PeopleSonic’s HR management platform has been upgraded with new features, implemented with greater team productivity and HR efficiency in mind. After last week’s deep dive into timesheets, this week we will look into leave liability reports, what function they perform, and how to make the most out of them.

Leave liability reports can be accessed in the PeopleSonic product under the payroll menu. Let’s get started.

What is leave liability?

Employees are entitled to a certain number of leaves a year, based on their employment status (permanent, full-time, or part-time – contract employee

s generally don’t accrue leaves). Leave liability is the financial value for all types of leaves accrued by the employee, that is owed to them by the company. 

What does a leave liability report include?

A leave liability report is a detailed breakdown of an employee’s pay cycle, the leaves they have accrued, and their financial liability. Below is a look at what the PeopleSonic leave liability report looks like:

The weekly pay rates (ordinary and average) are determined by the laws of your particular country, as is the holiday pay liability – these are used in conjunction with the number of leaves accrued to calculate the leave liability per employee.

Automating the leave liability report

Leave liability is generally a manual and collaborative effort between finance and HR departments to calculate and record the relevant data into balance sheets. Manually generating a leave liability report, whether on a daily or weekly basis, would involve daily communication, checks, and balances to make sure the most updated information is fed into these reports for managers and the company decision-makers. Not only would that be a time taking process, but would also be prone to mistakes due to so many moving parts involved.

PeopleSonic helps centralize and automate the leave liability report – a single datasheet where you can sort by employee name and date is a powerful tool that is updated automatically based on data picked up from other features of the product. This means that managers can, at the press of a button, get the latest numbers for any employee’s leave liability, which would let them evaluate the cost of an employee potentially leaving, among other things.

The need for leave liability reports

Companies need to have on the fly access to leave liability reports for balancing financial liabilities, work output, and employee welfare. That’s because employees who don’t take the fixed yearly leaves accrue a higher financial liability to the company, but it also negatively impacts their mental and physical health, which in turn can affect the quality of their work. On the other hand, poorly planned mandatory time-off can also impact project timelines and work output on time-sensitive tasks.

Smaller businesses can’t afford to have dedicated resources in finance and HR collaborating and managing annual leaves and liabilities, but it is a critical task that needs to be performed. That’s where solutions like PeopleSonic come into play, with dedicated reports to help reduce the workload involved in strategizing around leave liabilities. With this feature rolling out soon, small to medium-sized businesses can quickly take advantage of it by offloading a lot of manual labor to the PeopleSonic platform!

PeopleSonic has recently introduced timesheet management features to help small businesses run smoother, by offering simplified visual interfaces to view, approve and edit timesheet information and save time and effort involved with manually exchanging and approving timesheets via email.  

There is also an option for bulk import of timesheets so managers and admin can quickly parse a high volume of timesheet data – faster, smarter and a more efficient way of going through bulk timesheets!

Why Timesheets?

This of course begs the question, why timesheets?

With 2020 completely changing how businesses operate and how we ‘work’, smaller businesses have been left scrambling to adjust to the new normal as they lack the manpower and resources of bigger organizations to brute force a solution. Instead, they have had to resort to being smart about how they transitioned to hybrid work and implemented COVID-safe practices for their office space.

Small businesses have faced unprecedented hardships in sustaining and growing and for them, the smarter way of working will always favour them over any ‘traditional’ processes. In this case however, the ‘traditional’ process of timesheets has made a resurgence as the smarter solution to keeping businesses operational and highly productive in the face of changing workplace norms and is a solution that all small companies need to adopt.

For these businesses, an interesting trend has emerged with how timesheets have been keeping teams within those businesses functioning. Here’s a quick breakdown of how timesheets became a sleeper success to keeping small and medium businesses running “business as usual”, and how the timesheet feature from PeopleSonic can help you achieve the same.

Resource allocation in a hybrid setup

With most businesses worldwide, whether large or small, having to work completely or partly remotely, the way teams communicate has changed, and that results in poor collaboration or resource management – you can no longer turn in your seat and ask your team member what they are working on!

That’s where timesheets come in – a daily timesheet will help a manager stay on top of how their team is functioning and can allocate resources to specific tasks or projects based on their importance and time/cost budgets. These timesheets also let managers understand how tasks are being completed and can understand the resource costs associated with such a task and allocate accordingly in the future.

Boosting project management

Timesheets have always been important tools for project management, but that importance has become crystal clear this year. Timesheets let managers understand which employees are ideal for a new project, task or role based on their performance in similar tasks previously. They can analyze how certain team members perform in different time-based scenarios, identify key skills and learn to utilize each resource to their maximum potential.

Project managers can also benefit from timesheets when planning trainings and improvements for teams and future projects. Employees in need of additional training can be highlighted, overall efficiency of putting certain people together on a task can be determined, as well as their availability. All of these things help project managers estimate optimal costs and time requirements when creating projections for future and current tasks.

Reduce resource wastage

Or alternatively, increase efficiency of resources. A timesheet can help a manager pinpoint the areas where a team’s efforts are being wasted. By identifying tasks that are taking longer than usual, or necessary, managers can figure out how to prioritize tasks and make decisions to optimize project completion.

What do these things achieve for small businesses? In short: saving money. Optimizing processes to reduce overhead has been critical for small to medium businesses this year and is a trend that’s likely to continue into next year and beyond.

 

 

While the long-lasting economic impacts of the coronavirus pandemic won’t be fully understood for years to come, in the short-term it has required all industries to rethink their approach to work. SOPs have been implemented for the service and manufacturing industries, where human presence is necessary to function, and businesses and organizations have had to reckon with implementing a hybrid or fully work-from-home model to control the spread of the disease.

For any business that’s able to move to such a model, one of the biggest concerns is transitioning the concept of the “workplace” and “workforce”, two aspects that are the domain of the on-site HR. With the transition to work from home and hybrid teams, your approach to HR needs to transition and evolve as well, to make the most out of this ‘new normal’ workplace. That’s where technology comes in: A managed HR software is the best solution for your human resources to champion hybrid work and will end up being cost and labour-effective even if we as a society return to the pre-pandemic work model.

Let’s look at how an integrated software solution to HR can help successfully manage a hybrid workforce.

Automate Core HR Tasks

The daily workload of any HR team involves a lot of document and personnel data management, tasks that usually involve handling a lot of paperwork and communication with employees. The advent of managed HR solutions allows HR to go paperless and minimize unnecessary processes to complete those core tasks. A good software solution will let HR digitize and automate work such as employee role definitions, personnel data management, while offloading manual communications to self-service dashboards that are not only more efficient, but thorough.

Accelerate Payroll

With the pandemic causing undue financial stresses and instability among people, having a long, drawn-out (and manual!) payroll process will likely add to those concerns, with the high possibility of impacting employee morale and motivation. That’s where you as a business can step in and alleviate those worries. An automated payroll management system, part of an integrated, end-to-end HR solution can reduce payroll processing time from days to minutes and eliminate any human errors and delays that can naturally occur during the course of manual processing.

Not only does that remove excess burden from your HR during the critical monthly payroll period, it also boosts employee morale to have timely, punctual updates on their HR dashboard on pay day!

Enable Flexibility

Any competent, cloud-based HR solution generally comes equipped with attendance and time tracking features, both of which let employees and HR monitor how their daily or weekly work hours and punctuality are being managed. This is key to enabling flexible work hours, especially for hybrid teams that are now spread in multiple time zones. Employees can check in and out on their defined schedules, with the HR system providing real-time updates and tracking to that effect.

 

For businesses, especially small to medium sized ones, that are transitioning (temporarily or permanently) to home-based hybrid work models, it is imperative that the move is as smooth as possible both for the workforce, and the organizational systems in place, key among them of course being HR. Leveraging technology and choosing a competent software solution such as PeopleSonic can help HR be the guiding force to an effective evolution of the concept of a workplace, and help your business stay on top in these turbulent times.

 

There are a limited number of hours in a work day and of those hours, a significant amount can be attributed to manual, lengthy administrative tasks that keep any office running smoothly. While critical, the way those tasks are performed, manually, does not directly feed into the organization’s productivity. Those tasks can range from manually signing in or out of a ledger, following up on administrative things via email or in-person, or more.

HR ends up doing a bulk of such important but inefficient work, so let’s look at how automating their daily grind can help them and the workforce in general.

The solution to improving efficiency

Productivity is just one side of the coin; efficiency is the other. Understanding how to extract the most from your resources (time, cost or person-hours) is equally as important as the amount of work being done. And wouldn’t you know it, the key to efficiency can be summed up in one word: automation.

Human resources work involves a lot of communication, data and coordination to execute flawlessly day in, day out. That is work with a lot of time overhead, and thus something worth looking into first when considering the efficiency of a workplace. 

There are various HR solutions available that can help attain that baseline level of automation to improve efficiency. Increasingly, modern solutions such as PeopleSonic are going cloud based, while also providing an integrated, end-to-end solution. Let’s take a look at how these HR products can help automate repetitive work and boost the efficiency of employees.

The Advantages of Automation

Significant Time Savings

HR tasks such as payroll management and certain core functions such as employee data management, if conducted using ‘typical’ processes, can be incredibly time-taking and error prone. Given how integral both HR functions are, it is essential to remove human error from the processes, while also speeding them up. Automating these processes also ensures that employees are happier – no one wants payroll issues!

Reduced Communication Lead Time

Functions such as leave management, or tracking employee presence in the office require some form of communicative processes, whether it be email, text or phone call. This obviously presents obvious issues: The communication doesn’t happen in a timely manner, isn’t responded to immediately, or just gets lost in transits – phone signal strength still remains an issue in many regions. 

All this means that the lead time associated with the aforementioned processes is unacceptably high, especially if HR spends half their day chasing down the necessary information (or if employees aren’t able to reach busy HR personnel). 

Automation, especially those like PeopleSonic, which are powered by the cloud and accessible everywhere and on every platform, reduce that lead time drastically, while also allowing both HR and employees to communicate their attendance or leave status in a timely, easy-to-access manner.

Speed, with Accuracy

With any task or activity, we’re often given the old adage that one must sacrifice speed for accuracy, or vice versa. A modern, fully integrated HR solution offers the third, and best, option: Speed and accuracy. 

With human error and manual paperwork removed from the equation, HR functions require minimal redoing, while also completing faster. That directly translates to greater efficiency, not just for HR, but for the entire workplace. 

 

The move to an automated HR management solution seems like a no-brainer, yet many businesses out there haven’t still not adopted newer technologies to not only optimize their workplaces, but save their employees from the drudgery of repetitive, manual tasks.

Employee engagement always comes across as this important but immeasurable quality that organizations are wishing for – the reality is that while it is indeed an important metric, it’s also measurable. But before we get to that, let’s quickly remind ourselves why employee engagement is a critical factor that can determine the success of your company.

What is Employee Engagement?

Employee engagement can broadly be defined as the initiative and effort an employee puts in all their work endeavors, often as a result of job satisfaction which can be attributed to aspects such as satisfactory wages, nurturing work environment, suitable career growth trajectory and more.

Employee engagement is a metric that feeds into itself; workers satisfied with their jobs will continue to engage more at work; engaged employees will be motivated to perform even better and obtain greater job satisfaction from achievements, awards and growth. This self-replicating nature of employee engagement makes it an essential ingredient for the success and evolution of any organization.

What are the Impacts of High Employee Engagement?

We’ve seen that high employee engagement is a self-sustaining model, once the core requirement of “job satisfaction” is fulfilled. What makes it a key success metric is the impact a highly engaged workforce has on a business. A full analysis of the impacts is a discussion for another blog, but in summary, here are some major takeaways you can expect:

•         High productivity – A motivated team is a productive team. You’ll find such employee clock in punctually, waste less time in the office and are delivering higher quality work in the same, or less amount of time.
•         Nurturing workplace environment – As we’ve discussed a few times already, an office environment that is conducive to a positive, healthy mindset can transform the workplace. Motivated and highly engaged employees can play a significant role in promoting such an environment and mindset and assure greater success for the business and its workforce both.
•         Increased revenue – It’s a straight line from an engaged and productive workforce in a nurturing environment to increased revenues and profits for the organization. In fact, that is a sure shot way to demonstrate to the organization’s steering committee / board of governors the true value of employee engagement.
•         Decreased costs – The other side of the increased revenue coin is another positive! When your employees are happy and engaged at work, they won’t be jumping ship at the first available opportunity. This increases the chances of projects being delivered on time, successfully, as there will be no need to hire replacements for skilled employees mid-project. This also helps driving down the associated costs of hiring those replacements too, which is a significant saving!

How Does One Measure Employee Engagement?

By looking at the value employee engagement brings to any business, you can easily consider the inverse of those propositions and see the kind of negative financial and organizational impact a workforce with a lack of engagement would bring. That’s why it is necessary for the business, through HR, to be observing markers of employee engagement, such as tracking time and punctuality.

These trackable markers aren’t definitive, of course, but can be used, in conjunction with surveys and investigations into employee wellness, job and career satisfaction, and growth prospects: all metrics we previously linked directly to employee engagement. These surveys need to be well thought out, as the qualitative data amassed will be critical to identifying the state of the employees. We’ll be discussing the minutiae of such surveys and fact-finding investigations in a later blog.

Boosting Employee Engagement Means Business Success

The bottom line is very simple here: if you provide your employees with the requisite job satisfaction they seek, they will become engaged, highly motivated and help the business succeed to newer heights. Emphasis on providing job satisfaction, which is the fundamental way of boosting employee engagement.

As discussed above, job satisfaction can broadly be attributed to salaries, career growth and prospects, and workplace culture. The solution thus becomes apparent: By providing your workforce with adequate compensation for their work, assuring them of a better and brighter professional future and establishing a supportive and positive space in which to perform their duties, you can set your business up for guaranteed success!