As the economy rebounds, many organizations are growing by leaps and bounds. If 2015 was a growth year for your company – or if you’re planning to grow in 2016 – the expansion may have you feeling disorganized. For the New Year, resolve to take steps to get yourself and your organization back on track and running at peak efficiency.

1. Clear Your Clutter.

There are a lot of documents you need to keep for tax purposes, business purposes, or just-in-case-you-need-them purposes. But you don’t have to keep them in boxes in warehouses, closets, or under desks: scan those documents in, store them in the cloud, and reclaim your space. Most document management companies will pick up your boxes of paper, scan them in, upload them to a cloud-based service (and provide you with hard copies on a disk or drive if you desire), sort them into searchable online databases (including optional OCR to make the text of each document searchable), and securely dispose of your originals.

2. Integrate Your Information.

You’ve expanded your office space and cut down on your storage costs by scanning in your documents: now what? Integrating the important documents and information into an online system can help you utilize them more efficiently and effectively. Using a cloud-based integrated HCM system, you can tie together the documents and their information. You can track patterns, monitor efficiency, prepare utilization reports, and ensure compliance. Integrating your information into one, easily accessible system also reduces the man hours lost to shuffling through boxes of paperwork to find urgently-needed information.

3. Improve Your Personnel Process – and Documentation.

From posting a vacancy through hiring and training, and all the way through termination or retirement, most company’s personnel process are disjointed and disorganized. This year, resolve to streamline your processes from start to finish.

Keeping your recruitment, interviewing, and hiring paperwork together in an organized database can ensure that you aren’t “reinventing the wheel” every time you need to hire, and that you’re compliant with union agreements or applicable regional laws. Once you’ve hired, having cloud-based training modules and onboarding systems can save time and ensure your new employees are properly and effectively trained.

Every step of the way, keep your personnel files up-to-date, complete, and compliant with requirements for both accessibility and confidentiality. When terminating an employee, make sure you keep all related paperwork, including releases, final paycheck and benefits information, and any subsequent communications with employees or their representatives organized and secure.

Integrating your personnel files into a cloud-based system will ensure that your offices don’t start filling up again with paper!

4. Focus on Employee Engagement and Wellness.

One of the biggest buzzwords of 2016 is “employee engagement.” An engaged employee is one that’s interested and challenged by his or her work and invested in the success of the company. Research repeatedly shows that employee happiness is key to engagement and productivity. In addition to compensation, rewarding your employees with small perks, regular feedback and encouragement, and appropriate autonomy can help improve engagement. A company-wide wellness program can improve health, morale, and attitude as well as productivity. Improving the health and happiness of your community can reduce turnover and make your company more successful.

5. Be Creative!

The key to the booming success of many modern companies lies in their innovative attitudes towards the workplace. Flexible work times, remote working arrangements, coworking situations, job sharing and more benefit both companies and workers. Creativity can allow companies to take advantage of the talents of myriad employees who can’t (or won’t) fit into the on-premises, 9-to-5 traditional workplace model. Resolve to think outside the box in 2016 and see if you can take advantage of creative workplace solutions.

StarGarden is excited about 2016, too, because SG 5.0 is here! Our brand-new, upgraded SG 5.0 software is supercharged, integrated HR & payroll software. With a new, more customizable interface, improved integration with existing software, and even more ways to use it wherever you need it, SG 5.0 is the customizable HCM solution to help you keep your resolutions. Contact us today to find out how you can try it out StarGarden HCM software for yourself!