I sometimes think I’ve been working too long! I’m one of those people that hear other work colleagues talking and think something like that happened to me once, big problem is that a lot of the time it’s many years ago, in fact so long ago that I can’t even remember when it was.
The strange thing is that my recent change in role at K3 to being responsible for the sales and marketing of the Equator HR suite has brought back memories of the job roles I have undertaken in my career and in reality without that experience I probably wouldn’t be able to do what I’m doing.
In my early working years would you believe that we didn’t have any computer based systems? (I know I don’t look that old!). At one point I was a staff union representative for over 500 fellow employees and I can remember the company handbooks that used to cost a fortune to reproduce every time legislation or company rules changed. I used to go through Job Descriptions to manually work out whether an employee was on the correct salary and then verbally fight his case with our HR department. Of course they were always favourites to win because they had rows of filing cabinets full of previous similar scenarios, whereas as a humble staff representative we had next to no records available.
As my career evolved I went through roles of managing offices, running payrolls for both shop floor (analyzing clock cards was a daily task) and staff and yes I was now doing this via a computer system at last, no more trawling through the Inland Revenue Tax table booklets, hurray! (For those of you under 40, this could be a foreign language!). Eventually, I became a Company Secretary after spending nearly 10 years working in IT in support and consultancy roles and finally as an Account Manager. I must have been an OK Account Manager as I went on to work for one of my customers, where again I ran the staff and management payroll, but also had responsibility for HR (we called it Personnel in those days). What a nightmare, keeping track of all of the paperwork, as we still didn’t have a computerized Personnel system and this was just around the start of the claim culture, Vibration White Finger, Industrial Deafness, you name it we had claims for it and when we were dealing with Law Firms who were specialists in the area, we had to employ similarly experienced very expensive people, the problem was our records were a shambles of paperwork.
I subsequently went back into the IT arena and would you believe that my first job was to specify a new HR module for my new employer, who developed software. We subsequently went on to successfully sell the product for several years.
Turning full circle, here I am at K3 promoting a product that solves all of the problems I have encountered around Payroll, Personnel, Time & Attendance, Employee Self-Service, the list goes on. What has become apparent through all my previous career is that good records must be kept at all times across all of the HR disciplines and without a good computerised system to handle this, it would be nigh on impossible. Fortunately Equator now ticks all of boxes in terms of the whole HR function and I know that should we encounter any issues in the future, we have an excellent development team ready to provide the necessary knowledge and expertise to solve them for us.
So it begs the question, how did we manage it all of those years ago or is it the case that we didn’t manage it at all?
If any of the above scenarios are still familiar in your current working environment then please get in touch, we may be able to help.
