Investigate Every Issue with One Tool

Using different tools to handle various of issues and complaints can lead to confusion and duplication of effort, and often isn't the most cost-effective solution.

With employee relations software, you can manage and investigate both HR and ER issues, including:

• Employee misconduct
• Absenteeism and punctuality problems
• Discrimination, bullying and harassment
• Policy violations
• Health and safety incidents and concerns
• Employee/management disputes

Using a single tool to handle your HR complaints and ER investigations ensures none fall through the cracks. This reduces your risk of a costly fraud scheme, escalated harassment problems, widespread health issues or other negative outcomes.

RELATED: What is Employee Relations Software?

Create and Assign Cases Fast

When dealing with sensitive employee issues, you must to respond promptly and efficiently. Failing to address a problem right away gives it time to escalate or for repeat incidents to occur. In addition, putting off an investigation into a complaint or concern increases the risk that the employee will file a formal grievance or take legal action.

Employee relations software benefits teams by helping them address issues faster to protect both employees and the organization. First, you can integrate the software with your existing hotlines or other intake mechanisms. As a result, whenever an employee files a complaint or submits a tip, the software instantly creates a new case file.

Next, the case is automatically assigned to the next available team member or an investigator based on case type (e.g. harassment, health and safety, compliance). Also, you can also manually assign cases to balance the workload and avoid conflicts of interest.

These steps eliminate the need to check your hotline, manually create a case file for each complaint, copy over the employee's information and complaint details and sort through team members' schedules to assign the file. Faster case creation and assignment means you can get right to work correcting issues and improving employee experience.

Make Links Between Case Files

When you use a paper-based case management system or keep your data in spreadsheets, it is hard to gain insight into your workplace's issues. However, if your employee relations software has a case-linking tool, though, you can prevent repeat incidents from happening.

Using artificial intelligence, the tool flags connections between case files (such as employees involved, location or issue type), making it easier to spot trends that may be missed otherwise.

For example, say a manager recently moved to a new position, from your New York office to your Chicago office. In New York, they were issued a warning for bullying behavior years ago. Now, in Chicago, another bullying complaint has been made against them by an employee.

Because of the different locations and times between incidents, you might miss this pattern of behavior. Luckily, our employee relations software points out the link so you can monitor the situation.

Keep Supporting Evidence Handy

One of the biggest time-wasters when handling a case is tracking down supporting materials. After spending hours searching through databases or emailing coworkers to send you the documents you need, you could still misplace them.

Employee relations software with a centralized database lets you store all case material in the file. Supporting documents (such as an employee's attendance record or interview notes), as well as audio, video and image files, are all in one place so all team members can easily reference them throughout the process.

Collaborate Securely

At most companies, many people work together to resolve employee issues. Whether you need input from another department in your organization, an external professional (e.g. lawyer, mediator) or another team member, you must balance teamwork with confidentiality.

Employee relations software offers a secure platform for collaboration. Each team member's profile can be modified (manually or based on their role) so they only have access to the information they need for their tasks. Everyone can complete their work on the case in the ER software, while sensitive employee data is kept as private as possible.

Integrate with Your HR Database

Data entry can be one of the most time-consuming parts of handling employee concerns. When an incident occurs or an employee submits a complaint, you must manually enter all their data into a case file -time better spent addressing the issue.

Employee relations software can integrate with your existing employee database or HRIS to save time. Just choose the employee's name from a drop-down menu and the software automatically fills in the rest of their information (e.g. employee number, contact information).

This is especially helpful for cases with multiple subjects, such as a manager accused by numerous employees of misconduct or an employee accused of harassing more than one person.

RELATED: The Best HR Case Management Software Has These 5 Features

Create Investigation Reports in Seconds

Writing a final investigation report is one of the most critical parts of resolving a case, yet one of the most tedious. You need to communicate your findings and recommendations to your company's decision-makers, but writing a long document takes time away from more complex tasks you could be working on.

With employee relations software, you can produce a complete final report with the a click of a button. The software gathers all of the data from the case file to create a full report that you can share with managers and other stakeholders. This saves time at the end of an investigation and is also helpful if you are asked to produce another copy of the report in the future.

Conduct In-Depth Trend Analysis

Every employee issue or complaint is an opportunity for you to improve your workplace experience. If you don't take it, you risk overlooking an issue that's negatively affects your employees.

Some employee relations software analyzes data so you can spot trends and work to correct and prevent issues. Set the parameters you want to explore (such as region, store location, incident type or even employee), and the software organizes data into a heat map, chart or graph.

You can also analyze your workflow by sorting cases based on age or progression status. Are you taking too long to close cases? Do cases get stuck in a certain stage? The software helps you identify where you need to focus your efforts without spending hours on data analysis.

Help Investigators Stick to Deadlines

Your team always has multiple cases, often concerning different types of complaints. Keeping track of everything can be challenging and you risk cases falling through the cracks if you do not use a robust management system.

A key feature of employee relations software is that it keeps team members organized as they work. Team members get reminders when they have a task coming due. They can also set their own "to-do's" to fit their working style.

Tasks and deadlines are automatically allocated based on the nature of the case. Not only does this ensure that each case is handled consistently, but also helps your team comply with reporting requirements.

Are you struggling to figure out your Bill C-86 compliance approach? Download our free checklist for HR professionals to get on the right track.

Enable Better Manager Oversight

Juggling multiple team members each working on several cases means many managers are too preoccupied to individually monitor each case’s progress. You trust each team member to stay on top of their work, but what if they don't? Your company could face consequences, from a competent employee quitting to lawsuits or fines.

Employee relations software helps managers oversee their team's work in several ways. First, managers receive alerts when a task is overdue. Each case file also contains a timeline of activity, detailing who did what on the case and when. Together, these help managers track case progression and see if any team members are falling behind.

Access the Database Anywhere

Finally, ER teams cannot always be at the office. You might have to investigate a complaint made at a different work site. You could be away at a conference but have to meet an urgent case deadline. Or, you might work remotely and live thousands of miles from your organization's home office. Accessing a paper or spreadsheet-based case management system would be difficult in all those situations.

However, web-based, mobile-friendly employee relations software lets you work on cases from anywhere with an internet connection. When you are away from the office, you do not have to wait to work, ensuring you do not miss important deadlines or forget the details of an interview or incident.

Employee Relations Software Benefits

Employee relations software streamlines your case management processes. As a result, your team can respond to issues more efficiently and effectively, making your organization an even better place to work. Learn more about Case IQ’s Employee Relations Software today.