Five HR Case Management Best Practices
Getting into the case management game? Working to improve documentation for your HR help desk? Just looking for some ideas on how to leverage your HR case management system better? Pull up a chair. We’ve got a few ideas to share with you. Five of them, specifically.
Nothing is more critical to an HR Shared Services team than documentation. Your case management system is only as good as the information you put in, in both quality and quantity. Consistent, robust logs of all calls, emails, personal meetings and research not only help in building your audit trail, but they help the next person with a similar problem solve it faster. The more you share, the more value you get in return. So everything goes in.
2) Imagination is a Powerful Deceiver
Just like any work done in HR, perception can be very dangerous when it comes to that documentation. Always remember that even if you block an employee from seeing internal notes, they are still part of the record and they are subject to discovery. So keep using your best HR abilities when you document. At the same time, a manager’s email that says they treat an employee different because they are [insert demographic here] requires action.
Just because your employee can’t see something in the system, it doesn’t mean it will never see the light of day. Your system of record is always at risk of being called for investigation, so keep the entries appropriate at all times.
Be prepared for a disaster, and build your platform accordingly. Have a lot of remote HR help desk team members? Better have a great backup system for their information. Not in the server closet business? Make sure you aren’t buying on premise software that requires you to maintain a server.
Most importantly, though, be ready when there is an emergency that requires you to move quickly and disseminate information across your team. For example, our Flash feature allows you to push site specific information across your entire HR help desk team. Have a plan in place to know who will set up those messages, who will manage them, and who will see them.
Old school systems had pretty basic permissions settings. You were a user, power user or an admin. These days, you have so many more options that you can build almost any permissions scheme you can imagine. But someone has to be the owner. There must be a small set of users who can modify accounts, build rules and keep the engine running. But someone has to be the final decision maker and driver of change. Because there will be change. Great ideas are provided in every one of our software versions, and not having a leader may keep you from getting full value.
Identify an owner that lives in HR, and make sure they have the job of keeping everyone’s capabilities and permissions accurate as well.
5) Peace, Love and Understanding
One of the dangers of using an HR help desk tool, especially if it is actually an IT tool in disguise, is that you can quickly give employees the impression they are a name and a number, but they are not a person. And neither are you. Automated messages that are very generic (and most of them tend to be) are sterile, and can do as much harm as good. Spend the time to tweak your messages and make them softer. For example, if your HR case management system uses a string of characters to identify a specific case, consider using HTML to change the font color to match the background, hiding that code from the reader. A little thought and polish can turn a cold, uncaring ticketing system into a warm and fuzzy communication channel.
There’s your five for this round. And if you took the time to click on the links, you are welcome!
