Hi all 

I am an HR manager in a large retail unit with over 500 employees. I have a relevitvely small team who are very stretched (as we all are, of course). I have been in this role for six months and have tried to improve our processes. So far, I have focused mainly on ER as this is a huge area for us. I am now turning to other things and have noticed that the amount of day-to-day a queries we receive (mostly from employees dropping by the office) is immense. One of my HR advisors handles most of them and passes things to the administrators etc. But I am starting to think this is not the best approach and have recently had employees come back to me as their queries were unanswered. 

I have been thinking about implementing a ‘help desk’ type approach – where we log incoming queries on a spreadsheet, then work through them methodically. As it is we seem to deal with things in a very ad-hoc manner (which seems to be the case everywhere I have worked) which I am no longer comfortable with. Does anyone have a similar system? Or can anyone recommend a practical approach for dealing with such a high volume of queries? 

Thanks very much – I look forward to hearing people’s thoughts on this. 

Chris