Online HR Not the Whole Answer
January 27th, 2010A press release last week suggested that ending the life of the paper HR manual would save nearly £300million and 100,000 trees. And the first thing to say is well done to the PR person with the calculator.
But is online HR the way forward for SMEs?
At a basic level, many of our clients, even small ones, have their handbooks on their intranets. And it certainly makes sense when these documents can be out of date by the time they are off the printer.
The difficulties arise making them intuitive. There are, of course, IT solutions that promise to route employee’s questions to the right answer. But that functionality comes at a price.
But where budgets do allow, an up-to-date and easy to use online HR resource that is available 24/7 is a great idea. My plea is simply that it is well written with a constant reminder that the user can contact a real human being to explain or clarify anything.
And an online manual should never replace a proper HR resource. You need someone around that knows what is bothering people in the business. They don’t need to be there all the time to answer basic questions, but they do need to be on the ground to distinguish between that and something that could escalate to a big problem for the business.
