As the year 2020 finally draws to a close, there’s a lot we have to look back on. From the virus outbreak and long lockdown, we’ve adapted to a more digital approach in almost all aspects! Where we used to hire multiple employees in large rented spaces, now we’re working from home using much advanced and capable software to manage most tasks virtually, that too in an automated fashion! 

Managing businesses online efficiently is probably one of the few good things to come out of the year, so let’s recap on the best business management software 2020 had to offer. Bear in mind the list is in no particular order, yet all of the options are winners!

 

1 – Slack 

Slack is a channel based workspace that allows users to communicate via those custom channels. Slack is well known for its unique but well-made communication means. It allows users to interact with one another by texting or sharing files. It’s the perfect platform for an organization that has multiple departments and divisions. This is key for mass groups to share files and communicate based on their location, department, or team. Channels have the option to be public which allows anyone in the organization to view it or private which is open to a defined set of users. Slack has the ability to communicate with other businesses present on the platform, this allows for a complete virtual collaboration from each respective workspace. 

Slack also provides a host of other features such as searchable history, as files and messages are shared in vast amounts selecting or picking out a specific conversation can be tedious. Therefore the software includes a special search tool, which goes through all the messages as well as searches files if needed. The software boosts communication and therefore has a directory full of social and other apps to link with your workspace to get the most out of it. Alongside messaging, Slack also allows for the users to have a group call and even allows screen-sharing for mindful presentations. 

 

 

2 – Trello

Trello is your one-stop-shop for project management, with the inclusion of its marketing, HR, sales, and even web development options it truly is a fit for anyone. The options don’t stop there though, as Trello has a variety of other integrations to help boost productivity and functionality, a few top examples would be the likes of Google Drive and Slack. Trello helps you manage the entire organization from one platform, its host of integrations allows for added functionality and connectivity.

The software even has its own help bots which aid in your initial understanding and even carry out some basic tasks! Some of which include calendar commands, due date commands, custom card buttons, and even rule-based triggers. The web-based software works in a simple drag and drops manner, leaving the user with a plethora of customization options. The simple and intuitive interface carries efficiency on its back. The addition of Trello mobile applications means you’ll always be in touch and always in sync.

3 – Jira

Get your workflow going with Jira! Its project planning and workflow mapping software guides you through your clustered work much more efficiently. Jira offers a wide array of options when it comes to viewing your work, Kanban boards, reporting tools, charts, and flowcharts help you visualize what you need to get done. Its versatile software implementation means Jira can be integrated with almost all external software. You’ll be able to link your data to various platforms from one planner. The simple connection from a user to the company account means that you’ll be able to merge existing goals seamlessly. The added connectivity bonus allows for Jira to be scaled and adjusted to your liking with premium security protocols.

Jira features different views for your own unique style and preference, maybe you like the detailed Kanban board or maybe you only want to work on what’s pending with scrum boards. Jira has it all plus accurate roadmaps and a reporting system. The software takes personalization and editing to a whole new level with its build application and integration. It does way more than track your progress and pick out bugs, it’s the whole catch!

4 – Todoist 

Remove the clutter and re-organize your life with Todoist. The ultimate tool for organizing all aspects of your life from work to leisure to fitness and even travel! The complete task manager for even the most minuscule of tasks. It’s simple and open view allows for you to capture what you need to know at a glance, and has notifications for the slightly more time accurate tasks. Todoist simplifies it all for even the least tech-savvy people, the inclusion of templates for work, gym, and groceries are all readily available for use.

Todoist features are all you would expect and more, some notable features include priority setting for tasks, grouping, quick add, sharing common tasks with colleagues, and drag-drop accessibility for your ease. It also includes summary reports as well as productive visuals for you to keep track of yourself. The app is universal and is available on IOS as well as Android. The connectivity doesn’t stop there though, Todoist can be integrated with almost all your existing software management tools. So not an inch of productivity is lost!

5 – Peoplesonic

PeopleSonic is your complete Integrated HR and payroll management system. Whatever task you need to be done efficiently and accurately, PeoplsSonic has the resources to make it happen! The light and simple interface from the get-go is just what your device needs. Followed by options such as superfast company set-up and flexible customization options just add to its benefits list. PeopleSonic helps you set up your organization how you want it, from the comprehensive online support, premium privacy, no hidden charges and to top it all off, multiple integration options to extend your productivity with the software.

With its complete HR solution, PeopleSonic has almost all the necessary tasks automated for maximum efficiency. The consumer has full control over what goes into the system and can oversee the transparent automation if any amendments need to be made. A few key features relieve the need for a designated HR team, such as the Core HR which overlooks all HR management from one panel. It includes all you need to manage employee data effectively. Payroll management allows for you to set-up easily and automates your payroll, without having to tediously go through each account over and over again. Similarly, managing your employees’ timings and attendance has never been easier, with complete and accurate data being displayed for working hours and leaves. Speaking of leaves, the software looks into leave management just as well, assigning a paid or unpaid leave depending on the scenario and set-up. To finish it all off, the system is capable of creating timely and accurate reports whenever needed so you can see it all in just a glance!

6 – Bitrix24

Undoubtedly the top name when it comes to complete suite management. Bitrix24 grasps all aspects of digital management including all communication and collaboration tools. From a large-scale business perspective, Bitrix is the solution, as it’s a complete business management software with almost all the bells and whistles. The software has many perks but the main one would be its large collaboration with social networks and integrations.

Bitrix is packed full of features related to the top fields such as communication, tasks, CRM, website linking, and contact centers to name a few. The top features include HD video and conference calls, a variety of chatting options, work time tracking, cloud storage, reports, and workflow automation. The plethora of options allows you to take whatever business model you may have digitally without any compromise.

 

7 – Odoo

Odoo is yet another complete management software that offers a wide range of applications and tools to boost your management drastically. Odoo covers a lot more than just the basic management topics, it has CRM, accounting, eCommerce, inventory, project management, and POS just to name a few. Odoo is definitely packed to the brim with options and the best part? Odoo isn’t shy or far from the rest when it comes to integration, with hundreds of applications at your disposal.

Top features include customizable dashboards, a unique framework for you to get the most out of the system, real-time communication, and syncing to keep your work ready even on the go. You could take any business route with the help of Odoo and still wouldn’t run out of features to explore.

8 – Xero

Crunching numbers, fluctuating figures, and timely bookkeeping is a daunting task for any accountant, but what if there was an assistant that managed this all for you? Xero is the future of accounting, with its up to date features capturing the essence of managing accounts. It is the ultimate tool whether you’re a small business, accountant or even looking for an ideal book-keeping software. It’s easy accessibility as software and seamless connectivity with your bank, Xero is the top candidate for your financial ease.

Zero does not shy away from features, featuring all the glamorous tools you would hope for. Ranging from minute tasks such as bill payments, scaling to bank connections, and even going as far as claiming expenses just from your phone, laptop, or any other supported device. Easy tracking of multiple projects, contacts, and data allows for Xero to create precise and custom reports tailored to your very needs!

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.

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 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.