Automate employee managment tasks

- [Voiceover] Managing a team can be extremely time consuming. Overseeing the basic day-to-day tasks can bring down your efficiency, and keep you from moving forward with more productive tasks. Adding some basic automation to your recurring to-do items can free up time for more important management decisions. Here are some areas and ways you can automate some of the tasks you frequently perform. Hiring. If you only hire for one or two positions at a time, some simple, dedicated email addresses, auto-responders and templates can streamline your hiring process. Create a new email address, such as hiring at your company's domain to use an all-hiring ad and to accept resumes. When you're ready to review submissions, they'll all be in one place for you. Use your email's auto-responder to let applicants know the next step of your process. For example, when they can expect to hear back from you or what will happen next. Then, create pre-written responses as templates for recurring steps in the application and training process. For example, a template for an email to prepare for a training day. A time saver for scheduling interviews or meetings, Calendly, syncs with your calendar and shows when you're available. The applicant can sign up for a time directly through Calendly on their website, and your calendar will be updated. It can also send confirmation and reminder emails, ask questions of applicants when they sign up, and restrict certain times, or add a buffer between appointments. If you're hiring process is more complex, a program like Recruiterbox may save you time. It can help manage your job postings, track applicants throughout the application process, assign responsibilities for different stages of the process to specific staff, and allow you to keep notes and highlights on applicants. Employee setup. Setting up new employees in all of your systems and giving them the information they need quickly and clearly is important. If you're a smaller business, this probably falls on either you or your key staff to do. Consider a virtual assistant, or VA, for the routine set up tasks, such as setting up email addresses, sending employee manuals, gathering paperwork and more. VAs are perfect for routine tasks that are needed on an irregular basis, or if you don't want to take on the overhead of additional staff. There are a number of useful websites, such as hiremymom.com, Zirtual, or upwork.com, where you can find qualified, experienced workers who have chosen to work from home, instead of the traditional office. Now, be careful not to share any sensitive logins or data with your VA until that trust has been established. And make sure they're compliant with any privacy needs your specific industry may have. Hiring a VA requires the same detail as hiring onsite staff. So, expect to interview and research the applicants as much as you would an onsite employee, if not more. Training. Once your employees are hired, they need to be trained. Again, this can be a time-consuming task. Although training is a vital part of the employee experience and success rate, it doesn't mean you need to spend all of your resources doing it. A strong training manual can save countless hours. And is there as a first stop to answer a new employee's questions before interrupting the rest of the staff's workflow, or yours. A training manual doesn't need to be written all at once, or by you. As you hire and train new employees, you can have them write portions of the manual and update it as they see anything that's incorrect or unclear. Use a shared workspace or file storage program such as Pbworks wikis or Dropbox to maintain the files. Have each new employee improve on the manual and add to it. After a few new hires, your manual will be complete. You can check it any time for accuracy as it grows. This is also a great way to build a company operations manual, company FAQ, or project manuals. Use existing staff to create portions as they complete the related tasks. Videos are also an easy way to quickly train. Especially with computer-based tasks. Programs such as Camtasia for Windows, and Movavi or QuickTime for Mac, can record the screen of your computer and include audio. Simply perform the task on your computer while you speak the instructions and your training video is complete. Online professional trainings cover a wide array of skills that can be useful in your business. You can include a link to the training directly in your manuals. Include full courses, such as my Business Etiquette course, or add videos within larger courses to add more in-depth training to your manual without adding additional time in your schedule. Scheduling. Scheduling multiple employees and keeping track of timesheets can be a nightmare as well. By automating this key task, you and your staff can both benefit. Findmyshift is an online scheduler and timesheet. You can track multiple employee hours with the timeclock feature, and schedule people quickly. It tracks time off requests and availability, and it gives you an overall timesheet, has advanced reporting, and makes scheduling so much easier. Staff can even log in to request or swap shifts. A manager can approve any requests before implementing them. And the basic document storage is also a great place to keep employee manuals, forms, and more. A huge time saver. Whether you have a team of employees, or you're a one-person business, you can still delegate and automate tasks to improve efficiency. Consider which of these areas hiring, training, and scheduling you can automate to gain more time in your schedule.