The Great Resignation of 2021 saw more than 38 million workers quit their jobs. The piece that goes largely unnoticed is that some of this occurred in HR. And guess who has to process the resignations, manage salaries, hear employee feedback, recruit, hire, onboard, train, bolster moral, negotiate benefits, and manage enrollment? If you guessed HR, you’re right!
In 2020 and 2021 we watched a lot of formerly stable HR departments manage crazy workloads, enforce new federal mandates, navigate COVID-19, cope with resignations in the team and the broader company, and try to shuffle work to continue supporting their business. All of this while trying to re-imagine remote working and gingerly pick a path through emotionally charged reactions to mask mandates and vaccination cards. COBRA subsidies? Don’t even get us started.
If you’re in HR, you know. You’re tired. Exhausted even. You’re looking for some sort of respite where little is offered.
We found our salvation in technology. We moved all of our documentation online in order to open five new states for payroll and HR. We updated our internal policies and procedures. We moved recruiting, onboarding, and performance appraisals into the cloud. We found ways to leverage technology to relieve a great deal of the burden that these sudden changes brought.
Benefits management is no exception. Moving your benefits management online can be a real life saver. The biggest difference here is that we use our own digital products and have been doing so for years. We code those products in-house with our full time US-based staff so when we needed something, or our clients needed something, we just opened a feature ticket in our cloud-based software development program. Boom! Process improved.
Technology worked for us, and it can help you too. We selected vendors that operate like we do. We required nimble, agile, responsive product development that anticipated and reacted to the rapidly changing business landscape. If you have pain points around HR because there’s too much work or you’ve suffered a loss of knowledge when a key person who knew everything resigned for a better work life balance, consider looking to technology as a path to empowerment. It may not be something you can do all at once, but if you plan and steadily execute, soon enough you will see the light at the end of the tunnel.