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Work Smarter Not Harder

By Tony Leonard, Corporate Field Account Manager at Sage

Work smarter not harder, kill two birds with one stone. It’s all good advice and you hear comments like it all the time when people talk about life and business but how often do people actually do something about it.

I have worked in different sales environments for over 14 years and I’ve been around longer than I will reveal here so I have heard all the excuses.
People have ways of doing things and ‘that’s just how it’s done’ is one of the most common reasons people don’t move forward and embrace change despite all the benefits. They don’t always say it but it’s exactly what they are thinking.

Modern life is so busy that we are always looking ways to get things done cheaper and get results faster. The two minute workout, speed dating, microwave dinners, jet engines. Everything is about being faster and more efficient. People are doing more and more at home and online, facebook, on-line banking, internet shopping, e-bay, booking holidays … all from the comfort of home.

Business is no different, production lines, automation, working from home, communication on the go - it’s all about doing more with less. Airlines have embraced both these philosophies with its self-service check in. You book in online at home or from the office and when you arrive at the airport you walk straight to security and off you go.  The benefits are two fold … the airlines reduce their costs and offer a more efficient and faster service while the customer avoids those awful delays standing in line waiting to check in at the airport. And this is the concept businesses should now be embracing in their own operations. How do I work smarter? How can I automate processes? How can I reduce the steps and costs associated with what I do?

The cloud is something everyone is talking about at the moment but every business has employees and they can begin creating efficiencies and saving money by firstly looking at how they interact with them. Everyone gets paid, or at least we would hope so. No matter how much or how little that is. And here is what we have been building to.  The vast majority of businesses receive timesheets or hours for each employee which are entered onto the payroll system. This is then processed and all the payslips are  printed. They are then put into envelopes and someone either walks the business handing them out or they are franked and posted out to employees. That’s just how it’s always been and it’s how my employees would prefer it.

But why?  There are at least five steps involved in this process and at least  three if not four steps are unnecessary and cost extra money and time.
By incorporating an employee self-service module to their payroll the timesheet can be automatically imported into the payroll, and once they are processed all other steps are void.

You have no need to purchase expensive payslip stationary and envelopes, you aren’t paying 50 cent a stamp to post them or paying someone to drop them off throughout the business on desks and so on where they are open to being picked up by anyone. And why? Because the employee self-service module will allow staff to access their payslips at home, or on their tablet, their smartphone, however they wish whenever they wish. It should  even store their historic payslips and P60’S. A good one will even  allow them to book their holidays, that they just booked while sitting on their sofa watching coronation street!

Like I said at the start , work smarter not harder.