How One Money Saving HR Solution Found A Home At Housing Group

Spectrum Housing Group (Spectrum), one of the largest providers of affordable housing in the south of England, has revealed it saves more than £50,000 every year and has improved employee engagement using MobileHR, a mobile HR solution from Advanced Business Solutions (Advanced).

MobileHR allows Spectrum’s employees to submit expenses, annual leave requests and declare business hospitality gifts via smartphone and tablet devices, allowing the HR team to focus on more value-adding activities. Line managers can use the solution to record all sickness absence types and approve processes remotely without having to travel into the office.

Streamlining admin processes

The solution interfaces with Advanced’s OpenHR human resource system, which manages all HR information relating to Spectrum’s 900 staff situated at nine UK offices. OpenHR’s integrated self-service, training and recruitment modules have further streamlined administrative processes by assisting the HR department to more efficiently track absences, health and safety information and identify internal skills gaps through greater automation.

HR systems manager at Spectrum Housing Group, Robert Barnett-Moore, commented: “MobileHR has eliminated the need for trade staff to come into the office to manage annual leave requests and other administrative tasks. We are now saving approximately £50,000 each year in fuel and efficiency gains which has given us an instant return on our investment.

“In addition, holiday and sickness absence records are now automatically updated remotely by authorised staff. As a result we have saved five percent of administrator’s working time so they can focus more strategically.”

The solution is also enabling Spectrum to increase employee engagement through its internal recognition scheme, Spectrum Stars. Staff can quickly and easily nominate individual employees, managers or teams using their mobile device to receive internal recognition and annual awards for their outstanding contributions.

The process is managed using intuitive workflow, which routes all submissions for the consideration of the HR department and automatically alerts staff by email when they have been nominated. To date, almost 3,000 nominations have been submitted following the scheme’s launch in June 2012.

Barnett-Moore added: “We wanted to improve our levels of employee engagement and Spectrum Stars, with the aid of MobileHR, is supporting our goal to be named as one of ‘The Best 100 Companies to Work For’ in The Sunday Times’ annual survey.

“In the last two months alone we have seen a 71 percent increase in staff nominations for our 2015 scheme, partly due to the fact that Advanced’s solution is so easy and quick to use.”

Spectrum Housing Group has recently achieved Investors in People Gold, the highest award possible, which has currently been achieved by just seven percent of Investors in People accredited organisations. The Standard is the benchmark of good people management practice. Feedback from Investors in People included praise for staff recognition and reward for its Spectrum Stars scheme.

Want to stay up-to-date with all the latest tech news and insight? Sign up for our newsletter!