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3 Productivity Apps Every HR Manager Should Know

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The task list of an HR manager and his or her team is already quite long, and it is ever-growing. On top of dealing with hiring, onboarding, training, communicating, and getting feedback, an HR team has to deal with payroll and benefits, vacations, employee recognition and so much more. Whether in a start-up environment, in remote teams, or in a more formal corporate context: it’s a lot to handle! We’ve all heard the saying “Work smart, not hard”. So here are three quick fixes for some of an HR manager’s most productivity-zapping activities: employee training, leave management, and collecting employee feedback.

Employee Training with the Help of LinkedIn Learning

Preparing and presenting workshops to keep employee knowledge and skills up to date generally befalls the HR Manager and his or her team. It is often difficult to keep employees engaged with the content in a corporate presentation and to ensure that actual learning is taking place. Even a carefully polished presentation can fall on deaf ears. So why not get a helping hand driving engagement and improving employee learning experience at your next workshop? LinkedIn Learning offers “Training for Teams” content that can be specifically tailored to the personalized needs of different team members. Team members can take charge of their own learning and can do so anywhere directly on their laptops – a useful solution for remote teams. Topics range from skills in leadership to communications and digital transformation, and everything in between. This online learning resource is a gem for HR managers. LinkedIn Learning also offers interesting courses and presentations, built by trustworthy industry experts, on topics such as SEO Foundations, Digital Advertising, UX Foundations, etc. A monthly subscription costs a mere 29.99$ (USD) for unlimited educational content. At that price, it won’t bust the employee-learning budget. Moreover, it has been proven that employee learning also boosts employee engagement!

Simplify Leave Tracking with Vacation Tracker

Any person in a management role is familiar with the challenge of juggling a team’s vacation schedule. Knowing who’s in and who’s out of the office during certain key times is critical to ensuring coverage and excellent customer service, whether directly to a client or intra-departmentally. Vacation Tracker is a Slack-integrated software that offers a colorful visual dashboard of an entire team’s vacation schedule. Aesthetically designed and comprehensible at a glance, it takes the guesswork out of vacation or leave planning. Additionally, a lot of productivity-busting paperwork can be involved in submitting and approving vacation requests. Vacation Tracker simplifies the whole leave approval process by automating it. For an HR manager, this means that time spent approving leave requests is reduced to a minimum. Vacation Tracker integrates right into Slack, so employees can generate time-off requests anytime by typing /vacation into any Slack chat and following the on-screen instructions. Once the request is completed and sent, the employee’s manager is instantly notified and can approve or deny the request right away. Vacation Tracker is remote-team friendly and was built with start-ups in mind, therefore an organization can choose among nine different leave types to reflect their leave or out-of-office policies. Right now, new users can try Vacation Tracker during a complimentary 7-day trial period.

Collect Employee Feedback with Officevibe

Employees value two-way organizational communications. The millennial workforce, in particular, needs to feel understood and heard by its bosses to remain engaged. An HR department’s role is to make sure that employee feedback is collected and analyzed. Therefore, collecting feedback has become an important and often time-consuming task for the busy HR manager.

Officevibe offers a hassle-free way of collecting information directly from employees through the use of handy Pulse Surveys. These Pulse Surveys are designed to collect employee feedback and generate engagement, in a fun and quick way. The application provides an efficient solution for HR managers because it collects answers while organizing the information for analysis instantly. With minimal effort, a survey can be put together to encourage your teams to share their thoughts in real-time. With Officevibe, employee responses are collected and engagement is scored on 10 Key Metrics, backed by professional research on team engagement. The Surveys are completely responsive, so employees can respond on the go and on any device. What’s more, for smaller teams, this user-friendly software can be used for free! For teams of 20 people and over, it can be purchased, along with additional control features and more advanced analytics.

Hopefully, the tools mentioned here allow you and your HR team to boost productivity, by spending fewer precious hours of the day on polishing training material, manually approving and scheduling vacation or time-off requests, or on a lengthy feedback-gathering process. Automating these tasks saves time and energy, and doesn’t break the bank!

The three services mentioned above are just some examples of the myriad services that exist to help make the working days of HR managers more productive. HR managers can rest easy knowing that so many service providers are developing products with their busy schedules in mind!