A successful year relies not only on growing revenue but looking for simpler, smarter and cheaper ways of doing cumbersome processes. Take a look at your HR management. If you employ more than a handful of staff chances are you are spending far too much time — possibly up to 6 weeks — on HR admin.

It used to be that HR software was designed and built for large corporates. And small and medium business entrepreneurs had to muddle through with spreadsheets, forms and documents.

Things have changed, and cloud based software exists to make life much easier.

If you’re not sure how an HR platform can save you time and money, we’ve put together this round up for you.

Save time.

Keeping records of holidays, sickness and other types of time off manually is time consuming and error prone. If you are responsible for recording, approving and checking each and every time off request, this can mushroom into a big job when the number of people you employ grows. With a simple self –service software platform, employees can see how much holiday they have taken and have remaining, view their team-mates time off, and request time off themselves. All you have to do is approve the requests.

Making sure key people are working when you need them to.

Most businesses have key members of any team that cannot all be away at any one time. Or, there are critical projects that need more people to be at work to deliver them. Planning your people resources is a laborious task without a smart software solution in place that draws everything together into a calendar in real time. And you risk losing out on lucrative opportunities if you can’t guarantee your key people are there to deliver for clients.

Looking after the wellbeing of your people.

As an employer, it’s your responsibility to look after the wellbeing of your team. If you give them a set number of holiday days, it’s vital they actually take them. Do you allow unlimited holidays? This is something that is becoming much more popular, but the risk with this policy is that employees fail to take adequate time off to rest and the risk of burnout and stress becomes very high. A simple HR platform can track how much time your people have taken — and you can step in and insist they take a break when they need to — helping them stay fresh and motivated!

Save money and hassle on a multitude of solutions.

Many companies realize they need a software solution when it comes to processing payroll, expenses, employee surveys and other management tasks. But problems arise when several solutions are needed just in one small or medium business. Each HR platform has its own costs to consider, and that’s before you’ve considered integration between these workflows, set up, and ongoing support from each provider. Far better to look for one platform that can do everything you need, with an easy, seamless integration. The last thing you want to be doing is paying hefty consultancy and support fees when you just need to get on with running your business.

Reduce mistakes and errors.

Manually entering records in spreadsheets puts the workload onto you or your employees to check that people’s holiday, sickness and other time off records are kept up to date. Making holiday balance calculations is complex as soon as you have people working part time, shifts, or hourly work patterns. Your employees won’t thank you if you miscalculate their holiday entitlement, monthly pay, or pension contributions. Not only does it suck up time processing these and putting them right, you could be liable for fees, interest charges, and other costs, not to mention the effect on the employee who feels let down and mistreated. Doing the basics right is essential.

Underpin a great employee experience and retain your best people.

When your employees come to work they expect you to use the best tools to enhance their productivity. At home, they are comfortable with using Amazon, Facebook, Netflix and Uber for their daily needs and leisure hours. So when they come to work why should they be expected to fill out bits of paper to request holidays, when this doesn’t happen in any other sphere of their lives? If you drag your feet here it sends a strong negative message to your employees about your mindset. Your best talent will soon look elsewhere for a forward thinking employer who values personal development and puts a premium on helping their people be productive.

Enable employees to input their own data.

Who knows more about your people — you or them? A smart HR platform will allow your people to take ownership of their own data. They are in charge of updating their records (with your approval) if they move house, change their name or job role. This saves hours of your time, plus ensures people engage with the HR system and get the full benefit of its time saving power.

Allow you to do HR while out and about.

Most people now expect to be able to work productively and achieve just as much from their day whether they are in front of their office desktop, or in a train or coffee shop. And with the latest HR software you can — choose a HR platform that’s fully mobile compatible and both you and your employees can use up dead bits of time while travelling completing essential HR admin, leaving you all free to focus on what matters.

Be future proof.

We all know that the world changes in the blink of an eye and that just as we have got used to one technology another comes along and sweeps the old ways away. Your business needs to adapt and change or you risk becoming obsolete. HR software is here to stay. Your employees expect and demand it and will regard you as a dinosaur if you don’t provide it. Choose a future proof platform, and expect to pay a monthly fee — this way the software company will have a sustainable future and can continue to invest in the product and keep it up to date — protecting your investment and your people’s data.

Find out if ÐßÐßÊÓƵ is for you at . Happy New Year!

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With decades of experience starting and growing businesses between us we know the challenges companies face when it comes to HR and managing people. Especially on a small business budget and when there aren’t enough hours in the day!

We wanted people who worked for us to be happy, motivated, and productive. We wanted to create a fantastic company culture.

Creating a business our employees love to work in

We learned, sometimes painfully, that if people aren’t happy at work, they will take their talents to the competition. But when we invested time, effort and money into the company culture, people loved it, stayed with us, and told their friends about us. Happy people equals business success. It’s that simple.

As lovers of technology we looked around to find simple solutions for HR and company culture building that worked for us and we couldn’t find anything.  ÐßÐßÊÓƵ was born to solve this problem.

Simple, beautiful, intuitive

We make it simple to take care of HR with everything you need to manage your people at a cost you can afford.

We help you on your leadership journey, we are with you every step of the way. We’ll make it easy for you to take advantage of the best ideas and techniques for people management. Resources that are usually out of reach unless you’re a large corporate, with rafts of highly paid consultants!

Tackling Britain’s epidemic of bad management

Britain today faces an epidemic of bad management and unhappy workers. Only 30% of people are happy at work. That means 70% of people are not working as hard as they could be.

We strongly believe that it should be an employee’s right to have a great experience at work. They spend huge amounts of time there, and should not have to suffer the soul destroying experience of bad workplaces.

ÐßÐßÊÓƵ democratises the best of HR – for all companies

Luckily, technology today brings incredible power to the hands of each and every business owner and entrepreneur. You can create the workplace culture you’ve dreamed of, even if you’re not Google and aren’t in California. HR doesn’t have to be scary or tedious. Be compliant, up to date and organized – the simple way. And reap the rewards of happy, productive people in a business you can be proud of.

Read more of our best ideas for creating a company your employees will fall in love with here.

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As a psychology undergraduate we were taught the “magic number 7” theory on Day One of our course.

It’s the number of anything that the human brain has evolved to process comfortably. It can be seven numbers, letters, words, or chunks or information. Its been tested literally millions of times and holds true in all sorts of contexts.

It’s important because most of our social life is constructed to maximise our ability to comfortably process information in the way our brains can most easily handle. Otherwise, evolution would have taken care of us before Google and Uber does.

7 is cosy!

It also applies to social relationships. Seven is the number of close, seriously close, kinship bonds we can meaningfully invest in. That means going beyond casual friendships or distant family, Facebook friends and people you see in the pub now and again. It means the people that you would put everything on the line for – maybe even sacrifice your life for – and they would do the same for you. That’s a nuclear family plus a couple of grandparents, for example. Or a small tribe or clan.

From the tribe to the company

Here is where it gets relevant to your business. Remember when you started your business and you could get everyone in the same room – the same kitchen even! You didn’t need policies, documents, internal protocols, intranets, professional management development consultants or any of that stuff. Your bonds were so close, you probably spent more time with each other than your own family. Not suggesting you’d die for them….but you get the picture.

When you grow, things start to get more complicated. This kicks in at different points for different businesses but the rule of thumb is, by the time you’ve got to three lots of “sevens” – i.e., 21 people, you will have lost that clan/tribe feel.

Its biological..

The drivers for this go very deep and are based in our biology. We’ve evolved to behave in ways that enable us to process information in the most efficient way. Our brains didn’t want to be struggling to work hard while we were foraging for food or running away from a predator. Once we’ve got to a unit of 7 people, it becomes a “chunk” – and can be treated by our brain – almost – as one piece of data. Combine complex pieces of data together however, and our efficiency starts to fade. And because a chunk of data of 7 people is actually pretty complex, it doesn’t scale up in quite the same way as 7 simple pieces of data – like a single letter or numeral.

How does this affect our brain?

We react to this by feeling stress and uncertainty. This is translated into our inability to form as close a bond with those outside the “magic number” as those within. Again and again, ethnographic studies have shown that these emotions start up once a group size hits about 21. It’s at this stage that we start to see strong identification with the group itself. That “in-group-outgroup” dynamic that anyone who’s ever been in a competitive team environment will know.

That’s why, as you grow your business you will find that hitting your 21st employee is a milestone. Its at that time that you are probably thinking about formalising the ways you do things, as your employees are no longer known deeply to you. You will probably need some dreaded policies. It’s time to talk to someone who has experience of this journey and can guide you well. A great software platform such as ÐßÐßÊÓƵ can really help at this point – enabling you to bring in the latest tools to build a fantastic company culture with motivated, productive employees.

Look to the future

It’s really important that you take a step back to congratulate yourself on coming this far and enabling 21 people to earn a living and support their families. And it’s important to look to the future to see what’s missing from the next stage of your successful growth. This is the time to put in place the essential foundations for the next stage of your growth journey. Let ÐßÐßÊÓƵ help you grow your business- we’ve been there and done the journey, now we want to help you.

Find a useful free HR policy template library for all those essential HR policies here, and read more of our best ideas for succesful growth here.

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You might have heard about OKRs. Although they are not that well known in the UK, they are credited with being the key to success for a number of large companies and are widely used in the start up community. OKRs create focus and prioritization, aligning company, team and personal objectives to make sure everyone is working on the same goal.

Google’s John Doer is credited with popularizing OKRs after Google used them successfully to scale. A great way to get an overview of OKRs is to watch ±¹¾±»å±ð´Ç.Ìý

Companies using OKRs

The list of companies using OKRs is impressive; here’s a brief selection, there are many more!

What are the advantages of using this system? And how does it differ from standard performance management?

The key to their success is transparency. Everyone from the CEO down has their own OKRs which are shared across the whole company. People in the teams reporting into the senior teams will have their own OKRs which feed into top team goals. In this way, even in a large company, everyone feels a strong sense of alignment with the direction of the company overall. This is a proven way of increasing motivation and engagement for all employees.

As in life, as in business. We recommend starting as you mean to go on. If you start from Day One with the OKR system, even if there are only a handful of employees, you will find it much easier to scale as you grow and the goal setting process becomes natural.

People crave structure and clarity, this system gives it to them. In essence, OKRs are no different to many other standard performance management systems that you may have seen in businesses. They follow a standard cycle and involve some element of grading and judgment. However, where they differ is in two key aspects.

1. They focus on business performance above all else. The development and evaluation of the individual employee, including most probably any variable remuneration will need to be dealt with in a separate conversation; but it will be strongly informed by the performance and what the employee needs to do to achieve great performance.
2. The transparency. We’ve seen many businesses performance management systems over the years and its rare for the top team to share their goals and their gradings with all employees including junior ones. This may be a humbling experience for senior leaders, however, it sends a strong signal about the importance of learning together and the culture of your leadership.

OKRs are made up of two parts.

If you want to go ahead and get started with OKRs, its straightforward. Here’s what you need to know.

1) Objectives:
Objectives are goals. They tell everyone where to go and align with the vision and mission of a company. Its important to start from the top level goals of the business as a whole, then align each team’s OKRs with those top level goals. Depending on the size of your business, you may have several tiers of goals for each department and team, but these will all mesh with the ultimate objective of your main business goal whether that is profit, growth, or market share.

2) Key Results:
Each objective has about three Key Results. They indicate how the team will achieve the Objectives, and translate into actions.

This is where skill and judgment enters the picture. It is often delegated to individuals, teams or managers to set goals for their teams or themselves. Clearly there is a learning process, if the actions that the team were engaged in did not deliver the results in a period, it is up to the leaders to adjust their focus.

Here at joinair.com, we’ve been using this system since Day One and its a phenomenal tool to help us all keep on track and focussed.We really try to be objective, both in setting and grading OKRs. Its such a great discipline to get into! Even when we don’t hit our OKRs, which we often don’t, we are able to be honest about why not and strive to improve next time.

OKRs connect vision with actions

While OKRs drive activity, its important not to turn them into a To Do list or project management tool. Teams should develop their own processes for managing day to day priorities and tasks. is a great summary of the key differences between Objectives and Key Results.

Setting a timeline for OKRs

From the mission and vision, you derive your annual objectives.

Annual objectives split into quarterly objectives.

Finally, set the time when OKRs will be graded, results shared and learning discussed.

Grade Key Results

Only Key Results get graded. An Objective’s grade is the average of its Key Results. A good Key Result always enables objective grading. Objective grading is necessary for learning, but grading is never used for employee evaluation. Looking back at Rick Klau’s , he explains where the interaction between key results and employee evaluation comes. Some key results are objectively harder than others, some are stretch and some are more akin to “business as usual”. Grading is an art not a science and it is the quality of the discussion between employee and their manager and the teams that enables the system to be used as a learning process.

Set objectives where 0.7 is good
Use a scale of 0 to 1 for grading. People should target 0.7 – 0.8 on average – if they are getting 1 consistently the objectives are not hard enough.

Some activities and businesses lend themselves more easily to the OKR system. Clearly in a growth or change environment it’s relatively simple to set and use OKRs. They may not be as suitable for process based or functional support activities, although, with skill, they can still be highly effective in these roles too.

Our Recommendations

1: Set OKRs quarterly or annually
A quarter and a year are timeframes in which you really can achieve something. The same timeframes are often used to evaluate companies.

2: Aim for 3 objectives with 3 KR each
5 objectives with 4 key results each is your maximum. Otherwise it’s hard to have focus on what really matters.

3: Make OKRs challenging
Research shows that people who set challenging targets achieve more. Expect to get 70% – 80% in the grading, not consistent 100%.

4: Make KR’s number based
Numbers create objective evaluation and a learning process.

5: Review regularly and transparently
Review the objectives monthly or weekly. Make objectives public for the whole business to see.

OKRs will without doubt help you lead and grow your business. And most importantly, they are a fantastic tool for motivating your employees. You will also need to talk to your teams about their individual development. For more on this, go to this article.

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