HR Workflows in TOPdesk

"Every month, we receive dozens of emails containing various requests," tells Rik. "Many of the emails are requests for information – such as the details of the educational budget we offer our employees – but we also receive requests for things such as contract changes."

These requests are registered in TOPdesk’s Incident Management using the mail import module. Implementing this procedure has led to more structured and reliable request processing. Rik: "We can easily prioritize requests that require extensive research. A big advantage to using incidents instead of emails is that you can indicate a status and operator. Consequently, we cannot forget about requests, or even worse, lose them." TOPdesk can also be used to schedule requests that need to be processed in the future. For example, this could be an email informing HR that the sender is going to move in two months. "We want to begin sending the pay slips to the new address at the right time. That means we have to change the address in our administration in six weeks time. The system automatically sends us a message that reminds us to do so."

When a new employee begins working at TOPdesk, and when old employees leave, HR must ensure that items such as laptops and key cards are issued or returned. "A lot of different people need to do a lot of different things before someone can officially start working," says Rik. "For example, login accounts need to be created, hardware needs to be ordered and set up, a training programme needs to be planned and photos need to be taken. Now that we use TOPdesk, everything is automated." When someone leaves the company, an HR member runs a report, which provides an immediate overview of all the items that correspond to that employee.

Since our software is so widely applicable, we do not just use it to carry out administrative changes and serve our colleagues; we also use it to support some of our recruitment needs. "We use the Survey module to gather recruitment information from our colleagues. The ‘Starter Survey’ is used to find out what kinds of criteria first-year employees used during their job searches. We then use that information in our recruitment campaigns," says Rik.

According to Rik, a nice by-product of using TOPdesk is that the administration has become more quantifiable and transparent. "We are now better prepared to satisfy our accountant’s requirements. He needs to see, for example, how pay raises and contract changes are processed and authorized. All these things have been documented in TOPdesk."