First Steps of HR Manager

This article is relevant for HR Managers.

Welcome to Aptien. We'll guide you through the basics of HR work in Aptien so you can quickly work on your own and collaborate with others. So that you know what is possible in the system and what is not, what you can do and how you can do it, where it will help you, what it will make easier and where its limits are!

Aptien will help you in HR:

• keep HR information and documentation about your employees
• managing and coordinating onboarding and offboarding
• it also makes it easier to plan and develop employees and organize training
• active relationship management with employees - active and direct communication with employees
• maintaining information and documentation around job applicants
• maintaining information around job roles and job requirements
• maintain an organizational structure in the form of an organigram

Aptien will help you keep HR information, but it's not a payroll system - so it won't help you with payroll processing and payroll. It does allow you to keep HR records around people, making it easier to onboard them, communicate with them, and live in the company.

How will you work as an HR manager in Aptien?

Aptien helps you securely maintain HR information and administration, automate processes and maintain an active relationship with your employees. You will work mainly with personnel Organizers, these are your electronic binders. You as HR manager have access to them. Because they contain sensitive information, other employees don't have access. Your basic work area as an HR manager is:

• Employee organizer - this is where you keep all information about your employees, including employment contracts, and where you plan the personal development and training of your employees
• Applicants - list of applicants, summary information, interviews with candidates for a job in your company
• Vacancies - is an organizer for the creation of new and vacant jobs and job titles
• Training catalog where you keep a record of all the training and educational events you organize or offer for your employees
• Organization settings, catalog of job positions, job descriptions, and job requirements
  

What else can you do?

What else can you find and use in your workspace besides:

• Assets - you can keep all the assets you need in Aptien. It doesn't have to be only assets that you assign to individual employees, but also, for example, office equipment, warehouse equipment, etc. You can share the organizers as needed with your colleagues who are responsible for the assets.
• Companies - shared organizer where you keep your suppliers of HR services or training. This organizer is usually shared with other people in the company
• Contacts - another shared organizer where your company keeps contacts that need to be shared across the company. It is a company-wide directory of contacts

Have an active relationship with your employees

Aptien also allows you to maintain an active relationship with your employees with its intranet and employee portal. You'll get two-way communication between you and your staff that you can control and not get lost in email ping-pong.

Each employee only sees their personal information in the employee self-service portal, where they can also update their personal information to facilitate communication with you.

Where - what can you find? Get to know your workspace

Everything necessary can be found in the left menu, which takes you to virtually everything you need to do your job. At the top left, you'll see colored tabs - this is a list of the organizers you have available for your work. These are the ones you see as an HR manager.

Your HR workspace

• In it you will find all the important organizers for the management of the personnel agenda.
• In addition, you can also have access to other organizers, depending on how Aptien is used in your company, such as PPE, list of benefits, etc.

You can find out what it looks like in the article: User Homepage

Your tasks and daily activities

• An overview of all your tasks
• Notifications
• Notes
• and other activities that you do as an Aptien user, or that are related to other users' activities and affect you. Notifications can also come automatically from the system - as soon as you set some watchdogs or a task deadline is approaching, the system will notify you.

Your company

• The wall is the perfect place for sharing and communicating information across the company. Information on the wall is easily accessible to everyone in the company. It's much better than sending emails to all the people in the company.
• Directory of all employees where each person in the company can easily find contact information for other colleagues. 

How and where do you keep basic personnel information

You can find and keep information about your employees in the employee organizer. For each employee, you keep data on the employee's personnel file, where you have all their basic information, i.e. personal and contact details, work equipment, financial evaluation, salary development, their benefits, education, identity or health information, and other related information you need to keep for your employees. You also have information relevant to their joining, life in the company, and termination of employment. Also included is a job description or its job classification. You will find here:

• Employee contact details
• Personal information including residence, insurance companies, and other necessary information for payroll accountants such as health insurance or account number for sending payroll
• Information about the job, its description, and other information about the job title
• Employee's work equipment, where you keep track of what the employee is assigned or provided
• Wage, remuneration and employment contract information, you can attach the employment contract, its attachments and amendments
• Information on qualifications, education and career history
• Details of the employee's health, medical examinations and work restrictions
• Details of the employee's identity
• Records of medical examinations
• Other personal documents

Edit your employee information if you need to

• Aptien offers you a basic data template based on our best practices. However, every business is a little different and Aptien is ready for that. You are free to customize the information yourself.

How you will work and communicate in the system

Communication with other employees in the company is similar to email. All the messages and discussions from your colleagues and all the notifications from the system will be gathered in one place in your Notifications tab, where they can't get stuck, lost, or fall into spam.

• The vast majority of your communication will take place in tasks where you will interact with your colleagues and solve work tasks through discussions. The calendar will also be important, where you will see all your events and minutes. If you need Aptien to keep track of important deadlines or tasks for you, you will set up a watchdog for that.
• You will communicate with your employees who use the intranet via messages and by sharing information on the noticeboard

What HR processes will Aptien make easier for you

Below we introduce the processes that Aptien can help you automate and make clearer.

Employee onboarding automation

• The onboarding of a new employee is one of the processes that HR managers often have to deal with, where their work can be simplified through automation.
• There are many activities to plan, coordinate, and resolve during onboarding. From the preparation of documentation to the issuance of job aids. 
• See how to do this in the article Steps in employee onboarding

Training planning automation

• Scheduling and confirming attendance at training, especially if it is regular and mandatory training, takes a lot of time. With Aptien, you save a lot of time by scheduling, tracking, and confirming employee training. 
• Learn more in the article Employee training schedule

Employee development plans

• As well as employee onboarding or training plans, you can keep a development plan in the employee record
• You can plan development activities and then confirm their completion.

Employee data update

• We'll help you simplify updating employee information
• You can allow an employee to change certain information in self-service
• An employee can use the request form to send you information about changing any information you hold about them and can include a document with the request form, as long as the document does not need to be kept in any personnel file.

Requests and notifications to the employer

• An employee can send you different types of requests and reports
• A request for leave, a request for work equipment, a day off, or a visit to the doctor are the most common situations that arise in companies.
• With the help of request forms all requests can be automated, they always go to the right person.

Employee offboarding automation

• You will create a plan of activities that need to be carried out when an employee leaves.
• As an HR manager, you can also assign tasks to the employees - for example, to remove access data,  or to handover assets
• Thanks to the employee's card, you can clearly see what assets and duties they have been assigned to, so you can easily check and remove them.
• With an automatic checklist when an employee leaves, you won't forget anything and it makes the whole process clearer. 
• Learn more about How to create an employee offboarding plan

Keeping track of various deadlines and events

• Set up your own watchdogs, such as expiration dates, amendments, and the start and end of substitutes, is a piece of cake with us.
• Our watchdogs will take care of everything for you, and you can set them up exactly according to your needs.
• Users set up their watchdogs according to their needs and can share their watchdogs with individual colleagues. 
• If you need to, the watchdogs can automatically create tasks for you or your colleagues to complete

People's participation in training

• In many companies you deal with intensive education, training, and certification of your employees. You need to keep track of who has attended what training.
• You can ensure the process with two organizers that we've already introduced you to. You link information from the employee organizer and the Training Catalog.
• If you are organizing training, you will create a new training in the Training Catalog organizer, here you can enter tasks to organize it and, most importantly, link the registered participants to this training. The information is also written on the employee's personal record

Overview of provided protective work equipment

• For each employee, you may keep a record of the protective equipment they were provided when they started or during their employment. 
• You can also keep a history in the system, i.e. how often the employee requires new equipment (e.g. gloves)
• For each piece of equipment, you can see a list of employees who have been assigned the equipment.

Job description

• Writing the job description is not easy. You need to create a list of activities or processes that the employee is expected to perform in a specific job.
• You create a description of a job in the Job Description. Here you have the option of either describing the job in plain text or supplementing this text with a list of processes and activities that you have described in your process catalogue.
• If you have one in your company, go to the Job settings and simply create a link to the Process Catalogue in the Job description block.

Process description

• The Process Catalogue serves not only as a source for creating job descriptions but of course as an organizer of all processes in your company
• You can also use the catalog to create new processes, which you can then use to create a policy

Organigram (organizational structure)

• It allows you to graphically display your organizational chart

Catalog of job requirements

•  Designed to create all the different requirements you need to track and manage for each position

What is Aptien?

It is an application for collaboration and communication of people within the company, keeping various operational company records, company administration, task and work management. It's not just a personnel system, but it's a kind of electronic filing system beyond the scope of regular HR. Aptien is also a company intranet where people can communicate with each other, a company bulletin board and a desk for people in the offices. Something like combining Facebook with software for managing orders, projects, contracts or assets. Information from different areas is linked and traceable from one single application.

Unlike traditional applications, Aptien is very flexible, customizable, and can connect the records where your daily tasks take place. It allows you to attach notes and other information so you no longer have to write them on different sticky notes and papers. All in one convenient environment.