Digital HR: A key to success in the new world of work

We live in a remote-first world. After two years of lockdowns and work from home orders, companies are embracing remote working arrangements and building globally distributed teams. 

To support hybrid work, companies are adopting HR technology to streamline talent management and deliver a seamless employee experience. 

Moving beyond spreadsheets and filing cabinets, the best HR teams are digitising their HR processes to hire, onboard, and upskill talent through one central platform.

Doing away with manual paper-based processes saves time, reduces human error, and gives HR analytics to prove their ROI. 

Aimee Sandford, Operations Manager at Four Walls Realty says their transition to digital HR changed the way they do business. 

Four Walls Realty chose Breathe to lead their digital HR transformation and consolidate their talent processes into one streamlined, easily accessible platform. 

“We’ve saved so much time by adopting a new HR technology system, we also love the fact that the information can be accessed from anywhere.” 

One central home for HR 

Having everything the HR team needs in one place is essential for Four Walls Realty as it grows its operations. 

“We were manually managing all components of the HR process. As the business grew it made sense to look at our options,” explains Sandford. 

Previously, HR processes were siloed and manual. But to support a growing team, all employee data needed to be managed in the one centralised system.

“We previously ran spreadsheets and used paper-style lodgement systems,” Sandford explains.

“Staff would apply for leave on a paper form that would be marked as approved and signed off on, scanned and saved as a file on the server. License expiries, passwords, booked leave etc. was all kept and managed in spreadsheets.” 

Now, hiring, payroll, time management and rostering can all be done online in one place — from anywhere in the world. That reduces the risk of human error, and means Sandford’s HR team can scale their operations with ease. 

Save time for what matters. Swap spreadsheets for software and manage your team from anywhere with Breathe’s online HR, payroll and rostering software.

Making people management easy

Even as Four Walls Reality grows, its HR team can ensure every new starter is given a gold-standard experience. 

Breathe helps onboarding new employees with comprehensive online training that helps them hit the ground running before day one. 

“Bringing on new staff has been a breeze since implementing Breathe. We can have new employees reviewing policies before they even start!” says Sandford. 

Existing employees are also given opportunities to learn and upskill through the Breathe platform, which makes it easy to develop promising talent and plan for future skills gaps. 

Managing leave requests and payroll is streamlined and straightforward, even across multiple offices and geographies. 

“Our payroll is managed from a different town altogether so reports are simply generated and entered into our payroll platform. Previously the manager would have to email a summary to the payroll officer each week,” explains Sandford. 

Powerful insights and reporting 

One of the biggest benefits of a digital HR system is being able to see what’s working — and what’s not — in one central dashboard. 

With employee data stored in one place, teams can see bottlenecks, tasks that need to be actioned, and gain full visibility of each stage of the employee journey. 

And for other businesses looking to invest in digitising their HR, Sandford recommends going with the vendor that prioritises your needs. 

“Ultimately it came down to value for money and service for us,” she says.

“Breathe were the quickest to get back to our enquiry, they were also able to schedule our demo before anyone else and we found their pricing very reasonable for what they were offering in functionality.”