Is your company taking advantage of top HR tech tools? If not, you might be missing out on opportunities to not only increase the efficiency and accuracy of your HR department, but also improve employee engagement.
In today’s fast-paced business environment, HR professionals are being tasked with more and more duties – many of which are necessary but time consuming.
While the list of HR responsibilities continues to grow, employees are also becoming conditioned to expect more from their employer. You want to do what’s right for your company, as well as your employees. The good news is that there’s a solution for both sides of the equation.
With the right integrated HR software and tech tools, your HR department can turn repetitive, labor-intensive work into an automated and coordinated process. As a result, your HR department can multiply efficiencies, allowing for more time to explore new ways to align game-changing projects with your organizational goals.
Let’s take a look at three top HR tech tools that can help you go from feeling like an office manager to being an enlightened business owner.
1. Benefits management software
Running a successful business takes a competitive advantage. One way to achieve that is to offer the best benefits you can to attract and retain top talent. The only problem is now you have a host of benefits to maintain.
As an employer, you’re probably looking to provide employee benefits beyond the bare minimum. Effectively managing benefits and ensuring employees are offered the right coverage at the right time is a complex and time-consuming task to manage. That’s just the tip of the benefits iceberg.
The Affordable Care Act folds in an additional layer of complexity. If you employed an average of 50 or more full-time (or full-time equivalent) employees in the prior calendar year, you could be subject to an IRS penalty if you don’t offer medical coverage to your full-time employees. State and local health care mandates may require you to offer additional coverage or benefits.
From basic benefits like medical and dental coverage, to health care flexible spending accounts and life insurance, the list of benefits you’ll have to manage can grow quickly. That’s before you begin to include benefits such as:
- Commuter benefits
- Child care benefits
- Adoption assistance
- Employee assistance programs
Having a rich benefits package is a healthy way to attract top talent. But without the proper technology infrastructure, you may be creating a nightmare for your HR department. Not to mention that you may be offering benefits your employees don’t value.
A sophisticated benefits management software can help take the guess work out of your benefit offerings and put powerful knowledge into the hands of your administrators, drastically reducing the occurrence of eligibility oversight and improving benefit usage rates.
Many top HR tech tools in the benefits management realm offer dashboards for a quick glimpse into benefits usage. Some offer the ability to dive into the analytics associated with your employees’ benefits usage, so you explore whether you’re offering the appropriate mix of benefits and begin to predict future costs to stabilize your fiscal planning.
It should come as no surprise that many employee benefits are underutilized. Many times, the case is that employees weren’t aware of the offering or didn’t know how to enroll. The right HR technology can solve both problems, helping build stronger affinity toward your business.
A benefits management system with integrated decision-making tools can provide supplemental education to your employees so they can better understand and see the value in their benefits choices, including the cost to them or their family.
You can also be more proactive in alerting employees to key enrollment periods. Since life events such as marriage and the birth of a child are the norm, easy access to make changes through your benefits management system can provide simplicity toward helping ensure your employees’ changing families are properly covered.
Add all this together and employees can really begin to appreciate all your benefit offerings.
2. Learning management system
Unlike the complexities associated with benefits management, the markers of undertrained employees can be harder to spot. While indicators are less obvious, undertrained employees may still be costing your business time and money.
Regardless of the size of your organization, employees are often on the front line serving your best interests. Their knowledge and soft skills are invaluable to the overall success of your business. There is usually more than one way you can support employees in this effort.
Employees crave support and on-going learning programs to further their careers and become more adept in their current roles. In many organizations, the task of ensuring employees continue their professional education often falls under the purview the HR department.
It’s also important to mention that training extends beyond the nice-to-haves of career development into the more serious area of human relations training, including sexual harassment training and other areas. Employers in a growing number of jurisdictions are required or encouraged to provide sexual harassment training. A learning management system can help deliver training and document completion by employees.
From researching requirements and booking specialized instructors to scheduling training courses for employees, this responsibility can place a significant burden on your HR department. By providing top HR software and tools, you’ll provide your HR staff with new-found time, and the ability to focus on other pressing matters.
By implementing a cloud-based learning management system, you can provide a substantial amount of value to your employees and reduce the cost traditionally associated with employee training — something you and your employees will be thankful for.
With e-learning becoming more common, there are many learning management systems available on the market to help your employees earn and renew certified credentials, and keep you compliant. Cloud-based learning management systems are also a boon to organizations with multiple office locations and a mobile workforce. Beyond accessibility, additional advantages over traditional training methods may include:
- Mobile support
- Self-paced courses
- Multilingual availability
- Progress and reporting tools
- Real-time grading and scoring
E-learning is certainly not a new phenomenon, but it’s becoming increasingly popular among today’s workforce, and not just millennials. Workers of all ages welcome the benefit of continuing their professional education. Giving them access to the seemingly endless available content of a learning management system together with the ability to learn at their own pace is a bonus.
3. Time and attendance software
A natural extension of automating many of your company’s HR related tasks is implementing a time and attendance system.
This top HR tech tool will allow you to easily monitor hours worked (hourly and salary) and paid time off, as well as help you keep pace with strict labor laws regarding overtime pay.
There’s no need to complicate the process. If your company is still manually tracking this sensitive employee data, you may be exposing your company to the unnecessary risk of human error and incomplete or inaccurate time cards.
In addition to calculating hours worked for non-exempt employees, a time and attendance system can help you allocate your company’s human capital more efficiently. As your company grows into new locations, the challenge of confirming employees are working the hours they are supposed to be working becomes more difficult.
Absenteeism can be one of your organization’s greatest costs. When employees are absent from work, either planned or unplanned, it costs you money.
If the absence is planned, such as vacation or leave, it can reduce the impact. However, unplanned absences, such as sick days, unforeseen extended leaves, late arrivals and early departures are harder to track.
You want to make it as easy as possible for you and your employees to manage this process. Believe it or not, an automated time and attendance tracking system can add to employee satisfaction by simplifying the process on the employee’s end, giving them one less thing to worry about.
By adding automated elements to your time and attendance tracking, you can more easily view and plan around foreseeable absences. And when they occur, you can turn to a system that houses this information and perform proactive workforce planning.
Your key takeaway
What are your company goals this year? With these three tech tools in place, your HR department can spend more time focused on the human element of your organization. As much as software and top HR tech tools can help your business run better, grow faster and make more money, it’s the people who matter at the end of the day.
Learn more about how choosing the right HR technology for your company will allow you to have it all: HR efficiency and business growth. Download our free e-book, HR technology: How to choose the best platform for your business.