Even though we know a thing or two about HR technology, we still come across our own internal HR challenges in our ever-growing team.
We’ve nearly doubled in size in the last year, and with more employees comes more paperwork and processing.
We have onboarding covered. We have offboarding covered well too. The one process we hadn’t covered was – staff leave.
Our old, manual process
Whenever any team member wanted to book in annual leave, they’d first need to find out how much leave they have available. This was done by checking with our office manager.
Our balances are stored and managed in Saasu, but exposing them to staff is problematic.
Next, they’d need to send an email to their line manager cc’ing our office manager for the actual request.
From here, the office manager would wait for approval from the line manager (there may be a few follow-up emails and conversations from all parties to make sure that the employee could book their trip to Fiji sooner rather than later).
Finally, once the leave was all approved, our office manager would add the leave to a shared Google ‘Leave’ Calendar – a way for everyone to see who’s on holiday.
Personal leave was handled the same way, the only real difference being that medical certificates sometimes needed to be passed along in this process too.
You can probably see the problems this creates for us:
- No easy way to find out leave accrued
- Lots of work for our poor office manager!
- Delays in getting leave approved
- Time wasted filling out information in multiple locations
Enter Bindle – Online leave management
As you’d probably expect, we decided to fix the problem with cool, cloud-based technology!
Having worked with the very talented Bindle co-founder Damien Bastin on numerous projects, I had been following their start-up story pretty closely.
Damien and his co-founder Howard Fraser built Bindle to make leave management easy for businesses. It’s light weight, works on mobile, and understands Australian leave requirements.
Initially, Bindle’s offering free trials and ongoing pricing based on the number of users, so it was pretty easy for us to adopt.
The new and improved Bindle leave process
Now, everyone has access to their leave via bindle. They can instantly see how much leave they have accrued, access the leave calendar of the organisation and book in time off.
It’s much quicker for everyone, as there’s one central location for all of this information. Notifications are automatically sent out to line managers and our office manager as required, so it’s been much more reliable than our old process.
…and now I’m advising the Bindle team to help them grow!
I was so impressed with what Damien and Howard are doing with Bindle (as a user and as an HR Techie) that I’ve joined their team as an advisor.
Our mission at HROnboard is to improve the way organisations manage and engage with their people, so it’s a natural fit.