Roger Moore, General Manager at FMP Amity HR Software, outlines the ways in which your HR and payroll systems and processes should be geared up to ensure the processing of a leaver is legally compliant and as efficient as possible.
HR departments carry the vast majority of the administrative burden when employees decide to leave. But beyond the usual leaver paperwork, how else do HR departments need to prepare themselves and ensure the necessary processes exist for departing colleagues, while ensuring that company property is returned and regulations are adhered to? The leaver exit form is probably the most standard of HR practices for when an employee leaves the business, but typically this source of information is not used to its full advantage. By maintaining and examining accurate leaver information, businesses can analyse for trends to identify common root causes in leavers and therefore put policies and processes in place to help lower staff attrition rates and, therefore, reduce spend on recruiting and training new employees.
Once a leaver joins a new employer, they will often be required to present payslips from previous places of work. This can be a time consuming task for HR departments, however, allowing the ex-employee continuous access to their ePayslips can save the HR team from processing such requests from ex-employees, leaving them free to focus on tasks relating to current employees. Aside from the well known benefits of removing the costs of stationary, distribution and associated manpower, ePayslip systems can provide an ex-employee restricted online access to their payroll details for a limited amount of time after their departure date – a self-service approach, even for leavers. Reminders can be scheduled in an ePayslip system can to inform the leaver that their access deadline is approaching – providing ample opportunity for employees to print anything they need. Even when the account is closed to the employee, the data remains available to the employer so that should a leaver request a specific payslip, the employer can still provide it.
In a similar fashion, leavers may not remember to gather records of the training courses they have attended, which are often required as confirmation of claims on application forms and CVs. Again, an online employee self-service module can be used within the HR system in order to help the HR department find these documents and dispatch them. A standard part of processing a leaver is to make sure that company property is returned.
These items may be general property such as clothing and tools or things that an employee is legally required to return such as company credit card, business float and keys to the business premises. If it is managed through an electronic process and synchronised with the payroll activity, then the final BACS payment and other employment-critical documents can be dependent upon the satisfactory completion of the property return process. Specific flags and be set up within the system in order to track what individual employees possess and which are critical to return.
This can also be applied to training courses and qualifications that the business has contributed towards or paid for. Some employers will reserve the legal right to claim back some or all of the cost incurred to the business is an employee leaves within a given timeframe of the training. These details will be logged in the system and can be flagged to ensure that any repayment due is completed before the release of final documents and pay. Even after an employee has left the business, the HR team’s job is not always done. An HR system which stores information regarding sickness holidays, past performance, contract arrangements etc. ensures that the information is readily available when new employers ask for references, minimising the effort required from HR teams to produce them. Having HR and payroll systems and process in place, especially those that include self-service modules, can have a marked effect on the leaver process – allowing employers to deal with leavers legally and efficiently. The tools and know how are available and it is, therefore, up to businesses to capitalise on these available tools to make the process more efficient and to reduce the impact and associated cost of leavers upon a business.
