Human Resources Technology:
How to Modernize in 2020

May 22 2020 - Managing your human resources has always been a priority for you and your enterprise. With good HR management, you can extract the very best work from your employees and direct them towards your targets with more clarity. With poor HR management, meanwhile, productivity can slip through your fingers, leaving your business operating at a sub-optimal rate. In this article, you'll learn how new technologies can boost your HR performance. With simple software, programs, and data processing, you'll be able to develop a firmer grip over your HR issues, leading your business to better results in 2020 and beyond.

Payroll

One of the critical duties of HR departments across the world is to ensure that their staff receives the correct pay, at the correct time, each month. This is what ultimately motivates your staff to come into work and to put their efforts into their labor - without reliable pay, they will quickly lose focus within your company.

Payroll was once the preserve of spreadsheets and constant monitoring on behalf of your HR team. It took time, and it was liable to human error. But with automated payroll software - easy to onboard with the structure of your current payments - you're far better placed to make your wage payments securely, and free from errors, each month. Consider the range of payroll automation software on the market before choosing a program that suits you.

Productivity Data

Your staff are complex people with complex needs. If you treat them as one monolithic block of workers, you're likely to miss the more exceptional detail that tells you when someone's struggling - or when someone deserves a promotion or a reward. The solution to this HR issue is to use data to measure the productivity of your staff, learning from the numbers how your staff perform from week to week. With data, you can measure:

• What time your staff log in to their computers, and log out, each day
• Whether your staff are making errors in their work which they must correct
• Which staff are performing poorly, and completing little work
• What websites and apps your staff are using from their work computers
• Which members of staff are asking for extra work throughout your business

All this data is exciting for HR departments to get their hands on. By looking at the numbers, you can get a clearer view of what changes you need to make in the lives of your employees. If you have a trained data analyst on your team - and you can train employees with online data courses at Aston University Online - you'll be perfectly positioned to make the most out of your productivity data.

Communications

HR departments are also responsible for the company-wide newsletters and communications that bind teams together, helping them pull together in the same direction each week. Some of this communication will be done over email - the standard platform for internal dialogue. But, more and more, companies are looking to different forms of communication to bind their workers together, including:

• Instant messaging apps, which help you get speedy and urgent messages to employees
• Work centralization apps, which you can use to communicate and send collaborative documents through
• Digital newsletters and interactive PDFs with news and views from across your enterprise
• Other messaging apps, created for businesses, to help your teamwork collectively

While finding these apps may be the responsibility of your IT team, and those with excellent knowledge in the best software for business communications in 2020, this is a process that HR teams should be actively involved in themselves. When you find the right communications channels to match your business' needs, you'll be able to work faster and more energetically as a result.

Team Platforms

Whether you're thinking of platforms that your HR team can use to collaborate on, or you're thinking of expanding team platforms out to your entire workforce, your HR team are the place from which new ways of working are to emerge. In your HR team, you have access to productivity data, and you're able to get that all-important macro vision of your business, to see where the weak spots exist in your infrastructure. This means you're able to find solutions to common problems, such as:

• Communication blackspots between departments
• Different systems and programs and their lack of interoperability
• What slows your team when they're handing over work to check and edit
• Training modules, and how to get your team onboarded into new technology offerings

All these things can be solved through the constant use of teamwork platforms offered by several technology providers. With software solutions to help your team work better, faster, and more fluidly, you'll be able to boost the performance of your business across the board.

Training and Onboarding

Finally, one of the trickiest parts of an HR team's responsibilities is getting new staff onboarded, and getting older staff trained in new systems and new lines of work. In both cases, the HR team is responsible for getting employees into a position where they're able to contribute their labor to your business productively and efficiently. As such, these responsibilities are paramount to your team's success. When offering new training modules, consider:

• Whether you should go with an outsourced training team or create your own in-house onboarding booklet
• What critical skills you need all your workers to possess, and how you can get them up to date right away
• Whether you use technology - and online courses - or whether instead to run in-person training sessions
• How much cash you have at your disposal to invest in your staff training

All these factors will direct your hand when you're looking for training and onboarding technology to make your lives easier. A simple Google search can always reveal excellent, high-quality resources for your company to use to train staff - you just need to find the technologies and software programs to suit your specific business needs.

With so much new technology developed every month to help HR departments, it's challenging to keep track of what programs, software, and data analysis solutions you need to perform at your best. Hopefully, the above tips will help direct some of your thinking when you're next looking to modernize your HR team.

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