As we’ve previously discussed in some detail, inefficiency in core HR tasks leads to a lot of wasted potential – potential that could be critical to the success of a business.

Today, let’s look at how a tailored HR solution can boost the efficiency of those core tasks, using the PeopleSonic Integrated HR Management Solution as an example. 

Data Standarization

Employees come and go, that is a fact of running any business – this includes HR personnel as well. If there is no standard solution implemented, each new employee will do things slightly differently, format spreadsheets and documents in their own way. That is something which will become more problematic as the amount of data increases and the amount of HR personnel increases and someone has to search through previous data for critical information.

By implementing a standardized data input and storage system, the PeopleSonic HR solution ensures effective management of employee data and makes it easier to enter or retrieve information – no more scrolling through thousands of spreadsheets and cells!

Cloud-based Management

Is your business spread out over multiple locations? Does a single HR team manage all locations, or is the team split among those locations as well? In both those scenarios, you must have experienced the issue of data redundancy and sharing – how do you easily create a central repository where you, the business manager, can oversee data from all your business locations, at all times?

The solution is simple: Cloud management. Modern HR solutions like the one offered by PeopleSonic leverage the robust security and adaptability of the cloud to give an HR tool that can be spread out to as many locations as possible, and is accessible from any computing device, be it desktop, laptop or smartphone. Untether your data from physical locations and let PeopleSonic’s cloud-based HR management software store it in a secure, centralized location and save your team the chore of manually combining and storing the organization’s data.

Employee Self Service

Empower your workforce – provide them with a simple interface where they can see and edit their personal details, view their attendance statistics, payroll related notifications and all other HR related data.

This also helps unclog the work pipeline by saving your HR team the hassle of manually following up with each employee, the self service portal acts as the middle-man to obtain all necessary data from employees.

Customization, Customization, Customization

What good is a digital HR management solution that doesn’t let you tailor the software to your unique business requirements? The PeopleSonic Core HR features can be customized to your company’s structure – your team can define and manage jobs roles and designations for your company, as well as their access levels and permissions – you can in fact choose just how many they are able to view on their PeopleSonic dashboard.

PeopleSonic HR integrates with payroll automation, leave and attendance management systems to provide a single end-to-end solution which can help your team get on top of their people management woes. Read on if you’re on the fence about why your business needs to automate payroll management, or why you need to pay attention to leave management.

Even better, why don’t you make that leap and experience for yourself just how an integrated HR management solution can provide you with the time and resources to elevate your business to new heights.

It may sound slightly counterproductive, but your HR team should not be spending a bulk of their time doing “HR things”. Their time and energies should instead be spent on exploring ideas that boost or ensure the success of a business, for instance, through increased empathy and emotional intelligence in employees, or through the successful implementation of essential human factors.

Let’s identify what those “HR things” are that end up eating far too much time and prevent your HR from elevating your organization to its true potential.

Payroll Management

Are you a business that is still handling payroll manually, or through a combination of inefficient apps and spreadsheets? This is something we have discussed in detail a few times before. Whether you are a small-to-medium sized business or even large, there are enormous benefits to automating payroll and freeing up HR to pursue higher value projects.

Statistics show, in fact, that there can be upto 80% reduction in overall payroll costs merely by switching to a competent automated payroll system. With such overwhelming benefits to both cost and efficiency, there really is no excuse for being one of the 10% of businesses still not implementing payroll automation in their HR processes.

Employee Status Tracking

Another avenue that sucks up a significant amount of daily time for HR is verifying employee status and attendance. If you’re not utilizing  state-of-the-art leave management and attendance tracking systems, you are essentially burdening your HR with manual or email-based follow-ups to track down sick employees or monitor punctuality and time efficiency.

Not only can investing in such systems ease unnecessary load from your HR team, these systems have proven track records in improving employee motivation and accountability, which directly impacts their work quality and rate. The benefits to the business bottom line and employee productivity are significant in comparison to systems which especially still rely on emails or text messages to track employee absences.

Essential or “Core” HR Functions

These essential tasks, often dubbed “core” tasks are the day to day work that any HR team is doing. This ranges from personnel and document management to handling departmental and employee requests, and any office administration tasks.

While that may sound like the entirety of what most of us assume HR does, the reality couldn’t be more different. The fact that HR spends so much of their time on these daily tasks prevents them from focusing on other projects. Add into that tedious work like manual payroll management and monitoring employee punctuality and that leaves HR with almost no time in their work schedule at all!

The solution is simple: Invest in a customised HR platform that allows your team to automate and optimize these repetitive and time-taking tasks. In fact, integrated solutions such as PeopleSonic often provide businesses with a suite of features that can handle everything from Core HR to payroll and leave management, along with industry leading productivity enhancements through time and attendance tracking.

 

World Mental Health Day 2020 this past weekend was not just about highlighting the need for ending social stigma surrounding mental health; this year it was also about checking in with everyone worldwide. After all, it’s been an incredibly difficult year, and the ordeal is far from over.

In line with that, we decided to discuss mental health in the workplace, and what businesses and HR can especially do in current circumstances to nurture a more wholesome and inclusive space for employees.

The Impact of Sidelining Mental Health in the Workplace

Work is great for the mind and body, we all know that. However, sustained work requires a positive and healthy environment, just like all other aspects of life. The World Health Organization describes a healthy workplace as a place “where workers and managers actively contribute to the working environment by promoting and protecting the health, safety and well-being of all employees.” So what happens when such an environment isn’t available and its consequences not considered? A lot, as it turns out. Here’s a quick summary of some of the issues directly attributed to an unhealthy (for mental health) work environment:

• Relationship issues between employees
• Poor performance and productivity
• Poor quality of work
• Greater relationship issues in the personal lives of employees
• Deteriorating physical health
• Lack of motivation and drive
• Increase in harassment

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Not only does fostering a negligent or unhealthy environment in the workplace affect employees’ mental health, but the business gets directly impacted while also bearing additional costs of treatments. No one wins.

There is a two-pronged approach needed to really turn things around. Fostering a more wholesome office environment and promoting frank and frequent discussions on mental health. Let’s examine what these can achieve.

Building a Better Workplace Environment

A better workplace environment in this scenario specifically refers to a workplace where employers and employees are cognizant of both the importance of being mentally healthy and knowing that there is a system in place to learn of and seek help for any issues. 

Global and local health organizations stress the importance of implementing good practices and interventions to promote mental health in a workplace. This means establishing safety guidelines and practices into the company policy, as well as identifiers of what constitutes as evidence of declining mental health and how to manage such situations. It also involves informing employees of all options available to them, including training sessions and any medical or therapeutic help they may need. 

Employers can also create a better workplace simply by helping employees plan their careers better and praising them frequently for their work, thus creating a positive feedback loop that helps employees develop their careers in more fulfilling ways and thus reinforcing their mental well-being as well.

This bodes well for everyone who experiences poor mental health infrequently, or situationally. However, this does not cater to those who suffer from mental disorders or live on the behaviour spectrum outside the vanilla definition of “normal”. For this, businesses need to:

Support People with Mental Health Disorders

And truly, the first way to do that is by normalizing discussion about such things. It is the best and most permanent way of removing the stigma against mental health and perceiving employees as anything other than people. As we have previously discussed, a workplace that is high in emotionally intelligent individuals can lead to all-round positivity, especially when it comes to socially sensitive subjects like mental health issues. 

Beyond that, organizations can go a long way to helping such individuals by boosting the support they are provided by the organization’s systems. Such support can range from flexible work hours to the option for working from home, pushing to develop a more positive workplace as outlined above and a secure line of communication with management that is both reassuring and supportive. Luckily, modern technology has empowered HR to be easily able to implement things like flexi-hours, remote working and confidential communications. 

The thing to remember in all of this is that none of this is a one-time thing. Not the changes, not the conversation, not the support. It must be regular and continuous, evolving to meet the growing needs of employees current and future, and it must come through from HR and management.

 

It is important for businesses to understand how to design their workplaces and work culture with people in mind. A planned and considered approach can reap benefits in the form of improved overall performance and nurturing an enhanced climate of creativity and innovation for workers.

While every company will claim that they put their employees first, it is easy to spot the ones that actually employ a human-centric approach to their business practices, both in terms of employee happiness and business success. Therefore, let’s take some time to understand just what human factors are, their importance and how to leverage them into a more wholesome and successful workplace.

What Human Factors Should be Considered in a Business Scenario

Whether your business is office-based or involves physical labour, factory processes or logistics, there are human factors at play affecting the workforce and in turn the organization. This operational optimization is different for various business types. In warehouses, factories or other physical-labor based work, human factors could range from their health and safety, to human interaction with machines and dangers and risks associated with them. In office environments, they could involve environmental aspects (such as office space habitability) or situational aspects (such as surrounding ambient noise and interruptions).

Whatever your business, you need to critically examine your work processes from top to bottom to effectively chart out what human factors are applicable to your organization and its employees. An excellent skill that helps with this is emotional intelligence which, as we discussed in a recent blog, is a transformative skill for the modern workplace. Emotional intelligence features here heavily, allowing leaders to apply an empathy-centric approach to identifying key human factors applicable to their workplace.

Why These, or Any Human Factors Are Important

In a nutshell, human factors directly affect the efficiency, effectiveness and even the safety of your business workplace. Organizations can keep relevant human factors in their purview often design optimally – for instance, installing some sort of soundproofing in the walls if the office is located in a busy metropolitan area, or, providing regular safety training for on-site work at a dangerous facility.

Consider the outcome of sub-optimal human factors: Workers in a noisy environment aren’t productive, employees in an unsafe location may be injured and feel unenthusiastic in committing to activities that may harm them, even an office that is too cold may impact productivity and therefore becomes a valid human factor. A pilot in the cockpit of a commercial aircraft needs a certain level of comfort (environmental human factor) to be able to focus on their critical task – the importance of this factor is self-explanatory.

Only when you are able to chart the negative effects to your business resulting from a lack of consideration for human factors, can you understand their true importance.

Leveraging Human Factors For Your Operations

Referring back to emotional intelligence here for a moment, if the approach to leveraging human factors for business growth or development are from a bottom-line perspective, you run into the same issue as every business that only uses numbers and statistics to determine such outcomes. Human factors are complex and complicated, impacted by non-technical things like culture, behaviours and personalities, all things that are lost when reduced to mere numbers.

The goal of leveraging human factors must be to combine the best characteristics of human beings (skills, creativity and collaboration) with the best characteristics of your business pipelines/systems/processes in a way that eliminates excessive and unnecessary work which can lead to mistakes. For instance, any system that reduces data handling steps will reduce the chance of human error in critical operations such as accounting, finance or payroll. Any employees using such a system would have the peace of mind of reduced errors, and would therefore be productive in more ways than one: working faster because of the optimal system and working faster because of the optimal human factor (reduced stress of mistakes).

 

Human Factor study has been a topic of investigation in various worldwide industries for quite some time, yet even now merits careful examination before implementation. There are immense benefits to getting it right, so long as you tackle it appropriately and with the right objectives.

 

Emotional intelligence has been listed as one of the top 10 skills required to succeed in business by the World Economic Forum. Today, let’s discover just why emotional intelligence is so sought after in transforming your workplace and subsequently, your business.

What is Emotional Intelligence?

Psychologists define emotional intelligence (previously known as emotional quotient or EQ) as a person’s ability to identify and understand emotions in themselves or the people around them. While historically, emotions and intelligence (aka logic) have been seen as opposite to each other, scientists and researchers exploring the impact of emotions on our brains, personalities and behaviour have been using emotional intelligence as the defining variable.

A person’s emotional intelligence can impact their empathy (understanding and reasoning with the wide spectrum of emotions) and their people skills (managing emotions during interactions and decision making). 

These abilities are what can potentially play an important role in business settings, if such people and environments are nurtured.

How Can Emotional Intelligence Improve Your Workplace?

Nurturing people who display high emotional intelligence can act not just as a motivational and morale booster for the workplace, but it can end up facilitating higher quality work as well.

People who display characteristic behaviours associated with emotional intelligence are attributed with higher interpersonal skills, superior stress management and leadership ability – researchers agree to a high degree on this correlation. 

For a business, such employees are highly sought-after. Not only do such employees act supportive to colleagues and help each other succeed, but they are able to motivate themselves as well. That is because their high emotional intelligence helps them self-regulate their emotions, and to also understand them in their colleagues and act accordingly. 

A workplace that is boosted by the presence of such people becomes a more wholesome environment to work in, where everyone is highly motivated, adept at communication and more driven. A business that can harness that emotional intelligence will see a definite uptick in the quality of work done by the employees.

How do you measure the impact of EI in your workplace?

While emotional intelligence has finally been quantifiably measured by researchers, there is no immediate tangible test that can take the findings from one individual and extrapolate them to determine the impact on a business. There is no doubt that the transformation exists, and in the absence of direct measurement, there are indirect ways of seeing the uptick as a result of a workplace filled with high emotional intelligence people.

As determined above, employees with good emotional intelligence scores are driven and self-motivated. It stands to reason that such people would be proactive in the workplace and punctuality is a clear sign of that. Their work output would be greater as well. Such things can be quantified and measured, and business-ready tools like PeopleSonic can help managers, HR and senior executives observe such trends in their business. If your employees are clocking in punctually, not skipping work unnecessarily and demonstrating their value in measurable work output, it can directly be attributed to their emotional intelligence. 

Emotional intelligence is something that impacts someone’s professional and personal life both. It is something that can only be effective if everyone implements it. That is why for it to succeed in any business setting, it must become an attribute for everyone from the youngest employee to senior management and leadership. In fact, it wouldn’t be wrong to state leadership and employees with high emotional intelligence are what are crucial to building a more successful workplace.