Five essential things education leaders want from HR software

There’s a good reason why Every HR By IRIS was built specifically for schools and trusts.

HR software made for other settings just doesn’t make the grade. When it comes to education, your solution has to feel like it understands what schools and Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs) need.

To accomplish that, we do two things.

The first is to ensure Every HR is built and maintained by people who’ve worked in education. The second, and just as important, is to collaborate with the sector’s current leaders; we never make assumptions about the present-day demands of education HR, even if we have sector experience.

So, after getting all this feedback, what did these leaders tell us they wanted?

A control centre that manages data, supports staff, and delivers excellence

HR leaders want a system that can be the heart of their growing trust or busy school. Crucially, this has to be a system that brings everything together into one place; it can’t be the tangle of software solutions (or web of spreadsheets) many have put up with over the years. 

You need something that drives best practices, leverages trust-wide economies of scale, and protects data, making it feel more like an advantage and less like a burden.

And, of course, all this has to support staff and sync with your MIS.

We're sure you agree, that’s quite a list.

With all that in mind, how does Every HR By IRIS meet the challenge?

1) MAT-level functionality

The whole point of a MAT is to provide a centre that supports and organises schools and drives efficiency – but so few HR solutions actually help you do this.

So, we ensured Every HR By IRIS handles the all-important task of leading and guiding schools from the top by implementing clear, automated and standardised processes.

You can easily set up and apply departments, job categories, pay ranges and scales, term dates, auto-increment rules and more across your schools – all from a central management view.

The result? School HR leaders get what they always wanted: clarity and consistency.

Adaptable processes where it matters

Trusts need consistency, but when it comes to HR processes, one size does not always fit all.

This is most obvious when your trust has a mix of primary and secondary schools.

Thankfully, Every HR ensures you can define separate categories for these schools and apply different rule settings.

Consistency and control

Every HR also has the ability to associate pre-loaded settings.

What does that mean? Let’s take one example: applying pay ranges to job categories. In this situation, you can restrict the changes that can be made to a salary as it relates to a role.

The result is trust policies that have to be followed in every school.

2) Payroll that fully integrates with your HR operations

Pay is fundamental to running a school, but we all know overseeing this pay is not easy.

However, there are ways to make the process easier.

Here’s how you can feed data to your payroll from Every HR By IRIS:

• Create rules for employees to automatically move up pay scales (with approval if preferred), saving you time – and also reducing the risk of error.
• Define temporary changes to an employee’s salary details, such as contract hours, its effect on salary, and more. You can safeguard the process by specifying a date for auto-reversal.
• Define inset days to ensure everyone gets paid correctly.
• Switch an employee’s record from weeks to days in their contract salary information, allowing you to process salaries however you wish and eliminating the chance of conversion errors.
• Add final holiday balances against leavers, define contractual overtime for support staff roles, and map old and new pay structures – and execute changes – in a single process.

All this works smoothly regardless of whether you’re using payroll software (such as Every Payroll By IRIS) or working with an outsourcing specialist like Dataplan Education By IRIS.

3) There’s a joined-up solution for every step of your staff’s journey

Most of the time, schools face two software problems.

The first is finding a solution for a given task, and the second is linking that solution to your existing systems.

The problem is that data blockages often occur when one application doesn’t play nicely with others. Furthermore, back-office staff are stuck with an uneven experience when solutions work differently and perform duplicate functions.

Every HR By IRIS is about the full employee lifecycle – from creating job adverts to processing candidates, onboarding them, training them, and helping them find their full potential. Finally, it will help you manage the process when a staff member leaves or retires.

4) Absence management that’s made for schools and trusts

If there’s a way for HR software to add value quickly to your school or trust, it's by effectively managing absences.

That’s because if absences are not handled correctly, a lot of your budget will be wasted on supply staff.

Thankfully, Every HR’s case management helps you reduce absences, its control centre enables you to move staff when needed, and its automation ensures no time is wasted calculating sick pay.

We’ve linked sickness entitlement policies with live absences, so pay changes can be applied automatically when time-off thresholds are met.

We’ve also simplified the process of supporting phased returns. Every HR does this by introducing a dedicated area for you to store, track, and edit the whole process. This reduces the need to improvise working pattern adjustments.

5) A built-in SCR

Every HR By IRIS includes a module to support schools and trusts in maintaining a single central record (SCR). Its functionality includes:

• An interactive dashboard that automatically highlights missing information (e.g. date of last check) to ensure greater accuracy.
• A standard DfE checklist for basic compliance, plus the ability to create custom checks (e.g. online searches for recruitment).
• Full integration with your recruitment system so you can check off onboarding and recruitment requirements.

Find out how Every HR By IRIS can help your school or trust

If you want to know more – or see our software in action – why not check out our webinar?

With the help of one of our experts, you get a showcase of Every HR’s powerful, education-focused functionality.

Click here to see more.

Alternatively, visit our Every HR By IRIS hub.