Whenever paperwork is involved, it seems to be an up-hill battle to get it distributed to everyone and completed promptly. Even if it’s something that benefits you, there’s just something about having to fill out forms that makes everything else in the world seem a little more important.

Of course, the longer that someone waits to work on whatever it is they need to do, the more opportunity there is for something to go missing. Luckily for us, with the right technology, setting up a system that increases your ability to get tasks completed WITHOUT losing anything has changed from wishful thinking to a simple solution.

What Is Task Management

Employers need to be able to assign tasks to employees, like employee handbook updates, policy and procedure changes, and any company-wide information that needs to be communicated and acknowledged. Employees need to receive information from employers and be able to demonstrate that they have acknowledged receipt of the information, often in the form of a signature.

Today, employers are absolutely conducting task management, although it is often tracked on an Excel spreadsheet that offers no easy way to prove whether an employee actually signed for something (since the corresponding signature is often stored in a file somewhere. . . good luck finding it).

Task management is a basic HR necessity, and there’s a much easier way to handle executing tasks.

Easy Answer, Hard Decision

Improving the efficiency of how you assign HR-related tasks to employees can often be overlooked. However, when it comes to maintaining compliance with the DOL, overlooking something isn’t an option. Spending time on delivering, tracking, completing, and collecting paperwork quickly starts to add up not only for managers but also for employees. Needless to say, time = money. Saving time through process improvements can make a difference.

The answer that most people jump to when it comes to increasing efficiency for anything is switching to a software-based solution – and for good reason. Software makes complex processes simple and can do things considerably faster than humans can manually. The difficulty lies in choosing the right system.

Genie in a Bottle

First of all, every business has unique needs. We can’t tell you everything you want out of a piece of software. What we can provide are 3 wishes (foundational pieces of advice) that can be applied to all companies when looking for software that includes task management.

Right off the bat, you should be checking to see if your existing HCM platform can accommodate task management and how it actually works. Let’s say that you have updated your company policy handbook and need signatures from all employees agreeing for your records. The old school, manual way of accomplishing this would cost you money in time and resources. Some HCM software providers allow you to send out digital documents to employees who are registered in the system, but aside from providing a glorified email, the process doesn’t offer managers additional tools to complete the process from beginning to end. The best HCM platforms allow you to not only send out digitized documents but also then manage the entire process. You should be able to deliver, track, complete, and collect all tasks within the same software.

Second, your solution should make task management SIMPLE. It isn’t enough to have “aspects of task management” that require other manual processes, like printing or scanning documents back into the software. If your task management solution increases efficiency for your organization but is more complicated for your managers, it increases the risk of a failed solution migration.

Finally, the most important piece is ensuring that the solution you choose is easy for your employees to use. After all, if the solution ends up causing more questions than answers, the amount of time wasted skyrockets exponentially. For employees, the traditional, manual method of the process is simply receiving a collection of paper, filling it out, then returning it. With digital documents, employees no longer have to worry about misplacing forms. When filling out paperwork, the best HCM platforms work on the premise of “interview to outcome.” This means walking employees through which fields they need to be filled out while providing them with a clear checklist explaining what they have completed.

What Viventium Does

The Viventium Task Management module upgrades your ability to manage employees. A feature within Viventium Payroll and HRIS, Viventium doesn’t need to worry about issues with different software from different developers talking to each other since everything is handled within our own proprietary software.

Viventium’s Task Management doesn’t start and stop at digitizing documents, then allowing you to send them out to employees. We provide managers with all the tools they need to empower them to truly manage the process from start to finish. On the employee side, everything is handled within the same web portal that they use for all other HR functions, making the process simple and intuitive for everyone who is involved.

Like our other software features, Task Management is just another way Viventium continues to provide new, simple, and intuitive features for agencies’ and facilities’ HR departments.

Relax, you're with Viventium.

This information is for educational purposes only, and not to provide specific legal advice. This may not reflect the most recent developments in the law and may not be applicable to a particular situation or jurisdiction.