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 of our work and personal lives become dependent on digital technologies, there is an ever-increasing focus and emphasis on ensuring that data, the currency of everyone’s digital lives, is secure and safe at all times. 

That is why businesses need to discuss and establish data privacy and protection procedures within their organizations. Today, let’s take a quick rundown and what that can entail:

Establish a Data Access Hierarchy

A common refrain among security specialists is that the more access points exist to your data, the higher the chance of vulnerabilities and exposure of said weaknesses. 

What does this mean for your business practices? Set limits to who can access which employee’s data and what data they can access. For instance, a manager may be able to access an employee’s performance data but finance has no need to be granted access to it. Similarly, critical information related to tax paperwork or other personal information should only be the purview of HR or finance.

Ensuring a well-thought out hierarchy is put in place for who can access particular data will help reduce the overall vulnerability of your system to malicious software and people. Combining this with an equally thorough log system will help security and IT keep track of who accesses data, helping identify unauthorized people from gaining hold of precious data.

Evaluate and Reevaluate Your Security Policies

Once a competent data access hierarchy has been set up, the next critical step is to evaluate established data security policies and more importantly, setting up a reevaluation schedule. Revisiting your security is incredibly important – given the rate at which technologies improve, new technologies arrive and current and older ones are exploited by hackers and scammers, it is imperative to review the state of your security at regular intervals.

Is your security still depending on SMS for authentication? Recent revelations stating that this security procedure has critical vulnerabilities means that you should definitely consider a stronger 2 Factor Authentication system for your employee’s critical data, such as tax data. Considering digitising paper-based employee data? Ensure your on-site or cloud storage offers state-of-the-art security. Such decisions can only be taken if regular discussions are had on the subject of data security.

Invest in secure technologies

On the subject of secure data storage services and software, another decision to be made on the subject of data privacy and security is the discussion on when to invest in newer, better technologies.

Is your HR web portal still not employing HTTPS (HTTP secure)? It’s absolutely the time to stop using that insecure piece of software and opt for a more modern, cloud based HR platform like PeopleSonic, that promises security front and centre. There can be nothing more important for a business than to ensure the safety and integrity of employee and business data in this technology-driven world. Personally critical information like tax data, social security and all linked data is a necessary transaction between employer and employee, and it falls on the employer to invest in the continual security of that information.

The same goes for technologies that limit physical access to any on-site data servers – Facial recognition and fingerprint scanning are essential to augment any personnel performing security. Both people and technologies are fallible, only together can they help reduce any chances of protected data being breached.

Train your workforce on data protection essentials

When organisations as large as Twitter can fall victim to social engineering, it speaks volumes to the importance of having a workforce trained to spot such attempts of exploitation. That is why it is paramount to have regular training for keeping your workforce updated on best practices when it comes to data security and the security of personal information online. Social engineering hacks and scams do tend to rear their head more about certain times of the year, such as end-of-year tax filings, and that can be a great time to refresh everyone on the essentials. Make sure they know not to enter their personal data on shady tax sites and use reputed financial services instead. Ensure HR personnel are well-versed in accessing private employee data from a secure site, which would include the computer or smartphone they access it from and the internet connection they use.

Unfortunately, another adage of the digital era is that the weakest aspect of modern technology are the humans involved in its creation – this means that sensitive information can get stolen or leaked through both accident and malicious intent. Therefore, minimising the chances of that happening are essential, and require a robust data privacy and protection policy. By investing in the right technology, reviewing associated security protocols and training your workforce in the essentials of digital security will help keep critical employee data safe and secure.

Efficiency is the name of the game when it comes to survival for small, even medium-sized businesses in today’s highly competitive markets. Forget weeks, a lag of days or even hours can prove crucial to a certain outcome, so why should your business run that risk each month when it’s time to pay your employees?

The Problem with Manual Payroll Processing

It all boils down to time and accuracy. Even with a workforce of ~50 employees, manually creating and reviewing payroll can become a major time sink. You also have to factor in the cost of the employees tasked on this project. Between that and the tedium of double and triple checking potential errors, manual payroll processing today is counterintuitive to the very idea of a lean small/medium business. Delays are inevitable, and potentially disruptive – no company of this size can afford to lose their top performers because they weren’t paid in a timely manner.

Why should payroll management suffer in the analogue era when digital technology is enabling so many aspects of businesses?

Automating to Eliminate Mistakes, Faster

Granted, some initial training of the automation tool / software would be necessary, but by and large the move to a digital payroll solution is both smart and just plain better. Correcting an error becomes as simple as merely tapping a few times on a keyboard, rather than poring over reams of paper trying to locate the mistake. Spotted a blunder that made its way to several locations? A few taps on the keyboard fix that. Updating records at the last minute? A few taps. Need necessary approvals to finalize processing? A few taps.

It’s so easy, you’ll be hard-pressed to remember a time when you didn’t have this essential service.

Let the Computers do the Calculations

The very first digital payroll management was nothing more than glorified spreadsheets, very similar to the analogue versions. A lot of the legwork still fell on the employee running the tool. Later on, salary / wage calculations and deductions would become additional modules that let your team blitz through tasks previously considered incredibly time-consuming. Tax calculations, in particular, were and still remain the bane of any manual payroll system.

With digital tech now handling all the heavy lifting, payroll automation software can now provide even more value to your small business. A consequence of technology is the rise of the freelancer, the contract worker. These essential parts of the modern workforce completely upend manual payroll, as their wages do not get processed in the same way as “standard” employees. You need tools that have the flexibility to process monthly, weekly, hourly or even task-based payments. These sought-after features were once the domain of big-budget and expensive software like QuickBooks, definitely something not every small-scale business can afford. Lucky, then, that the payroll software industry has an excellent variety available in the form of competitors such as PeopleSonic, payroll solution that is targeted specifically at small to medium-sized businesses.

Why break the bank to achieve essential payroll automation, or worse, forego it for the archaic manual systems?

Impeccable Record Storage, Instant Withdrawal

Is your accounts or finance team still doing payroll by hand? A quick way to answer that is to look at or around their offices. Do you spot absolute mountains of papers inside bulky file folders? How motivated does it make you feel to locate and peruse the payroll record of a specific employee?

Digital storage becomes available to your HR department (and the accounts/finance teams) the moment you switch to automation – you can reinforce this record-keeping through data duplication or preferably cloud storage. That’s a feature manual payroll can never have, the ability to store critical information long-term and peruse it fully and instantaneously. This feature helps your business and your employees both – no one wants to search for that one piece of paper months down the line.

Running your payroll no longer has to involve human and financial capital coupled with extended time and effort expenditure. There are now smart automated solutions available that can ramp up your efficiency several fold and put a smile on your employees’ faces each month. There is no reason to not do that, today.