One of the biggest surprises we at Sunrise have had this year, is the number of organisations that still put their employee cases and queries, and their faith, in the humble spreadsheet. Now, please do not get me wrong, I love a good spreadsheet and I really see the benefit of using them for a whole host of purposes from budget planning to reporting – but sometimes data that would be better managed elsewhere finds its way into the columns and rows.
When you are dealing with hundreds or even thousands of employee cases and queries every month and then logging these in your faithful spreadsheet, there are a whole variety of reasons why this has the potential to go very, very wrong. Here are our top reasons why the spreadsheet should be avoided if you are dealing with high volumes of queries…
The spreadsheet can become very slow and unstable
The simple fact is that the moment you have large volumes of data in your spreadsheet, it is going to become very, very slow to upload all that information in one location. Therefore you will either be sat waiting for the information to load, or searching multiple different spreadsheets in order to make the process ‘quicker’. Also, overly large spreadsheets run the risk of crashing every time you load up the document, resulting in more frustration and time wasted. Not to mention the pain of trying to run a report…
Size becomes unmanageable
On the subject of large volumes of data, this does make the process of finding the information you are looking for a tricky process. Time consuming and frustrating for both the person searching and the employee waiting for the answer, with the employee potentially having to repeat themselves if information cannot be found. With employee retention being so crucial, it is important for HR to provide a good service to employees and demonstrate value to the business.
Data protection
Although there are ways to protect data in spreadsheets, there is still a high risk of there being a data breach when using this method to record, track and filter highly sensitive employee information.
Corruption
And one of the biggest risks of all….. your spreadsheet becoming corrupt and all data being lost. With HR teams often having to refer back 2 years for employee case data, losing this information could cost the business thousands in employee tribunals when HR have no audit trail.
Spreadsheets definitely have their place, but at Sunrise we do not believe that the place for spreadsheets is managing thousands of queries and cases that come into HR departments. Can you really afford the risk of putting all your data in one spreadsheet?
So what is the solution? As a HR department you need to manage, track and report on this information and ideally you need to recall it quickly and efficiently, easily done if your spreadsheet is only managing a few hundred queries – but if your query volumes are moving into the ‘thousands’ it is time to rethink your process. This is where HR Case Management solutions, such as Sunrise’s HRCM, can really help. A central location that will enable you and your teams to quickly find the query and any associated items. Saving your team time, money and headaches.
If you are interested in how HR Case Management can help your HR team to improve efficiencies look at our blog ‘A Service Desk Approach to HR’.
Sunrise’s HRCM solution is available as a ‘Cloud’ solution or can be deployed ‘on-premise’.
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