Welcome to this month’s guest article from Ian Reece who is responsible for Filtermist’s Group HR. Here he talks about the introduction of technology to automate daily HR functions helping to achieve the company’s ongoing focus on continuous improvement and to give greater autonomy to our workforce.

“As a company Filtermist has rapidly expanded over the last five years with a number of company acquisitions which in turn has increased the number of employees that we as a HR department have to manage.  Our workload practically grew over night and we knew we had to introduce smarter ways of working to manage things more effectively.

“A big focus for Filtermist and for the wider Absolent Group is ongoing continuous improvement and each department has a role to play in this. In February 2020 we introduced the E-days online absence management system into our company.  The system which helps us manage all forms of absence, time management and training has helped us move from being a heavily paper based team to a team that can be more productive in managing the day-to-day HR tasks.

“Before we introduced the online system any holiday booking, absence recording and noting of training courses undertaken were all done on paper and then recorded on to an excel file with the risk of people not remembering when holiday was taken, or training completed.  The new system gives us greater control and visibility of our employees than ever before, which in turn allows us to give them the flexibility needed to balance their work life with other commitments. 

“The pandemic has made us work in ways which we had never considered before and we need to take the positives from that and keep improving on it.  Mid-pandemic we launched our flexible working and remote working policy which works perfectly alongside the clocking in and out function in E-Days.  This means that those employees who are based remotely can record their time and clock in and out as needed around their lives and the requirements of the business. This has been particularly helpful through the pandemic where many of our employees have been juggling work with childcare and home-schooling.

“The new system has made our department’s job much easier - as everything is done and recorded online we can access information at any time and download reports as needed.  As a business we have Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in place and so having everything recorded in one place with easily downloaded reports is brilliant and it means we can quickly identify any trends that we may need to be aware of.

“The Shared Services department has several online systems which it uses to manage payroll, DSE assessments, expenses, and car hire and vehicle checks - all of which are contributing to the aim of becoming a paperless department.”

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