Is thinking AND acting like your company’s Strategic Partner a part of your HR organization’s plan for the next year? Are you prepared to search for the real ways to reduce inefficiencies, lower costs, and focus on your core competency - helping your company’s main asset - its people - to unlock their full potential?

We are not talking about grandiose transformations that will "turn the company around," and "completely revolutionize" the way it works, and for which you will never get a buy-in from top management. What we mean are small changes that can, when applied to every team member, translate into weeks, or even months of improved productivity and lowered costs. We are talking about the automation of non-essential, inefficient, and error-prone tasks.

These are the activities that take a manager’s precious time away from planning, frustrate and mislead regular employees, and give you and your staff constant headaches. Activities such as opening over a hundred Excel timecard spreadsheets to make a small change, manually counting the remaining time off for every one of your team members (yes, all of them), and having to type in every task that employees engaged in during the day (which often results in a "magical" 2 hour time frame for every project). And, don’t forget the timesheet frenzy at the end of each pay period.

The American Payroll Association estimates the annual cost of manual timesheet processing by HR Administrators to be at least five minutes for every timesheet per pay period. It takes at least four hours for an HR administrator to process weekly time sheets for a team of fifty, every pay period. Sound small? This number can translate into over twenty-seven working days in the year spent doing this activity alone. You probably would agree that working on activities like this one is not the highlight of your day.

Now think about how big this number can get when applied to the entire team. Aside from the human costs, such as discouragement and frustration experienced by the entire team in the process, there are the financial costs of time and effort spent, and errors associated with manual input and calculations when engaging in non-tactical activities. There has got to be a smarter way of doing things.

Fortunately it takes just two basic steps to get started. First, identify the productivity gaps. Next, find the right solution for tackling them.

Examine your own organization first: what are some of the repetitive, time-consuming tasks that could be reduced or completely eliminated? Timesheets, payroll preparation, entering and modifying employee information: they all fit the bill. Next, step outside the HR box. By starting to think like a marketing executive, production executive, or other functional manager, you can begin to identify inefficiencies across the entire company that could be addressed with automation. There are tools available that can help guide (and even automate) this part of the process. For example, by using online ROI calculators, you can determine specific costs of manual processes and benefits of automation for your organization.

The next step is to research for a software solution that will meet your company’s specific needs. There are many solutions available. By asking the right questions you can speed up the search and make the right decisions along the way. Our most recent article discusses detailed ways for evaluating a vendor for an automated solution.

Quick Tip: you may get more favorable response from your executive team by looking into a web-based or Software as a Service (SaaS) solution that will not tax your internal IT resources and would potentially have a lower total cost of ownership over an installed product.

Finally, you can approach top management with detailed findings on how to reduce countless repetitive manual activities and translate them into higher productivity. We can work with you to help reveal specific needs for improvement for your company and prepare a compelling case for the decision makers.

Once your company is able to work more efficiently, you can focus on your core competency of helping retain talented employees and apply their abilities more efficiently. Instead of dragging through countless Excel spreadsheets you can now research the next team building outing, or take the time talk to employees to learn more about their ideal workplace and address their unique concerns.

Now is the critical time to start planning what you can do as a Strategic Partner to take your company to the next level. Don’t make it another New Year’s resolution - take the initiative today.