The Covid-19 pandemic has pushed businesses across the world into making hasty arrangements in order to allow staff to work from home. Remote workers often need to take home some amount of company equipment to remain as productive as possible.
I couldn’t be writing this little article in the convenience of my kitchen-office right now without my company laptop. Unfortunately, the nature of shifting quickly to WFH arrangements has meant many employers have had to sacrifice good record-keeping for expedience.
My current proximity to snacks is slightly less unfortunate. If your business has found itself in a record-keeping pickle—don’t worry. It’s not too late.
This article aims to help employers with geographically scattered people and property reconcile those records with the use of a few highly versatile features on Employment Hero’s HR software in the cloud platform.
1. Set employee equipment tracking requirements
If your employees have had to leave your office building with an armful of company equipment, and you forgot to ask them to print and complete that one asset form from that drive somewhere, there’s still hope!
You can use custom fields, available on our Platinum subscription, to require employees to update employee-related information easily and from anywhere.
First, decide what you want employees to record (laptops, monitors, etc.) and create custom field requirements for each asset you want to track. Feel free to create as many as you would like.
No need for printing paper forms, and no worries about lost drives or messy filing cabinets. You can store asset information within employee files for easy access anywhere.
2. Ensure employees comply with requirements
Creating custom fields is a futile exercise if there is no process in place to help ensure the tasks get done. And we know that chasing employees for details is no HR admin’s favourite task. We also know that making data entry for employees as easy as possible is key to good compliance.
So let’s set up a system that is easy on everyone, shall we? Employment Hero has a few features that can help you increase follow-through amongst staff.
Our communication plan recommendations include:
- Notifying employees
- Setting tasks for people managers to follow-up
You can trigger an email notification to employees in the custom fields setup steps to let them know there is a new field requiring them to provide information.
However, given you will most likely want to create more than one custom field in this setup, sending employees an email notification for every field you create may create a bit too much noise for everyone. You can use the company feed to notify employees just once instead.
This will allow you to send one notification to all employees instantly, and you can post a follow-up later if you feel it is needed.
Once you notify employees, you may want to leave it up to people managers to ensure employees complete the required information. E.g. put it to them to manage their people. Scheduling a task for managers is an easy way to make that happen.
You simply create a task, select the assignees and choose the window in which people managers should have this completed.
3. Track compliance
Once you have made employees aware and managers accountable, you will want to ensure each staff member has done their part. Creating a custom report ensures you have real-time data about company assets available to you from anywhere.
Conclusion
Tracking equipment issued to personnel, and helping everyone work from home smoothly, is much easier with a little help from some of our favourite features. Although many businesses have already made the transition to remote working, it’s still not too late to look after these details using Employment Hero’s HR report software.
Custom fields is available to Platinum HR customers. If you’re not a current Platinum HR customer, upgrade your account in the platform now to access this feature (look for the ‘Upgrade Now’ button).
The remote first workplace playbook
