You may have been using HR21 in your organisation for a number of years now. If so, you have probably moved on from the previous version to the much more functional ‘version 3’. For those who haven’t yet implemented HR21 now is a good time with the impending upgrade to Chris 21 version 7.8. This is because with each Chris21 upgrade you will get the very latest version of HR21.
HR21 or employee self-service as it is commonly known provides many benefits to organisations. There is no shortage of articles on the internet that talk about these benefits.
I often see organisations who have implemented HR21 and then nothing much else happens. In other words, the system is rolled out with minimal features and left like that indefinitely. This is a pity because there are many features available that can deliver tangible savings, in both time and money.
Let’s look at some of these:
- Emailing password protected payslips. These are delivered in PDF format. If an employee doesn’t have an email address, the payslip can be emailed to their private email address. Just make sure this email address is specified on their Details (DET) record. Printing and delivering payslips to employees can be a thing of the past;
- Making payment summaries available in HR21. During your end of year processing the Payment Summary File (GCF) process allows payment summaries to be generated in PDF format in HR21. No more printing and mailing payment summaries. And if employees lose them, which I hear is quite common, then they can simply print another one directly from HR21;
- Employee updates. You can now configure HR21 from within Chris21. This means you can decide whether a form is updateable or whether individual fields on forms are read only or updateable. This gives you much more control over what employees can change. See my blog HR21 Implementation – Some Useful Information, which explains more about this. In addition, you can setup email alerts to go to payroll or HR whenever an employee makes a change in HR21. This is particularly useful if you allow employees to update critical information, such as their bank details.
- Workflow functionality. Most organisations setup leave workflow when they implement HR21. Managing leave via HR21 has many advantages and works well. There are other functions that can be implemented with workflow, such as timesheets, training, expenses, flexi-time and travel. These all have the potential to deliver great benefits yet are often overlooked.
Giving employees access to more functions in HR21 empowers them and at the same time frees up the payroll and HR staff to focus on more strategic activities.
I hope this article has given you some ideas to help you to get more value from your HR21 system. I would be interested to hear your thoughts if you have implemented features of HR21 that have delivered real benefits to your organisation.