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Stress – it’s the word we all love to hate. According to a Labour Force Survey conducted by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), in 2017/18 stress, depression or anxiety accounted for 44% of all work-related illness cases. As a result, stress management in HR has become a significant priority for many organisations.
If you are an HR manager, these pressures can easily affect you; you try to handle tens if not hundreds of emails a day and oversee any number of HR tasks. So how can you reduce the flood of administrative work that you have to handle day in, day out?
Well, if you rely on a combination of email, spreadsheets and paper files, one of the simplest ways to reduce your workload is to invest in good HR software.
Stress management in HR using software
Below are just four ways that the right HR software can help you:
1) It can enable employees to do their own HR tasks
A lot of online HR software now includes self-service features to allow employees to access the system and carry out a variety of HR tasks for themselves. This can include requesting holidays, uploading sick notes and updating their own contact details.
Putting the onus on staff to carry out these tasks will reduce your own administrative burden; it can also lead to employees feeling more empowered and engaged. It can also result in greater accuracy where they are amending and checking their own personal data on the system.
2) It can help you delegate HR roles to managers
You can also transfer a significant amount of your administrative workload to specific managers, by configuring your software to allow them to take responsibility for certain HR tasks.
For example, line managers could deal with their team’s holiday requests, absence updates and notifications for upcoming performance reviews.
You can also ensure these managers have access to all the related templates and documents in your system. They can use or distribute these as required.
3) You can let the software do the chasing
How much time do you spend chasing staff to ask them to confirm that they have read and received important work policies and documentation?
Good HR software should include an effective document management solution to help you issue documents and track when your employees have opened and read them.
4) It can act as your virtual PA
Of course, even where your HR software allows you to reduce your workload through delegation and automation, you will still be responsible for managing HR functions.
The good thing is that the right software will help you streamline and finesse your management activities through the recording and scheduling of tasks.
By allowing you to schedule tasks for yourself and others, your HR software becomes your ultimate PA. The software keeps you appraised of the status of important assignments.
What is more, if your software is available online, you can effectively take it with you wherever you go. That's true whether you're working from your office, on the road or at home.
Other stress solutions for the busy HR manager
HR software can lead to significant reductions in the busy HR Manager’s workload. However, you may still face a host of stressful situations handling staff issues and grievances.
As a result, it might be worth you looking at additional solutions for reducing stress. Acas provides a wealth of advice and information in this area, as does the Stress Management Society.
When you are the one responsible for managing the wellbeing of other staff, it can be all too easy to neglect your own needs.
However, it is important to remember that HR management burnout can happen just as easily as for any other type of manager and taking prompt and effective action is always the best approach.
Read more from the myhrtoolkit blog
Signs of work-related stress in employees
How to reduce employee stress at work for better productivity
Written by Fiona Sanderson
Fiona is Marketing Manager at myhrtoolkit. Her areas of expertise include HR systems, productivity, employment law updates, and creating HR infographics.
