One salient statistic in the shift to remote work over the past eight months is the fact that on average people spend an additional hour working per day versus when they were previously working in the office. We know that people don’t necessarily want to be working more, but the change in how people are working has resulted in this shift nonetheless. One way to help people take back some of this time is by automating routine processes to make their workday easier.
Gloucestershire College operates a busy HR department charged with finding, screening, recruiting, and training job applicants and validating and seeking budget and senior management approvals for new posts. The approval process had become a significant problem, with too many workers spending too much time on sign-offs, approvals and status updates.
The situation was that new staffing proposals were often incomplete or completed incorrectly, the chain of approval had sometimes broken down because of holidays or sickness, or that the approval was buried on someone’s desk. “It’s frustrating for staff and managers when they could be using that time for high-value, interesting and rewarding tasks that make a positive impact within their team and their business,” says David Grover, Director at Office How.
The Opportunity
To create an automated workflow using Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Power Automate for departments to submit new staff requests that will automatically go through budget and senior management approval.
Microsoft Power Automate is a cloud-based service that enables users to create and automate processes and actions that save time and effort with repetitive tasks.
The Solution
We worked closely with Gloucestershire College’s HR teams to develop a new SharePoint form, that limited the number of possible errors and omissions and allowed users to track their own submissions. We created approval workflows in Microsoft Power Automate to send the submission automatically through each of the approval stages—automatically escalating the approval within one or two days if the appropriated approver did not respond.
“Since we used Microsoft Power Automate to automate processes, we’ve returned hundreds of hours to the business and generated substantial high-value benefits for staff and managers,” says David Grover.
Office How has enabled many organisations to transform their existing IT landscape and fully realise the benefits of improved productivity, customer satisfaction and sales. To find out more get in touch.