Friday nights should be a time of the week when your team has a chance to wind down and prepare for the weekend. However, that’s rarely how things play out in practice. Often, you wind up with HR nightmares, just when all you want to do is go home and go to bed.
Fortunately, there are ways around these issues, which we explain in this post. Here’s everything you should be doing:
Outsource Your Peripheral HR Functions
First, you’ll want to outsource your peripheral HR to other companies. Getting firms to take care of your payroll software and handle things like time off and bonuses is often useful. Many of these services can deal with complex problems without all the usual paperwork, making them far more manageable than trying to get everything done late on a Friday night.
Communicate Employee Deadlines
You can also avoid many issues by communicating clear deadlines to employees for things like timesheet submission and tracking expense reports. If you can get these by mid-week, that prevents the mad rush on Friday to get everything done and reconciled. You can also avoid the time-draining last-minute submissions that dog some smaller and medium-sized businesses.
Schedule Your HR Tasks For Earlier In The Week
It might sound like a simple solution, but scheduling your HR work earlier in the week allows you to get off faster on a Friday afternoon. You could leave this period during the week free for things like reviews or low-effort follow-ups.
What you want to avoid is a situation where everything is piling up for Friday evening, just at the moment when you have the least energy to get it all done. If you can make a start on the work before then, you can at least spare yourself some of the challenges of doing everything when you have the least energy to get on with it.
Use Common Document Templates
Another pro tip is to use common document templates for all your regular HR paperwork. You don’t want to be in a situation where you’re having to write up everything from scratch every time.
Most experienced businesses have common document templates for things like:
- Letters
- Performance reviews
- Exit interviews
- Training
If you have these ready to go and print out, you can usually power through this type of paperwork quickly. You can also do things like auto-complete with fields, or use voice recognition software to do the majority of the donkey work for you during meetings.
Delegate
Of course, delegation is another strategy you can use. Cross-training staff on critical HR-related tasks is another pro tip that works well when you’re up against the clock.
Junior staff are great for this sort of thing. Starting them on the work early on Friday morning usually means you have less to do by the time the afternoon comes around.
Centralize Your Data
Finally, make sure you’re using cloud-based platforms to centralize all your employee data. These days, it is easy to find software to gather everything into the same place.
