When it comes to technology that helps people manage people in business settings, most of us think immediately of the type of software used in payroll or finance software suites. Perhaps those familiar with larger businesses might even reference company legal departments where contracts are drawn up and stored.
Every professional human resource manager knows that these areas of people management software are just the start of modern workforce management platforms. Sure, those elements of payroll & legal do exist in most businesses some form or another, but often the driving force in formulating contracts and setting pay rate changes fall back on HR professionals. Today’s HR platforms integrate with many other business functions and provide a lot more functions and features beyond what is traditionally imagined.
This article considers some of those features found in modern HCM technologies, which today range from candidate search facilities, to pre-onboarding new employees at one end of the “human capital” chain, right through to safely facilitating the exiting of staff leaving the organization.
Between these two outliers is where the platforms we feature below differ. There are solutions out there that concentrate specifically on employees’ well-being, both mental and physical). These platforms can even provide training that’s not necessarily job-related — like information on how to practice mindfulness or meditation exercises.
Others focus on protecting the organization from a cybersecurity point-of-view, where they provide learning platforms designed to educate users of technology systems about good online practice. This functionality also sometimes extends to tracking and monitoring data movements into and out of the company when instigated by employees at any level. This function stops an organization’s intellectual property from going on a walkabout with employees as they move from their current role to a role outside the company (taking valuable sales leads with them, as a prime example).
Specialist applications of all types exist in this market space and there are as many as there are types of people in any workplace, each with its own foibles and strengths.
Some platforms we feature were designed specifically to be modular, so companies can pick and choose their requirements, almost in a menu-like listing from those available, and pay accordingly. Most featured here are cloud-based, although in-house hosting is often an option if an organization possesses the infrastructure necessary — in some cases, such as industries or verticals that handle sensitive data, in-house hosting is a prerequisite.
The challenges being faced every day by HR professionals — especially given the varying office and home office setups most businesses are experiencing — mean that turning to technology for a helping hand in managing the workforce is a solution for HR professionals seeking streamlined safety. The vendors featured here can help.
EMPLOYMENT HERO
Employment Hero is a cloud-based human resources platform with a broad offering across different HR areas, from paperless onboarding and integration with jobs boards, right through to performance reviews and goal management.
With Employment Hero, you can access learning and development opportunities for your team, as well as reward and recognition features. You can also easily manage employees, freelancers and contractors on the platform via the time management system, as well as provide your team with exclusive benefits.
As a standalone solution, HR professionals will find that Employment Hero can streamline just about every aspect of their roles. Employment Hero also has integrations with a number of common systems you might already have invested in across payroll, accounting, and recruitment.
It’s simple to use, and the powerful automation capabilities of the platform free up staff from manual activities that often see human error. Say goodbye to copying, pasting and transferring information between systems; or worse – from paper.
You’ll find the templates that are built into Employment Hero useful too. There are common contract types, induction content that can be easily modified to fit any business, and HR guides. There is even an optional add-on that connects you with HR and payroll specialists for tailored advice.
XREF
Getting references from prospective employees is a practice as old as any job itself, but Xref’s spin on this is that it is still massively time-consuming and problematic for employers.
Via the Xref platform, referees can quickly and easily upload their impressions of their past employees or ex-colleagues, taking the sting out of the tail of the overhead when being asked to provide precis of pat employees. In fact, the whole process can be automated and made much easier by the platform’s content as presented, with simpler questionnaires and checkboxes that make providing references much simpler.
The Xref solution also offers background checks, such as security-based assessments, criminal records, nationality and right of residence; a capability that is available cross-continent.
The reference service is available on a pay-as-you-go basis, or for employers that hire regularly, there are enterprise-level pricing plans. For those larger-scale clients, Xref also lets companies dive into the entire process’s metrics, pulling out critical data to unearth trends and insights so HR professionals can improve continually.
There is also API integration with existing HR platforms baked-in, so we envisage Xref being deployed with one or more of the other solutions showcased here
REWARD GATEWAY
This multinational company’s platform concentrates firmly on employee well-being and reward, with capabilities that let companies carefully tailor offerings to incentivize and help their staff.
There is a great deal of emphasis put on communication from “the higher-ups” to frontline staff, with recognition systems and gaming of learning outcomes very well executed.
The financial aspect of employee rewards is also well-catered for too, with different healthcare bonuses or remuneration package components covered too, which is perfect for organizations operating internationally.
Country-specific offerings are also included, such as the cycle-to-work scheme in the UK and discounts in stores local to whichever continent your offices happen to be on. This latter facility is well integrated, so businesses can even offer discounts or tax breaks on goods & services from companies with which they work — like local electrical retail outlets, for example.
The company also makes a feature of API access to its platform, allowing external company benefit & remuneration systems to integrate with the platform, and cybersecurity is writ large throughout the platform’s underlying structures.
SAP HCM
SAP’s suite of applications helps companies and organizations of any size connect the different strands of their business, aspects like expenses and spend & travel management to produce data that feeds into the SAP platform saving time for administrators, payroll, and HR alike.
Expenses, for example, are presented and can be approved on-the-go via the SAP Concur mobile app, allowing access to this powerful, cloud-based platform from the office or out on the road — when that becomes a reality again, at least!
The same platform can be used by HR Managers, ensuring seamless and timely onboarding and continuous development mechanisms according to predefined policies – and all in a compliance-safe, secure environment.
Electronically captured and processed paper so common, still, in even heavy HCM-reliant enterprises, can be normalized into digital records via the OCR capability built into SAP.
With automatic verification of information, items like orphaned expenses, mismatched learning records, and erroneous contract paragraphs become rare. Exceptions are flagged for specific attention only when the powerful, automated SAP platform processes require human intervention, so every ‘i’ is dotted, tracked, and managed.
Source: techwireasia
