Human resources (HR) is one of the most crucial functions within an organization.

The HR department handles all employee-related issues as well as payroll calculations. Considering the importance of this department, an effort should be made to streamline operations, optimizing both employee productivity and the employee experience as a whole.

Fortunately, companies are investing more in HR. In fact, the industry is projected to be worth $38.17 billion by 2027!

Sadly, many businesses still rely on manual management of their workforce, but companies can use Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS) to reduce or even eliminate many of their routine, time-consuming tasks.

An HRIS addresses many different issues often faced by the HR department, but its primary purpose is to simplify HR workflows. This is accomplished by speeding up HR processing and ensuring an accurate payroll.

Recommended reading: The Benefits of HRIS Technology for Small Businesses

An HRIS is effective for large enterprises, but they’re also perfect for any small business trying to improve the efficiency of its operations.

Before you pick an HRIS for your business, it’s important to look at the different types of HRIS available and which industries these solutions serve best. If your business falls within one of these sectors, then chances are it’s the right time to make the necessary adjustments and invest in an HRIS for your company!

1. Education

According to a report by the Economic Policy Institute, there is a shortage of teachers in the workforce.

In fact, the annual teacher shortage was estimated to reach 110,000 teachers in 2018 and is expected to quadruple by 2023.

This shortage highlights the importance of hiring enough teachers so that schools are not under-staffed. Of course, hiring the most-qualified candidates is also important, and attracting the best talent requires offering competitive salaries and enticing benefits to potential employees.

In education, HR serves as the middleman between teachers, staff, and the school administrations. HR is there to resolve any issues or concerns of the workforce, which can range anywhere from benefits concerns to labor issues. If teachers or staff feel that they deserve more from the administration, then it’s up to the HR department to convey that message to the stakeholders.

One of the most useful features of HRIS is benefit analysis, which helps find the most attractive and efficient benefits for your workers. This feature poses an obvious advantage for finding top-tier teachers, but it can be utilized in other sectors as well.

2. BPO / Call Centers

Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and call centers have some of the most competitive atmospheres in the workforce today.

Employees, motivated by rewards such as commissions for their efforts, are bound to work harder to achieve their allotted quotas. This sector is best suited for resilient, resourceful workers who can adapt to the long calls and late-night schedules that tire out most employees.

HR is an important part of this industry as finding people willing to sit through long conversations and work extended hours is key to success. Quality call center agents who get along with their coworkers can be hard to find, although the competitive nature of the profession likely contributes to disputes among team members.

Since companies in this line of work usually have hundreds of employees, a proper HRIS is essential. The systems are ideal for managing a massive team and provide the perfect solution to all of your payroll issues.

Call centers may struggle to distribute the payroll on time due to their massive employee bases, but HRIS has features that allow the HR department to streamline the payroll process, ensuring that all employees are compensated properly and on time.

3. Construction

Construction is one of the most physically exhausting industries in the modern workforce. Workers are often deployed at multiple job sites, making it hard to keep track of attendance. If workers don’t get the proper benefits, salaries, and treatment, worker morale can plummet and projects will quickly crumble. An easy way to keep everything the workers need in check? Using an HRIS!

HR plays the crucial role of forecasting in the construction industry. Before a project begins, HR helps in distributing the workers among the job sites. During and after projects, HR acts as the workers’ go-to for all their labor needs. A proper HRIS can streamline both processes through its database, and the features it offers help reduce the likelihood of errors (and time required) from the HR department.

From ensuring salaries are paid on time to keeping workers up-to-date on the latest policies and compliance laws, an HRIS handles all of the heavy lifting, allowing your business to optimize its HR department.

4. Government

This sector needs HR the most. HR effectively empowers the government by allowing workers to provide the services required by the general public.

Utilizing an HRIS, the HR department can easily manage and organize the data of an employee for future reference. Whether it’s ensuring they are still qualified for a job or checking for past misconduct, an HRIS makes it easier for government agencies to maximize the amount of work they can process on any given day.

Beyond that, a proper HRIS provides workers with cost-effectiveness incentives, motivating them to work harder. Though often overlooked, these incentives are important as they let the workers know they are valued by their employer, regardless of the industry they work in.

5. Banking and Finance

Finding the right people for the job and keeping accurate records in the industry poses a large challenge for banks and other financial institutions.

Thankfully, an HRIS has many features that make this task a lot easier for the HR department to handle.

As the banking industry is mainly service-based, some of the main challenges it faces are managing people while navigating both financial and economic risks.

This huge dependence on the workforce makes HR a top priority. An HRIS can help plan for recruitment, train current employees, manage employee performance, and keep track of employee requirements.

Managing everything from benefits to retirements and resignations, a proper HRIS is crucial for any financial HR department.

Improve Your HR Processes

Any time is a great time to make the necessary adjustments for your business, especially if you’re concerned with company growth.

While there are hundreds of HRIS options available on the market today, it’s important to choose the one that will give an edge to your business.

Start exploring your options by checking out the features and capabilities of UZIO, which offers HR, payroll, benefits, and workers’ compensation solutions.

If your HR department is currently struggling with managing and maintaining your HR department, then it’s time to explore tools designed to optimize your processes and boost your business.

Quick links

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  Building An HR Department in 5 Steps
  
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  1. Devise a Staffing Plan​
  
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  Mini-Plan for Building a staffing Plan
  
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  2. Create an Employee Handbook
  
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  3. Set Safety Standards
  
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  4. Create a Performance and Feedback Process​
  
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  5. Build an HR Administration, Benefits, and Payroll System
  
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  The Conclusion
  

Today’s most successful businesses thrive by having a strong, cohesive HR (human resources) department.

Without an efficient HR team, it’s hard to imagine running a successful operation. Since an effective HR department is so crucial to the success of a business, even small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) aspire to establish an HR department.

Sometimes referred to as a people department, the men and women of HR are responsible for overseeing company culture, hiring, employee onboarding, time tracking, employee engagement, payroll, benefits, and workers’ compensation.

A solid HR department takes a load off the business owner, allowing them to focus on more important tasks instead.

Of course, an HR department is policy and process-driven.

Building An HR Department in 5 Steps

If you’ve never set one up before it may seem confusing, so here’s a list of 5 steps to assist you with forming a successful HR department for your business.

1. Devise a Staffing Plan

Staffing requires a strategic, data-driven approach if you want to be successful.

It doesn’t start and end with recruiting the right people. Staffing is an on-going task that includes evaluating organizational needs, growth strategy, and a full spectrum of both skills & resources.

All of this must align with the company-wide business goals to ensure business success. A proper staffing plan helps businesses:

• Improve the recruitment process
• Increase employee retention
• Optimize the promotion process

Here’s a Mini-Plan for Building A Staffing Plan

• Set measurable goals for optimizing staffing and employee development levels. This means: 
• • Deciding which HR metrics to track
  • Implementing a way to analyze progress
• Evaluate your current staff. Here’s what you need to look at,
  • The existing in-house skillset
  • Employee performance levels
  • Top-performing employees
  • Current compensation rates vs. the industry average
• Predict the optimal staffing levels using:
  • Trend analysis
  • Industry benchmarks analysis
• Conduct a gap analysis. This will let you:
  • Prepare to let go surplus employees and resources
  • Analyze current and previous shift management data

2. Create an Employee Handbook

Though we may not always agree with them, rules are there for a reason: they promote unity and growth through a unified code of conduct.

These are the main reasons why you should create a crystal-clear code of employee conduct.

A good employee handbook covers safety, health, and company culture in an easy-to-read digital or print form.

If possible, you should have both a hard and a soft copy available, so employees never have the excuse of “I lost it”.

It’s important to include answers to any current questions (or questions commonly asked by new employees) in a FAQ section as well.

By providing employees with a specific book of instructions and guidelines, you will be standardizing conduct and optimizing your business from the start.

3. Set Safety Standards

These standards cover physical, verbal, and virtual practices.

It’s important to provide employees a clean, hygienic, and safe workplace where they can comfortably spend their 8-10 hour days.

Ensure that these guidelines are strictly adhered to so that no employee is ever in physical danger.

Beyond physical standards, verbal and virtual standards are important as well.

A sexual harassment policy is a must and needs to be readily accessible by any employee.

These policies cover verbal and virtual conduct both inside the workplace and out.

Another important thing? Having an EAP (Emergency Action Plan).

If something goes wrong, employees need to have a response plan in place, especially if evacuation is necessary.

4. Create a Performance and Feedback Process

It’s hard to recognize progress if you have no method in place of measuring it.

Performance expectations provide measurable goals and metrics to monitor both employee and business progress.

A comprehensive performance management and feedback process play a critical role in attracting and retaining key employees.

By monitoring and measuring progress, you ensure employees reach their full potential while confirming they’re happy with their roles and growth within the team.

5. Build an HR Administration, Benefits, and Payroll System

The success of your HR department will ultimately depend on the approach you choose, so go with one that’s adaptable and expandable.

An all-in-one, fully integrated HR, benefits, payroll, and workers’ compensation platform for e.g. UZIO automates your people management workflows and helps you to:

• Eliminate manual tasks while increasing productivity
• Efficiently handle tedious and time-consuming HR administrative tasks
• Ensure 100% payroll accuracy
• Offer a wide range of benefits to your employees
• Quickly address all workers’ compensation claims and policies

The Conclusion…

Having an excellent HR team is essential if you want your business to grow, expand, and prosper.

Without a productive HR team, your employee relations, hiring, training, career development, benefits, and company culture will all suffer!

Of course, now you know how to create your HR department within your company, so take these tips, choose a team size, and start building your HR team today!

The word ‘Information System‘ depicts an integrated platform to manage a large chunk of data. Management Information System or MIS is a widely used term in organizations to ensure the safekeeping of their operational records.

But is there any connection between HR and the cloud storage platform? How will it help HR managers to enhance operational efficiency? 

HRIS or Human Resource Information System is a software package with a similar bucket of benefits of ‘MIS’ that allows HR managers to embed every crucial data in a single platform. HR managers daily deal with large unorganized datasets scattered on several different platforms. Handling this data from distinct platforms and integrating them to draft analysis is a quite chaotic and strenuous task.

HRIS is the solution, a platform to integrate data from different sources and execute every task efficiently in an automated fashion.

Now the second question one reckons is regarding its value propositions. Most of the organizations store their crucial data in this cloud-enabled platform to streamline their operations. The benefit bucket comprises of the following functions-

• Record-keeping. An HRIS is a record-keeping system for tracking every minuscule information of employees. Organizations observe the severe cases of data breaches for the trail of paperwork and even face financial losses. HRIS system revamps the paperwork system to a digital record-keeping platform. The software accounts for maintaining transparency and eradicating toxic environments in the organization.
• Compliance. Organizations with activities in the U.S. must retain personal expenses from their U.S.- based representatives. Income tax is payable across seven groups, with logically higher rates applied for higher income, going from 10% up to 37%. There is no base limit at which annual income tax is exempt. However, the stipends in each band change for the accompanying gatherings:- single individuals, married people filing separately; heads of households; married people filing jointly; widows and widowers.

Extra business prerequisites include: 

• Filing Form 941 (quarterly compromise) toward the finish of each quarter. 
• Filing Form W-3 with the Social Security Administration (SSA) every year. 
• Providing all workers with Form W-2, which is the annual wage and tax statement, by January 31 of consistently.

Recommended reading: A Guide to Essential Payroll Forms & More for Small Business Owners

Taking care of all these compliances is a big hassle for the HR manager. HRIS is the name of the solution to cater to all these bewilder tasks to give you a sigh of relief from these complexities.

• Productivity: One of the significant functions of HRIS is that it helps organizations to enhance their productivity. Integrating data in a single platform helps in accelerating the process efficiently. An HRIS system is the only constant in your organization to witness the hassle-free completion of the employee life cycle. Starting from an automated onboarding process to smooth reimbursement after the notice period HRIS is the only solution to build a hassle-free process. 
• Strategy: The HRIS enables the tracking of data, analyzes it, and implements it in different verticals on the priorities of the organization.
• Transparency: A final benefit is the ability to offer transparency within an organization. The software enables employees to monitor their activities. The right execution of HRIS helps to execute a good employee experience.

The benefit bucket comes with some features to execute the mentioned functions hassle-freely. The innovative software encompasses the following features-

• Onboarding: The process of onboarding usually takes a colossal amount of strenuous paperwork. Employees find it cumbersome to repetitively enter the same pieces of information in various documents. HRIS has turned the monotonous manual labor to a dynamic one by reducing the extensive paperwork in the process. The cloud server will capture every crucial information regarding the employee from one document and deploy that to every other copy and reduce the workload. The only job of the HR manager is to register the employee details initially to the cloud platform and then upload any single document to get filled out manually. The data will get stored in the system and can be retrieved for any other documents automatically in the future.

• Payroll: The payroll system automates the pay process of employees. The cloud-enabled platform tracks every data from attendance to leave taken in that month to calculate the payroll process. HR managers often get bewildered at managing different sets of taxes for both permanent employees and individual contractors. 1099-MISC usually applicable to the independent contractor, to pay over their employment taxes. A W-2 form, on the other hand, applied for permanent employees to deduct payroll taxes from their earnings. An HRIS system will automate the process for both of the tax payments, and it also seamlessly handles payment of state and federal taxes for your organization.

• Employee Benefit Management System (EBMS): Another feature of the HRIS is benefits management. Employee benefits are a crucial aspect of compensation, barring that monetary and non-monetary benefits also get managed in this system. Moreover, it offers each employee a self-service model for benefits management. Employees can monitor health insurance, retirement accounts, vacations, paid time off in a single platform. They can select the customized benefits options from the available bucket. Someone might require additional paternity leave, the other one might opt for an expensive company car. This personalized approach to benefits is also called a cafeteria model.

• Identifying Training Needs: Training and development is a prime element when it comes to employee management. This module allows HR to develop a tailor-made training module according to the need of the employees. The machine learning algorithm helps to analyze the qualifications, certifications, and skillsets of the employees, and predict the training need for that particular person. The training need will be unique for every employee, and they can also track the Learning Management System in their dashboard. 

• PTO management: Do your employees retaliate with you for miscalculating paid leaves? Unfortunately, this is the usual scenario of every workplace, and coping with that is indeed a big challenge. Often employers fallaciously slip-up in the calculation, and on many occasions, employees commit the same mistake.HRIS is the platform to embed the details paid leaves and gives notifications to both employees and employers to utilize it effectively.

• Analytics in an HRIS: HR managers can also track their performance through this software. They can analyze their strategic implementation and success rate of the same through records. Starting from manpower planning to attrition percentage the data will help HR managers to work upon critical areas.

UZIO is the name of these precedent solutions. Automation is not only enhancing productivity but also helps to optimize operational expenses. Organizations can integrate every piece of information on a single platform and operate from there to reduce the maintenance cost of different software. UZIO HRIS is a disruptive technology with the superior attributes to sweep away the traditional strategic approach of Human Resource Management. If you still haven’t incorporated the state-of-the-art solution, spontaneously contact the industry expert to entice your workforce efficiency. Contact UZIO out rightly for their virtuoso guidance.

2020 was a huge turning point in the way companies managed business.

Companies that had only previously considered remote operations were now forced to put them into action because of the pandemic. The majority of the workforce (many who had never even considered remote work) were now working from home.

While the world is still adjusting to the “new normal” and continuing to embrace remote operations as a whole, there are certain factors common among many businesses that have room for improvement. Business leaders need to adapt to the new manner of handling their businesses, and a great place to start is with company onboarding procedures.

The hiring of new employees was not stopping even during the pandemic.

Successful onboarding ensures a clear path for employees as they begin their work at a new company. Even in these difficult times, remote business operations are no excuse for a complicated onboarding process.

New employees expect the hiring and training period to be as smooth as before, so it’s up to the organization to ensure this process is successful.

By focusing on optimizing the onboarding processes and providing new employees with tools necessary for their success, employers can easily make themselves more attractive to prospective employees than other companies that are yet to do so.

Like it or not, remote work is here to stay, so businesses need to adjust to this new workflow. The adjustment process to this online working culture begins with setting up a successful onboarding process for new employees and providing necessary tools to the current employees to work from home.

Fortunately, virtual onboarding is very much similar to in-person onboarding at the office.

The main difference is that interviews and initial training are done via video calls & video meetings instead of in-person meetings.

Of course, remote work doesn’t mean that company culture goes out the window!

In fact, company culture expands far beyond the walls of any workplace and is more critical than ever as your company transitions to a fully-remote working environment.

Let us check out the major Organizational benefits of Virtual Onboarding of Employees:

1. Increased Efficiency

Arguably the biggest benefit of a virtual onboarding process is increased efficiency.

Since forms are managed digitally rather than on paper, this means new employees can fill out forms faster and with less repetition.

Many times, the same information is required on various forms, which normally would need to be written down multiple times.

However, since forms are being filled out digitally, new employees can take advantage of the “copy and paste” functions, saving them from writing (or typing) the same information over and over again on multiple forms.

2. More Flexibility to Compare Available Perks

Benefits offered by employers are some of the most commonly sought-after perks that potential employees are looking for. Many forms traditionally filled out by hand, such as health insurance paperwork, can now be filled out digitally.

This reduces the processing time, and also allows the worker to compare multiple plans easily without shuffling through piles of paperwork.

If possible, you should include benefits forms as part of your virtual onboarding process.

3. Faster Processing Options

When filling out these forms, a signature will be needed.

Fortunately, there are many e-signature solutions available online, which makes it easy for new hires to read and sign any necessary hiring documents.

As the information is filed digitally and available in an instant, using e-signatures for your paperwork is a far superior solution to manually managing onboarding paperwork.

4. More Communication Options

New employees need active communication and instruction as they adjust to their new responsibilities.

Since in-person help was not an option, you can assign new employees a “welcome buddy” to provide direct support on their first day, who they can easily communicate with via chat.

A friendly face (even behind a screen) will help new employees feel welcome and comfortable within your company.

While this may not seem like a traditional introduction to you, the age of social media has made online introductions commonplace, so it’s unlikely that the new employee will have any trouble utilizing this approach.

5. Virtual Training Options

A virtual workplace allows new employees to quickly get assistance throughout the workday, and you can even create “meet and greet” roadmaps to introduce employees to their fellow workers.

This is beneficial beyond comradery – it also lets employees know who to turn to when they need help going forward!

If an employee is struggling to adjust to their new work environment, you can always assign them a virtual mentor to speed up the learning process while allowing space for growth and improvement.

Ready to go digital? Give virtual operations a try with a free 30-day trial from UZIO!

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Final words

When you hire a new employee, it’s important to get them up to speed as quickly as possible, so they can start making valuable contributions immediately.

For hourly employees, you can accomplish this through an orientation of the workplace and the role they’ll be playing.

But what about salaried and office workers?

When you hire someone who doesn’t work on-site, it can be difficult to prepare them effectively, which results in added time and expense before they are productive members of your team.

In this blog we have discussed the benefits of virtual onboarding that will help you get new hires productive faster.

If you’re not sure about Employee onboarding process, check out our step-by-step guide: How to Create an Employee Onboarding Process That Doesn’t Fall Flat.