Use HR Software to Make Organization’s Work Smoother and Faster
The most precious capital of any organization is human resources. They literally form the backbone of the organization. The human resources department, that handles the entire lifecycle of all the personnel, from the first touch of recruitment, to payroll, performance appraisals, incentives, bonus and increments, leaves and the final exit, due to retirement or resignation, is hard pressed to manage all the tasks efficiently. This is where some automation can be a boon to the human resources team.
What does HR software do?
Any human resources software or HR management software (HRMS) takes care of these main tasks:
- Maintains a central database of all employee data
The central database allows access to search for the entire history of an employee, or similar groups of employees, look at the organization charts, review the span of control, perform analytics on any data like attrition, performance etc.
- Allows employees to update their personal data via the self service feature
Any change in personal details of the employee like an additional qualification, additional skill set, timesheet updates etc can be done by the employees directly, saving the time and effort of the human resource team, as well as, ensuring minimum errors.
- Tracks attendance and leaves
The software integrates data from various devices and can be used to track attendance, shift schedules, leaves and timesheets.
- Helps with performance appraisal and training
The performance appraisal module typically allows the employee to feed in their performance appraisal and allows the supervisor and manager to review and approve the rating, increment and discussions. It also charts out the current skillsets, identifies the training needs and updates the same post completion.
- Manages payroll
The major administrative task of payroll can be completely automated and this can remove one major pain point from the HR person’s tasklist, making the job easier, faster and error free.
HR software – easing the life of the HR personnel
The human touch can never be replaced but for everything else, there is the software. So, how does implementation of this solution help the HR department? A few examples are pointed out along with the key benefits:
- Efficiency in administration
The self service feature allows the employees to access their own data at any time. There are no requests for previous month’s payslips or current leave balance or time-in time-out data for a particular date, since they are all readily available the employee. There are no files of paper floating around, also reducing the amount of storage required drastically – digitization helps retrieve data quickly and efficiently. It eases communication since contact data is also stored centrally and can be accessed immediately.
- Increase in productivity
Administration, being automated, frees up a lot of time for the HR department. This time can be spent by the HR team to look into important jobs like recruiting fresh talent and strategizing on how to plan trainings and retain existing talent, rather than doing mundane jobs that can be done by the software.
- Data analysis
The central database allows number crunching to come up with performance analysis for one employee or a department or a particular set of employees, over one year or many years, quite easily. HR personnel can use this data and recommend remedies for a department that has a high attrition rate or suggest best strategies to be followed across the organization by extrapolating what another department is doing right.
- Security of data and effective disaster recovery
All application packages ensure that confidential employee data is kept extremely secure. It also ensures that the data is backed up, so that in the case of the central location being inaccessible due to any natural or man-made reasons like earthquakes, floods, fire, etc., the application can still be accessed from an alternate disaster recovery site. The DR invocation involves seamless transition and near – zero loss of data.
- Compliance management
A lot of time and effort is spent on ensuring that the organization is compliant with various governmental and regulatory compliances. However, there is still an element of human error or oversight that can creep in. Compliance management becomes a breeze with this solution and a simple patch will handle any change or addition in the compliance regulations.
- Tracking grievances
If an employee registers a grievance or a complaint online, it gets tracked till either it is redressed or validated. All the complaints are also stored so that HR can analyse and review their own performance as well.
- Ease in handling mandatory documentations
Many HRMS applications have the ability to ask for a “I have read the document completely” checkmark, before allowing any further access. This facility can be used to handle the reading of mandatory documents and makes it convenient and easy for the HR department.
- Reduction of errors
Automation removes the errors caused by oversight, repetition or plain typos and helps in keeping the data intact.
- High ROI – return on investment
An efficient implementation of the application will ensure that not only does the HR department become lean and efficient, but will devise business strategies to streamline the other production departments too.
- Document management systems
Most HRMS systems have an inbuilt document management system to manage all documents centrally, with proper access control, rights and privileges.
- Birthdays and anniversary reminders
An employee feels cherished when his birthday or anniversary is remembered and a warm wish and / or a small gift comes his way. This job becomes easier with the central database feature.
Feedback from HR professionals
A senior manager in a national firm says “While implementing the HRMS software was very challenging because of the huge amount of data entry involved, our lives have become a lot easier now. More time is freed up to focus on important tasks like recruiting and organizing trainings, rather than preparing timesheets and poring over spreadsheets during salary payouts.”
Another manager in a startup sums it up succinctly when she says “HRMS manages all the mundane jobs so that HR people can focus on their core expertise and not waste time.”
Conclusion
An efficient HR software can not only ease the life of the HR department but also makes it more effective and productive. It also helps reduce the HR department’s footprint in the organization. It allows for easy communication, smooth operations, and better performance management. HR software or HRMS applications have stopped being an optional item and have now stepped into the mandatory list, if the organization needs to hold their own in the dynamic marketplace and evolving technological world.
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