5 essential task lists Cezanne can help you automate

5 essential task lists Cezanne can help you automate in summary:

• Automating onboarding and offboarding processes ensures new hires are set up efficiently, and leavers have a smooth transition, minimising administrative errors and enhancing employee experience​.
•  Automated checklists help manage the complexities of remote work setups and employee relocations, ensuring all necessary steps are completed and nothing is overlooked.
• Task automation supports compliance with company policies and legal requirements, and increases overall HR productivity by reducing manual task management.

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As an HR practitioner, you know that having a never-ending list of tasks to do is part and parcel of the job.

Chances are you’re at the front line of ensuring a host of essential people-related activities get completed on time. It can be exhausting for even the most experienced HR professionals.

Did you remember to make sure that the head of IT knows that Harry needs an email and PC set up for when he starts? Or the sales director needs to decide whether Frank fits the bill before his probation period expires? And what about Sarah’s visa?

With everyone so busy, important emails are missed, scribbles on paper get lost in the desk clutter, and vital processes are forgotten about. Before you know it, Harry’s email-less, Frank isn’t going to stay but you still need to pay the full recruitment fees, and Sarah’s right to work has expired…

You’ve been there before, which is why you’ve probably got a comprehensive set of tasks lists for every occasion. The trouble is, how to make sure everyone else is on track too!

That’s where Cezanne’s Onboarding and Lifecycle module can help. It allows you to set up as many different task lists as you like, each with their own activities, participants and due dates. Simply starting an event, like a new joiner, triggers the associated notifications, so everyone knows what they need to do without you having to do a thing!

With everything managed centrally, you’ll have immediate visibility over the status of all the tasks, and participants benefit from automated reminders to complete tasks, meaning important actions are less likely to be forgotten about across the business.

We’ve identified five essential task lists that Cezanne’s HR system can help you automate.

1. Onboarding

Having an effective onboarding programme goes a long way in setting up your new employees so they can settle in and be productive as quickly as possible. But onboarding new hires comes with a lot of admin that HR has to keep on top of.

By creating a new joiner task list, you can make sure that all important administrative and compliance processes get completed. This could include letting your new joiner know what information you need from them before they start (such as references and right to work details), kicking off payroll processes, arranging health and safety training – and of course, ensuring that they have the equipment they need to do their job in place on their first day; with many employees now homeworking, this is more important than ever before.

Social onboarding should not be underestimated either. Why not include tasks to ensure a buddy is in place, and that the line manager knows to show them round the office, or to schedule a welcome lunch for them in their first week? The new hire will feel looked after, and more at ease with your company.

2. Offboarding

The responsibility for managing leavers also often falls into HR’s lap. By automating task lists to remind colleagues to schedule exit interviews, shut down emails, delete logins, collect any devices (phones, tablets etc), calculate outstanding loans or holiday entitlements, confirm their last pay cheque, etc., you can ensure it is a smooth process for everyone involved.

As the custodian of your company’s brand, you’ll want your leaving employees to look back on their employment with your company fondly, especially as it’s so easy for past employees to leave negative reviews online following poor experiences with employers.

The task list templates you set up in Cezanne can be easily tailored to reflect specific circumstances; for example, to remind a senior manager that it’s a long-standing employee’s last day, so they can stop by to say thanks.

3. Return to work

Automated task lists can come in handy when an employee comes back to work after an extended period of absence. Scheduling a return to work meeting with their line manager, a refresh of health & safety and data protection training, plus perhaps a couple of check-in sessions with HR, can be an effective way to integrate them back into the company.

If a lot has changed while they’ve been away, or there are new factors to take into account, like a change in health status, checklists can be incredibly useful – even if only as a framework that you can tailor to individual employee needs.

For example, you could set-up a task list in your people management software that‘s specifically focused on assessing – and adjusting – the work environment to accommodate disabled employees; like adapting desks, chairs or keyboards, moving the work station to a more accessible space, or installing a ramp if the employee is in a wheelchair. Or you may want to remind line managers to reallocate some of the employee’s workload to make their return easier, or to change their working hours to accommodate medical appointments.

4. Relocating overseas

Whether it’s from London to Birmingham, or from Birmingham to Paris, relocating an employee to another geographic location involves sound planning if it is all to run smoothly.

If just one critical task is forgotten about, the whole process can fall through or be drastically slowed down, which can cause a huge headache for everyone. Sorting the employee’s accommodation, liaising with the overseas office, booking flights and arranging to move their possessions are just some of the actions that should be considered.

Many companies will use external help when moving employees overseas, but it’s still worth having your own task list – so you can double check that everything has been covered and keep others up to speed, too.

5. Working from home

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies have now embraced hybrid and homeworking. While on the surface, the transition from office to homework is straight-forward, you’ll know that there’s much more to it than meets the eye. Thankfully, automated checklists can make this process more manageable.

As the employer, your obligations to your employees’ health and safety extends to their homeworking environments, so this is often the first area to consider. Notifications can be triggered to make sure that Facilities or IT, for example, assess the homework environment to make sure it is suitable, and that homeworkers have all the equipment necessary to do their job. This could include setting up laptops, phones or printers, and determining WiFi needs – and setting up the appropriate services (they may require VPN access to ensure a secure connection, for example).

A lot of companies had to quickly roll out homeworking earlier this year – if in the rush checklists weren’t followed, perhaps now is a good time to make sure your homeworkers are properly set up.

With Cezanne’s integrated Onboarding and Lifecycle module, it’s easy to put together as many automated task lists as you like, and to tailor them to your specific company needs. It provides you with a systematic, standardised and automated approach to managing key activities and gives you a useful overview of the distribution and status of tasks, making that never-ending to-do list far more manageable as a result.

Here’s what just one of our clients has to say about the checklist feature within the Cezanne HR Onboarding module:

“The ‘checklists’ element of the Onboarding module is especially helpful for new employees starting with the company. Now, at any point in time, I have a central view of which teams within the business have completed necessary tasks and which have not, and I can trigger the system to notify or remind individuals as needed.” –    ByrneLooby. Read the full success story here