follow your company policies, and stay up-to-date with the latest people management tasks – no matter where they choose to work.

And with digital document storage capabilities, there’s no more worries about whether people are able to find documents or whether they’re updating the latest version! You can feel confident about HR data accuracy.

HR and Document Storage platform currently being developed at WhosOffice

WhosOffice people management software now includes an optional HR and document storage module. Start your free WhosOffice trial to see how it works.