Benefits of HR Help Desk in Small Businesses
Utilizing an HR Help Desk in large organizations is unquestionably critical to the company’s success. A typical 5,000 employee business generates on average 30,000 HR cases per year, with issues ranging from simple PTO requests up to sexual harassment complaints and other legal-related complaints.
Case volumes in the tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands can be analyzed to find patterns of issues that HR must recognize and address before they hit critical mass and begin to negatively impact the business’s operations.
However, companies with, for instance, 500 employees may only create as few as 3,000 annual cases, or about 12 cases daily. From an administrative point of view, numbers that small can easily be tracked in Excel spreadsheets, without the need for a formal help desk solution.
So why consider an HR specific case management system for your small business? The answer lies in 3 acronyms – HIPAA, PHI, and PII. Small businesses are not immune from lawsuits filed due to breaches of private employee data. HIPAA violations can cause fines in excess of $1M per incident – regardless of company size. In today’s litigious society, workers are often likely to sue, even for small HR related infractions, if their contingency-paid lawyer thinks they have a case.
Whereas a larger organization may have the resources to fend off frivolous lawsuits, one bad case could put a small company out of business.
A well-designed HR Help Desk tracks all employee-to-HR interactions, and maintains that data in a secure and HIPAA-compliant system. From initial complaint through case resolution, necessary confidentiality is guaranteed. Unauthorized eyes will not have access to sensitive case data, documents, phone records, etc.
Therefore, HR Help Desk’s advantage in small business is less about analytics and more about security and minimizing risk. In some regards, breaches of private employee data can potentially be greater in smaller organizations where workgroups are smaller and tighter knit. When everyone knows everyone else, inadvertent disclosure of private information, particularly if HR policies are not clear or not carefully enforced, presents real risk. Though a help desk solution cannot prevent careless (or clueless) disclosures of private employee information, it can track breaches from initial awareness through ultimate resolution, providing documented evidence that the issue was professionally managed.
Although analytics is not as important in small business (due to lack of enough meaningful data), HR Help Desk summary reports do provide important insights into patterns of employee behavior. For instance, an unusually high number of new cases for a particular employee might point to the employee’s dissatisfaction or even risk of resigning. Or, multiple complaints coming from one department can imply the need for HR intervention. Frankly, any spike in the data likely suggests the need for HR taking a closer look at the reason for the spike. Basic reports are often all HR requires to gain the greatest value from the case management system, reports that would not exist in spreadsheets or paper records.
The good news is that some of the finest HR-specific Help Desk systems are available in low-cost SaaS based offerings. LBi’s popular HR Help Desk Enterprise application is available in a Pro Plus SaaS edition, which includes many of the same features as in the Enterprise edition. For a fraction of the cost of Enterprise, companies with up to 3,000 employees can enjoy the same benefits that large organizations demand.
Contact LBi Software for more information or to arrange a free trial.
