HR teams are already responsible for the complex process of hiring and training new employees, keeping employee information up to date, and managing employee performance and pay raises. The last thing they need to add to their list of responsibilities is project management – but why not? If HR managers want to improve their organization’s workflow, they should look into using a project management system or HR automation tools like Chorus. In this article, we’ll discuss 10 ways HR teams benefit from project management systems, including reducing employee turnover and saving money through HR automation tools.
#1: Improves Interpersonal Communication
Project management systems can bring structure to daily operations, which means they’re an effective tool for interpersonal communication. In fact, teamwork and better communication are two of project management systems’ most touted benefits. On a day-to-day basis, that translates into more organized meetings and clearer instructions. In bigger picture terms, it also facilitates smoother communications between your team members—which makes projects run much more smoothly than if everyone is working in silos and no one really knows what anyone else is doing.
#2: Helps to Optimize Workflow Efficiency
Project management tools keep you on task and focused, which helps to optimize workflow efficiency. An added benefit of using project management systems is that they tend to serve as a repository for your business processes. As you go about completing various tasks, you naturally document how you do it and why. These reusable documents can be used for training purposes or simply pointed to when someone else needs to do something similar in the future. This goes a long way toward increasing workflow efficiency overall because it allows employees to get up-to-speed faster and more easily than if they were expected to always reinvent solutions for repetitive tasks or obstacles.
#3: Provides Insight Into Team Members’ Performance
Project management systems are powerful tools for communicating project performance and status. When used effectively, they can allow stakeholders to view a project’s progress in real time and provide instant updates regarding impending changes. They also show when something is amiss, making it easier to flag problem areas before they spiral out of control. In other words, project management systems play an integral role in maintaining a sense of order in the workplace and facilitating productive interpersonal communication among team members. As a result, employees become more motivated to produce quality work and achieve goals on time – especially because their manager can clearly see how well they’re doing at any given moment.
#4: Makes Organizational Knowledge Accessible to All
A project management system helps make all of your company’s organizational knowledge accessible to all employees. It allows you to easily identify what needs to be done and who is best suited for each task. Because it can take some time to get used to a new project management software, you’ll want to spend some time training your team so they know how to use it. This will save them time in their workday since they won’t have to worry about looking up processes or information that should already be available from your system.
#5: Supports Cross-Functional Collaboration
Because of its versatility, project management software allows cross-functional teams to share tasks, keep everyone in-the-loop, and understand progress. Without a PM system, HR often struggles to communicate with other departments – not to mention complete their own work! To make things worse, most HR projects require collaboration across different teams which means they would have trouble integrating multiple systems.
#6: Provides Flexibility in Scheduling and Reporting
The fact that projects and tasks can be scheduled by anyone, at any time, has huge advantages for a team or organization. Employees or teams can schedule their work around their personal lives without having to seek approval from a manager, which makes life easier for everyone. Reports and analytics give people in different locations instant insight into how things are going with all of their projects. This removes a lot of administrative pressure on employees and managers alike who have no choice but to trust that everything is being reported as expected, making HR teams more effective when it comes to getting work done in an organized way.
#7: Integrates with Other Office Apps
Great project management software will integrate seamlessly with your other business apps—and won’t require that you learn any proprietary systems. While some project management tools can be used independently of other apps, others only work when used in conjunction with them. It may seem like a minor detail, but you don’t want to have to switch between a bunch of different programs throughout your day. That would eat up valuable time and make it harder for you to get things done quickly and efficiently. Ideally, your HR automation tools should integrate with as many other systems as possible—without making things more complicated than they need to be.
#8: Streamlines Project Tracking
Our system also allows you to track your projects and tasks, saving time. For example, let’s say one of your team members has a project to develop new product packaging. The person can use our system to assign tasks to other team members and know exactly what they’re responsible for; and when that task is completed by each member, everyone can see it without having to be in constant communication with one another. This way there are no surprises about whether or not team members are keeping up with their responsibilities, because all of them can see their workload on a daily basis. #9: Improves Interpersonal Communication: Have you ever wondered why so many meetings never get anything done?
#9: Facilitates Managerial Decision Making
Even though HR and project management are two separate disciplines, they’re intricately connected. A good project management system can help an HR professional make managerial decisions more efficiently by showing how one action affects another. For example, if you can see where a team member is working on something that would affect another worker’s deliverable, you can ensure everything gets done on time by making a change before it becomes a problem. The bottom line: When people know their priorities and understand their roles in your organization’s larger goals, they perform better as individuals—and in turn bring down costs for your business overall.
#10 Builds Effective Team Dynamics
A good project management system will allow you to formalize roles, responsibilities, and processes for better team dynamics. You can even automate action items and deadlines so that employees don’t have to stress about their workloads. This is especially helpful for HR teams, as having a clearly-defined process will help your employees understand where they stand in terms of their job description and career path. Automating processes can even help ensure clear communication between departments; if one department doesn’t meet its deadlines on time, it won’t create a ripple effect that impacts other parts of your organization.
Final Thought
Putting your project management on auto-pilot may seem counterintuitive, but when you think about it, it makes perfect sense. If you’re not streamlining processes, or if you’re essentially doing a job twice, then that’s time you could be using to focus on other projects. And with an HR automation tool like TSheets, automating tasks is as easy as pie. With 10 tools that streamline each department process from talent acquisition to training and performance management — plus reporting and analytics so everyone can track progress — taking on those administrative tasks might be even more rewarding than everything else HR does.
