Category: HR Management

Posted on by Wifi Attendance Super Admin

In the twenty-first century, organizations depend on the energy, output, passion, and engagement of their employees. If employees are engaged, their determination to work is high; they are more productive, focused, and result-oriented.

Companies that indulge in activities of employee engagement tend to be more profitable and revenue generating.

While employee engagement is a buzzword in most organizations as employers strive to encourage their staff to deliver value to customers, identifying ways by which these employees can be engaged still remains a challenge.

Here are 10 competent steps that will help you to improve the level of employee engagement in your business enterprise:

Assign the Right Role

Every employee must be put in the right role based on their skills, abilities, and experience. They must enjoy what they do and must be able to achieve the right goals for the company.

This requires the involvement of the talent acquisition team who must know each employee well and must introduce retention strategies that focus on delivering maximum output.

Employee Training

A culture of trust and accountability cannot be developed until and unless the team is skilled for success. This means that managers and leaders must focus on the training and development of employees.

Employees must be asked what they would like to learn and appropriate training courses or skill enhancement sessions must be organized.

Give out Meaningful Work

Several organizations hire the best of talent but are not able to provide work accordingly. Only when employees do meaningful work and understand how their contribution affects the success and growth of the company, they feel engaged. Know why a person has been hired and give out right tasks to them.

Regular Feedback

Gone are the days when you wait for quarterly reviews to check progress and give feedback. Nowadays, workforce appreciates the regular feedback.

Indulge in formal and informal sessions wherein activities are evaluated and suggestions are accepted. This way, loopholes are identified faster and wastage is reduced.

Have Inspiring Leaders

The role of leaders is crucial for employee engagement. When managers and leaders take initiative in understanding the work of employees and their needs and aspirations, it helps to establish goodwill and ties of trust.

Offer Growth Opportunities

Employees feel disengaged when their skills are not optimally utilized. They may have experience in a particular field but the set-up of your business does not allow them to showcase their talent. This can be quite discouraging.

Therefore, give your employees the opportunity to highlight their skills and encourage them to stretch their skills with a focus on growth.

Recognize and Reward

Every employee’s efforts must be rewarded. This gives them the motivation to work harder. Thanking them for the contribution they have made shows that you recognize and appreciate what they have done. It also acts as a technique to boost their morale.

Understand your Employees

Every employee has a life beyond the organization they work for. Understanding the responsibilities your employees fulfill outside of the workplace helps to establish a bond with them.

Companies that believe that employees are their greatest asset remain an attractive place to work in. Provide initiatives to help your employees balance their work and personal life.

Team Work

Wherever possible, encourage employees to work with members of other teams. According to research, attachment with co-workers is beneficial for the growth of the organization. This is because the productivity is better when employees interact with other professionals.

Take Ideas for Engagement

Successful managers keep the communication with their employees transparent. They often discuss with their teams how engagement activities and solutions must be incorporated to improve the workforce culture.

These steps for increasing employee engagement are not at all complex. They are easy to adapt and some may already be a part of your organization.

Also, apart from these, there are several other techniques that you may use to engage your employees. The bottom line is to focus on employee engagement as engaged employees deliver faster and efficient results.

Posted on by Wifi Attendance Super Admin

Any business owner understands and appreciates the importance of a Human Resources (HR) business plan. While a good strategic vision and an overall business plan are important, the HR plan is also essential for securing success in business.

In the absence of a human resource plan, your staff will not be prepared and will not work in accordance with the goals of the organization. When the need arises, hiring new employees will be a challenge and you won’t be ready for turnover and succession planning to manage your company.

The following five steps help you plan your human resource in style and ensure that your company is ready to tackle all sorts of staffing and management issues:

1. Know the Abilities of your Employees

Before you prepare your human resource plan and set out to hire new employees in the future, it is essential that you evaluate the skills and abilities of your current workforce.

The data you collected at the time of hiring will have most of the information available, such as educational qualifications, past experience, skills, projects they have administered to you etc.

This can act as a stepping stone in knowing what your employees are capable of. Additionally, a lot of employees you would be working with currently will have skills and talents that you are unaware of and haven’t been used to your advantage.

How to get information about such skills? Just ask! Have a conversation with your employees and identify their strengths. Employees appreciate such dialogue when you take interest in their potential. Record this information and use it in a manner that it can easily be accessed later.

2. Prepare a Succession Plan

Every business organization undergoes changes in management. This is something that cannot be avoided. Managers will join and leave, positions will be open, and new employees will be hired as you continue to expand and grow.

In order to be able to tackle these changes, preparing a succession plan in advance is advisable. You can choose to include or not include your employees in this succession plan.

Nevertheless, remember to keep their career goals and future plan in mind so that all such changes can be adapted by both you and the employees. Keep them informed of the changes.

A succession plan helps you easily identify who has the skills to fill the important positions of your organization and where there is a need for a new hire.

3. Focus on Employee Development

If your workforce is strong enough to take you forward and help you grow, you are now ready to figure out how their potential can be maximized. Of course, this does not mean that you lose focus on your business goals.

Once your company requirements have been clearly highlighted, it is time for you to match your employees’ goals with the goals of your company. Understand what their goals are and weigh them with their current abilities.

This way, you will be able to decide on what skills your workforce needs to develop in order to stay in-sync with your goals.

Moving on, frame an employee development plan and apply the strategies to help your employees enhance their skills.

According to studies, if the employees are included in the growth of the company, they tend to stay motivated and dedicatedly work towards the betterment of the organization.

4. Perform a Gap Analysis

A gap analysis basically compares the workforce you have currently with the workforce you will require as you expand and grow in the future. This study will clearly identify if your HR services are outdated and need improvements to keep the company going strong.

The process of a gap analysis will require a check of the job descriptions you use for hiring. Are they up to date as per employee expectations or do they need some kind of modifications?

Your employee handbook will also require an evaluation to ensure that all employment laws are timely updated and there is no policy that can be questioned.

The training policies must also be looked at so that changes with respect to the health benefits and sick leave have been taken into consideration appropriately.

The performance of your existing employees will have a significant impact on the future of your business and therefore, a relook at all of these documents as well as the employees’ rewards package is crucial for an increase in revenue.

5. Expand your Workforce as Business Expands

Your workforce must not feel burdened. You must carefully evaluate when you need to hire new employees and take action against the same.

Make sure that the reward schemes you set in place match the expectations of the employees you intend to hire. Also, keep your work culture strong so that employees are motivated to continue working and do not face any kind of challenges.

With the above-mentioned steps in mind, you will be able to manage your hiring and recruiting processes efficiently and only have qualified individuals working with you.

Your human resource planning will be performed in a manner that it does not result in any kind of obstacles and challenges.

Posted on by Wifi Attendance Super Admin

A good work environment is essential to company’s growth and success. Bain & Company reported that companies with more engaged workforce grew revenue 2.5x more than companies with a less engaged one.

A toxic work environment on the other hand drags down your company’s growth. A bad culture kills employee morale, pulls down the office energy and perpetuates a sense of incompetence.

It is hard to define a toxic environment but here are some signs that your office culture is turning negative:

  • Low employee morale
  • Sluggish rate of project completion
  • Frequent miscommunication
  • Blame games
  • Employee resentment
  • Absenteeism
  • High turnover

How does a company come to the point of having a toxic work environment? After all nobody planned to have a bad work culture, right? Not planning for a healthy work culture is actually the reason for landing up in such a situation. A good culture has to be actively nurtured by leadership and personnel management in a company.

More often than not the company culture is a reflection of business leadership. This is made clear by cases like Uber which gave excessive power to its co-founder Travis Kalanick and had to face numerous allegations last year.

For others like Amazon, a stressful work environment is just by-product of their value to be the best at any cost.

How can you bring back your company culture after it has become toxic? Obviously something has gone wrong down the line. Your first step is to inspect your journey and pin point the mistakes that happened. More often than not there will be many things that require change.

Following are some effective ways to clean out toxicity and have a healthy, happy environment again:

  • Improve communication

Bad communication is the number one cause for a toxic culture. Companies with a bad culture usually have the grapevine channel stronger than formal communication. Make your formal communication robust, timely and transparent.

Share everything with employees officially so that there is no room left for rumors and fear. Not addressing a sensitive issue only makes it more likely for miscommunication. So share everything openly and honestly.

  • Review your Leadership

Clean up your system of people you are toxic. Is there someone in the top management who is perpetuating stressful work practices or politics? Work ethics always trickle down from the top management. Hence, it is important that your leadership shares the values of your companies.

Sometimes it may also be a handful of employees in the executive or mid-management who are contributing to the problem. Remember that no one is worth it if they bring fear, stress and politics to the office every morning.

  • Review the Company structure

Clash of roles, duplication of roles and complicated reporting structure can also be a source of conflict in office. Review your company hierarchy and remove and complications. Confusing structures give rise to unnecessary blame game and stress.

  • Take Employee Feedback

How do you take actions on the above points? How would you know which leaders are causing a problem and weather the reporting structure is confusing or not? The answer is employee feedback.

Change is company culture is for your employees and hence their opinion must be taken in the activity. It would be a good idea to take representatives from each department and form a ‘cultural change committee’.

This will spread a loud and clear message to everyone- ‘we have taken note of the bad culture and we are going to change it’. This itself will be enough to lift up the spirits.

What makes toxic culture worse is that everybody complains about it in the hallways but nobody admits it in front of the management.

Acknowledging the problem in open will be a signal that things are changing and management is being honest of the ground reality. 

  • Align Performance Management

Are your employees happy with the way their performance is reviewed and appraisal is done. Appraisal and recognition is a sensitive topic and a common cause of employee dissatisfaction in many companies.

Dissatisfied employees are more likely to spread negativity and spoil office environment. Therefore it is important to minimize the number of employees walking our disappointed from a performance review.

Some of the steps that HR can take are – having a clear KPI and break them down into quarterly or monthly goals. This way the employee has time to take corrective action instead of facing a shock end of the year. Also keep scoring as objective as possible to avoid favoritism in office.

Final Thoughts

A toxic environment is a downhill spiral of negativity which can turn your talent unproductive. Catching early signs of company culture going bad allows you to take corrective action quickly.

Since leadership is the main influencer of culture it is important to review top managers. Make your communication open and timely and review your company structure. Take continuous feedback from employee and involve them in correcting the culture.

Posted on by Wifi Attendance Super Admin

If you have any experience in managing teams and running a business you would know that company culture has a big impact on business revenue and employee retention.

In 1992 a Harvard Business Study found that companies with strong culture saw  a 4x greater increase in revenue and more than 12x increase in stock price.

Sometimes people may not realize it but company culture is actually at the root for every business’s success, failure, fraud, collapse or growth.

It’s no secret that happy employees lead to happy customers. This is clear in service of companies such as SouthWest Airlines and Google. A fun and safe culture also attracts new talent to the company.

Here are some ways to build a better company culture at your workplace.

Have a Purpose

You must first decide the culture that you want your company to have. Simply copying the values of other successful business will rarely work.

Your company culture comprises your values, beliefs, purpose and philosophy in serving others. The company culture is almost always a reflection of its founding members and should be as unique as each human being is.

Think of the kind of atmosphere and working style you want in your office. A small start up will naturally have its founder’s culture but will require conscious effort as the team grows bigger.

Use stories

Use stories and brand ambassadors within your company to propagate values. These stories could be of founders or top level employees.

Personalities such as Richard Branson (Virgin brand) and Steve Jobs (Apple Inc.) are an inspiration in themselves. They form a major part of the brand they have built.

Not every company will have a popular personality to influence its culture. Even everyday stories by frontline employees or action on social media can be used to reinforce values and build culture.

company culture

Hire Right

Zappos the online shoe seller is loved for its company culture and customer service. Did you know that Zappos gives cultural fit a 50% weightage when hiring an employee!

That means a candidate with impressive skill sets could still get rejected because he is not right for the culture of the company.

Culture is made up of people and stories, so it makes sense to protect it from getting corrupted. It is possible to teach a skill set but it is much harder to change a person’s attitude and belief systems.

Always hire people who add to your culture and share your sense of purpose. Hiring employees who have conflicting values is quick way to turn your culture toxic.

Encourage right culture

It is also important to encourage the right behaviours after hiring the right employees. Make sure your awards and recognition reflect your values.

Take the example of Publix Super Markets, the largest employee owned company in United States. They offer their employees company stock after a year of service and additional stocks each year promoting the culture of inclusiveness and ownership.

As a result their turnover rate is as low as 5% and profits are more than that of Wal-Mart.

company culture

Have zero tolerance for breaches

What you stand against is as important as what you stand for in building a strong culture. Make clear that behaviours and practices against the company’s values will not be tolerated.

Have a written code of conduct and policy that reflects your culture clearly.

Rewards and punishments are noticed by employees and travel through the grapevine quickly. It is an effective way to keep your company culture in check.

Sum Up

94% of executives and 88% of employees believe a distinct workplace culture is important to business success. Company culture does require time and effort but it is well worth the effort.

In fact, it is impossible to have a sustainable long running business without a strong culture.

Building a culture starts with having a purpose, hiring right people and nurturing it daily. Company culture will evolve as the business grows and next generation of workers are hired.

However, the core of the business and its essence must always be preserved and reflect in everything the company does.

Posted on by Wifi Attendance Super Admin

Employee Absenteeism costs companies billions of dollars globally. It can be defined as intentional and habitual leave from work that is unscheduled. Calling in sick, arriving late daily and taking undue long breaks is also counted as absenteeism. It leads to loss of productivity and disruption in work flow.

In some companies absenteeism is a chronic problem leading to low morale and affecting the bottom line negatively.

Many times the cause of an unscheduled leave is genuine like medical emergency, personal work or ill family member, but employees who are absent regularly are simply avoiding work.

There may be authentic reason behind not wanting to attend office too. Reasons could vary from office bullying to having an indifferent boss. It is the company’s job to find out the reason and address it before widespread absenteeism becomes a disease in the office.

All companies face absenteeism in some form and at some stage. Here are ways to deal with it and keep your workforce productive and motivated.

Ways to Deal with Employee Absenteeism

 

Study the Problem

It is important to first study the problem of absenteeism in your company. Collect data on leaves and people on unscheduled absence. Does absenteeism peak during a particular month or is it more prevalent in any one department? These questions will help you to get to the root cause of the problem.

Having attendance and leave management system like Wi-Fi attendance will help you in getting data easily.

Have a Written Policy

Many companies do not have a written policy on work absence. This leads to confusion and wastage of office hours by some employees. Make sure you have a written policy stating the office hours, acceptable delays, half day provisions if any and possible consequences of breach of policy.

Make it a part of induction program for new joinees and especially educate managers on handling absenteeism.

Train Managers

Managers must identify absenteeism in early stages and resolve or report it to HR. Any employee taking more than two unplanned leaves a month or arriving more than an hour late everyday is a red-flag; although the limits will depend on your company’s policy.

There must be a clear course of intervention for such employees and the managers should be instructed to take these cases seriously.

Wi-Fi Attendance System

Common attendance system can be exploited by employees who want to avoid work. The problem with RIFD and biometric attendance system is that they can be fooled with proxy attendance and cannot register actual time worked by an employee.

Wi-Fi attendance on the other hand tracks real time location of the employee using office router. Employees can mark attendance only when they are connected to office wifi.

This allows HR to note unreported absence or inadequate working hours by any employee. A technologically advanced wifi attendance system is hence an efficient way to tackle employee absenteeism.

Employee Support

A good Employee Assistance Program or EAP does a lot to keep absenteeism low. EAP are support programs that help out employees in personal front. This could be though financial support, healthcare services, flexible works schedules, counseling etc.

EAP aims at supporting employee in testing times so that he/she can get back to full productivity at their earliest.

It also makes the employee feel cared for which makes it less likely that they will miss office or cause a loss to the company.

Final Thoughts

Employee absenteeism leads to low productivity and huge costs for companies. Dealing with it requires a formal process and good technology.

By tracking attendance through Wi-Fi Attendance App you can keep a close eye on unscheduled absence and take corrective action.

Posted on by Wifi Attendance Super Admin

With different developments in technology over the last few years, human resource as a process has experienced significant changes. Artificial Intelligence (AI), a technological area that simplifies the way we do things has also reshaped the HR function.

While the technology cannot completely replace human element, it has successfully altered the way companies hire, manage, and engage with their manpower.

AI machines are gaining the intelligence needed to find the right resource or watch out for the next step and assist HR professionals in making intelligent decisions. Let us take a look at some of the benefits of AI in HR management practices:

1. Screening Candidates

Recruiters have a large candidate profile database and usually tend to screen each one manually. This involves face to face discussions and a lot of other time-consuming processes.

An AI-based software,on the other hand,analyzes the various aspects of a candidate and distinguishes them on the basis of their skills, past experience, and cultural fit for the organization. The software identifies a suitable match for the job profile, thereby saving the recruiter’s time.

2. Interviewing Candidates

Generally, recruiters spend about 30% of their time in fixing and conducting interviews. According to reports, 50% of the candidates do not receive a timely response to their application through the traditional corporate structure.

However, AI-enabled software identifies the right fit and ensures that communication flows smoothly between the candidate and the HR management. It efficiently sends custom-made messages to potential candidates making it easier for the HR personnel to focus on closing job positions.

3. Onboarding Candidates

Deciding the joining date of the candidate post offer acceptance is a tedious task. There is always uncertainty on the same. AI helps to engage and follow up with the potential candidate and ensures that chances of last-minute rejection are low.

4. Reduce Human Partiality

AI is dependent on data instead of the human mind. This reduces the chances of bias based on the intuitions and perceptions of the various individuals working in an organization. The work culture is free from discrimination with a more cohesive, communicative workplace and a faster decision-making process.

5. Establish Better Relationships with Employees

AI can be used to identify the various characteristics of individual employees through engagement surveys and other personality tools. This helps to match the right employee with the right role.

HR queries can also be taken care of with the help of an AI-based Chatbot. Meetings between employees and the HR management can be easily fixed while immediate managers have more information to take the right decision about temperaments, departments, and co-workers.

6. Improve Predictive Data Decision-Making

AI algorithms make analysis and interpretation of data easy, resulting in sets and models that provide insights for decision-making. Based on their reliable and predictive properties, decisions for today and tomorrow can be made keeping in mind data from the past.

For instance, insights derived from large volumes of data can help to predict probable issues even before they arise. This means that you will be ready to take on attrition and retention precautions at the right time.

Predictive analytics help to track employee activity and behaviour which has a direct impact on an organization’s efficiency and productivity.

7. Talent Development

Every employee has different learning styles. This is dependent on their experience, behaviours, interests, qualifications, skill sets, and more.

AI can develop customized learning programs based on the abilities and capacities of various employees. It can also offer personalized training paths which the employer may only be able to provide in a longer period of time.
HR functions are a critical aspect of business growth.

This means untimely acceptance of digital HR can hamper the overall success of a business. Therefore, HR personnel must train themselves and be ready to adapt AI technology and machines in the future. These technologies together with human intellect will help to advance HR solutions.