Running a large organization means not only juggling but spinning plates, and perhaps even doing a handstand at the same time. Sure, you do have staff under you and system utilities to empower you, btu you still have to keep in mind the needs of every employee under your watch.
That means truly understanding what they’re going through and if any friction in the system is just a normal element of working towards a goal, or if it’s being caused by bad processes, bad understanding, a lack of morale, or any other cause.
But more than that, an approach dedicated to making staff time easier or more fair will show they’re always accounted for in your decisions. Here’s how to not only tell your staff about such an outcome, but how to ensure it happens correctly:
Spend Some Time “On The Shop Floor”
Walking around and actually watching how time and expenses get tracked in your organization right now will probably reveal a bunch of workarounds and frustrations that nobody talks about in meetings.
For instance, your marketing team might be using completely different methods than your developers, and your remote workers have probably figured out their own systems that work better for them than whatever official process exists on paper. You could spend a week following the journey of a single timesheet from the moment someone starts a project until that time shows up in client billing or cost reporting, and you’ll likely discover steps that seem unnecessary, where information gets lost, and processes that made sense two years ago but don’t match how your team actually works now.
The same thing happens with expense reporting if you’re not careful, especially if they get entered into systems that don’t talk to each other, and create extra work for both employees and finance teams who are just trying to keep everything organized and compliant. If you spend time on the shop floor, you notice these issues.
Let Your Team Help Pick The Solution
Your employees are going to live with whatever system you choose every single day, so it’s smart to invite them into the selection process early, which should the whole implementation more mindful of their needs.
For instance, you might set up small groups from different departments to talk through their current pain points and test out potential solutions, because people often have insights about their daily workflows you may have been missing, only to find two like departments have completely separate processes.
Alternatively, someone from your field service team might point out that they need offline mobile access since they work in areas with spotty internet, or your project managers might explain why they need to see budget information in real time rather than waiting for weekly reports. Getting this input upfront helps you implement fixes, like enterprise time and expense software that talks to both departments.
Build The System Around Roles & People
It’s wise to design your setup around real work patterns so they fit inwith the daily reality of your firm. That could imply thinking about your consultants who spend most of their time at client sites and need communication tools that work on their phone without requiring perfect internet connections, or your creative team who jump between multiple projects throughout the day and needs quick ways to switch contexts without losing track of their time.
Different roles probably need completely different interfaces and information, so your accounting team might need detailed approval workflows and reporting tools but your technicians just want to clock in and out without dealing with project codes and cost centers they don’t understand or care about. So here you can also gate access and make utilities custom-designed for each role and utility, instead of forcing everyone to conform into one measure.
Make Approval Processes Feel Reasonable
It’s not fun to wait on the management to approve something important to you, be that holiday, overtime, or expenses, so implementing review timelines that make better business sense while respecting people’s time is important for keeping everyone happy with the new system.
In some cases, you could set up automatic approvals for routine expenses under certain amounts and still ask for a human review for bigger items or odd categories of spending, which speeds up the process for most submissions for those you can trust on a trip, for instance.
Now, different types of work might need different approval paths, andsp building in reasonable time limits with escalation measures will help you avoid issues where managers forget to approve things and employees end up frustrated because of it. Trust us, making the admin work better for your general staff member will help them feel accounted for.
Train People More Precisely
Boring, generic training sessions where someone clicks through every menu option rarely help people learn what they need for their actual job, so it could be that focusing training on the specific tasks each person will do most often will help them feel like their time is respected.
If it’s important, you can also host large amounts of people in one day, such as going over compliance or safety. You may also find that e-learning or short videos that people can access when they need help will generally be more useful than hour-long training sessions that try to cover everything at once or repeat the same point over and over.
Alter Carefully As You Can
Your systems are live and in use on a daily basis, so watching what actually helps with efficiency and what gets ignored tells you a lot about whether your setup matches how you had it planned or not.
You might notice patterns like consistently late time entries or expense reports that keep getting rejected, which often means the process is too complicated or missing something important rather than people being lazy or non-compliant. This gives you the right questions to ask and the means to tune the process over time, which isn’t always an easy approach to go for. However, staff notice you’re not a one-and-done kind of boss, which is great.
With this advice, you’ll be certain to ensure your staff always feel accounted for.
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