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.

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.

The start of the COVID-19 pandemic was a time of chaos – not only were people rightly worried for their safety and that of their loved ones, they were simultaneously trying to transition to working from home for their office jobs. While that shift was necessary for the survival of businesses the world over, it brought a new set of challenges to overcome.

Today, let’s discuss one niggle that HR has been attempting to resolve: how to effectively measure and track productivity. Let’s talk punctuality.

A Routine Helps Productivity

Workplaces have attendance and punctuality measurements not just to ensure employees are working the hours they are supposed to be, but to bring a measure of order to chaos. 

A stable routine is often cited to improve one’s productivity and the same rule can be extrapolated for teams and workplaces. Working from home has impacted productivity and efficiency already, people have to manage children, pets and families in the same space as their makeshift home offices and wild variances to clock in and clock out impacts the output of the team as a whole.

To alleviate that, implementing some form of attendance or a check-in time can do wonders to quickly ramp up productiveness.

The Benefits of Attendance Tracking

Dedicated office buildings and work spaces used to have some sort of manual or automated clock in system by the main door or reception – how does one recreate that when everyone is working from different parts of a city, country (or even world)? 

The answer lies in the use of an effective HR software with an integrated solution to manage employee work timings. Here’s how the use of solutions such as PeopleSonic can instantly benefit your business in these pandemic-ridden times:

• A central dashboard to easily let managers observe trends in employee attendance and timings and identify problem areas.
• Specialised utility that allows managers to set a sort of a ‘grace’ period for morning check in – so many employees with young children often find themselves in unplanned kid-emergencies which would otherwise negatively impact their record!
• Manage multiple shifts and different timings with a click of a button – COVID-19 has reduced work capabilities for many businesses, and many employees no longer work full-time and that would otherwise require a lot of manual logging that would fully occupy HR!
• Have attendance and work hours data down to minute-precision. Businesses fail and succeed with time efficiency, and knowing and understanding exact work patterns can help alleviate and improve workflows within teams and the organization as a whole.

As mentioned above, once the workforce is back in some semblance of punctuality, you will quickly see work output increase!

Prevent Your Company Culture From Stagnating

A curious thing that has suffered indelibly has been office culture. Each workplace has its unique culture, beloved to its employees and revered by competitors. 

Whether it was monthly lunch parties or (indoor) sports tournaments, each organization has lost those social events which added to the wow factor of working there. Why can’t that be recreated in the online workspace?

Setting up online lunches, quiz competitions or even social gaming obviously requires that the workflow of the team and company be as optimized as possible, which brings us back punctuality and productivity! Once your workforce is back on a regular schedule, HR can find it easy to plan and arrange for fun activities to bring back the cheer, the culture your organization was known for.

Attendance tracking and management isn’t just a business tool for HR to report employee timesheets and performance. It’s also a great way to boost morale and output, and more importantly, in our new reality, a way to recapture “normal” work life for most people.

 

 

As more and more businesses move HR from a pen and paper department to a web-based smart operation, those left behind have a choice to make: do they stay in the past or do they take that necessary step into the future?

To add to the decision-making worry, there are two major ways HR is managed digitally: Bespoke services that manage a singular aspect and nothing else, and HR platforms where all aspects are managed and integrated into each other to provide an end-to-end solution.

Let’s resolve any lingering doubts you may have about the efficacy of these integrated HR platforms by taking a look at just how they excel over ‘traditional’ HR management.

You Get Centralized Core Services

A major complaint that arises with the sheer breadth of scope of most HR teams is the fact that data gets scattered far and wide. Collating that data when it is requested can become a hassle when it is divided across several apps, systems and files, there’s also the additional possibility of errors when combining said data into a singular report.

An integrated HR platform basically renders every such problem moot. Most integrated HR systems provide an all-in-one dashboard for managing employee data, such as:

• Employee contact and personal information
• Job designation
• Department / Team within company
• Employee documents / contracts

Additionally, these dashboard enable HR to manage data permissions and privacy controls to every employee in the company, and store all this data to the platform’s secure cloud servers, from one convenient location!

You Get Additional Services Like Payroll and Leave Management

Most HR functions beyond employee data management and onboarding are lengthy, tedious and no less essential. Payroll and leave management are two of the biggest and most demanding of those functions – ‘traditional’ HR management structures have multiple people tasked specially to fulfill these functions, making them a major manpower sink. Being human-driven also leaves these critical services prone to errors and mistakes.

Modern integrated HR platforms such as PeopleSonic pride themselves on providing turn-key solutions to the looming problems of payroll and leave management. These integrated solutions provide dedicated applications within the platform which exclusively manage payroll and leaves, while fully exposing their data to the central dashboard to enable analytics, tracking and updates.   

You Get Instant, Detailed Analytics

As mentioned earlier, the biggest boost that integrated HR platforms provide businesses comes in the form of analytics. The modern business world is exceedingly data-driven, which refers to understanding data and using those analyses to inform decision making. Knowing how to make sense of the data collected becomes far more necessary than the act of collection itself, and that is where your business profits from these platforms.

Rather than having an employee gather data, run it through their performance metrics and guidelines and create a report from that, HR platforms use their integrated nature to call data from the relevant application, analyze it and generate the required reports, all from one button click! Harnessing the computing power of the platforms also provides thorough analyses that would otherwise take HR days to produce.

You Get to Save Time

It must be evident by now that if your business still executes its HR functions through personnel only (and using paper rather than digital), you are wasting a hefty chunk of your employee’s time on things that integrated HR platforms now do instantly, or automatically on a schedule. By removing the burden of menial tasks, HR teams get freed up to tackle higher value goals for the business. The same goes for time saved each month on processing payroll, and especially the time saved in following up on leave approvals, statuses and accruals.

While the difference in time efficiency gained when using an integrated solution to using several solutions for HR management is not as dramatic as that between analogue and digital, it is still significant. That is especially true given how highly competitive today’s industries are, and even a minor advantage becomes critical in the long run.

You Get Increased Productivity 

A consequence of HR systems that doesn’t get enough spotlight is the increase in employee productivity through time and attendance management. By observing and understanding employee behaviour, managers and HR can best formulate ways to motivate teams to arrive on time, which would in turn boost and elevate the work culture of that organization. 

Time is money may be a cliche, but it is one that is painfully important to businesses, whether they’re small or even multinational. That’s why managers and team leads are always looking for data on employee attendance and how to maximise it. By analyzing this data, a more productive work culture can be created, one based on trust with the employees.

 

While the idea of using exclusive, specialist software to look after various HR functions can sound enticing, getting those applications to play nicely with each other can prove to be challenging, sometimes even futile. That’s why an integrated HR platform that is essentially an end-to-end solution for managing HR will always appeal more to businesses, and with good reason. What’s more, modern HR platforms even allow a lot of customisation features that can tailor that platform to your business’s specific needs, one which can easily augment the benefits you gain by moving your business from ‘traditional’ HR management to an integrated, all-in-one platform.