The digitization of processes is still one of the HR departments’ challenges in the past years. Experts still note a certain reluctance to the technology replacing part of the future jobs, determining a rather frequent resistance to change in contemporary companies.

On the other hand, it has become more evident that the automation of the repetitive activities of the HR department leads to time and energy savings, which can be otherwise dedicated to solving more complex issues.

Legislative updates, a potential catalyst for change

Changes can be determined or accelerated by some amendments to the applicable laws. In August 2017, for instance, a legislative provision stating that employers are bound to keep more detailed records of the employees’ work time determined many companies to consider the implementation of time tracking software, facilitating alignment to said provision.

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Article 119 of the Labor Code, updated by Government Emergency Ordinance No. 53/2017, provides as follows: “The employer is under the obligation to keep record of the daily work hours of every employee, outlining the start and end of the work day, and to submit such records for control by the labor inspectors, whenever requested to do so.”

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This law does not provide expressly for the automation of the procedures used to outline the start and end of the working hours, but merely that a strict record thereof must be kept. However, many companies understood that replacing the old-fashioned attendance register with a time keeping app would have significant benefits, going beyond the alignment to the new legislative provisions.

Automation entails better time management – both for employees, and for the human resources team, eliminating errors that are almost impossible to avoid in case of old-fashioned time keeping methods.

Automation comes with cost reduction and redefining the role of the human resources department. Released from repetitive tasks, or part of them, the HR department can contribute directly to the organization’s development strategy.

6 benefits of installing an automated time and attendance solution in your company

You have a constant overview of your employees

By using time tracking software you will constantly have an overview of your employees. You can follow their working hours and how they stick to them, planning shifts more easily and constantly making sure that procedures are applied and complied with.

You can set customized working hours according to the company’s specifics

With the help of the time keeping app, you can easily follow your employees’ working hours, irrespective of whether they have a fixed schedule, or they work in shifts. The time tracking system ensures versatility, by its multiple configuration, filtering and parameter setting options, according to your company’s needs. You can define different types of working hours (regular, extra, night work, weekend hours etc.), according to your case, as well as any kind of leave (medical leave, annual leave, etc.).

Greater flexibility for employees

An online or electronic time tracking software makes it possible for the employees to fill in directly their working hours – if you want to allow this (an operator can also manage the employees’ working hours). Whoever fills in the information in the online time keeping app, they are quickly centralized without mistakes.

If you want greater flexibility for your employees, or for certain employees, they can fill in their hours remotely.

Simplified tasks for the HR department

When employees, managers and members of the HR department have access to the same system, the HR department’s effort to centralize information is much smaller, and the error risk is reduced to the minimum.

Furthermore, the department members will benefit from extra time that they can use for more complex tasks.

You can automatically calculate the hours worked by employees, which is a good starting point for paychecks

A time tracking app, known also as a time and attendance app, allows you to calculate automatically the hours worked by the employees, including shifts, night shifts, telework, or any work that differs from the regular working hours (training, work-related traveling, meetings, etc.).

With this app, you will have a clear record of the hours worked by every employee, including overtime, special leaves, annual or medical leave.

The time keeping app will automatically generate timesheets according to the work shifts defined by you in the app or in the employment contracts.

You make sure that you comply with the laws in force

Legislative changes in the field often generate delays in the regular workflow. A time tracking app will be constantly updated when legislative changes occur, therefore making the HR department’s task easier, and minimizing the risk of not observing the laws in force.

How do you choose the right time tracking app?

The more HR apps there are, the more difficult the process of choosing the version and modules suitable to your business. Please see below a few criteria that you can use in choosing the suitable time keeping app for your organization.

Pay attention to the functions offered

The functions of your chosen time keeping app must be suitable to the needs and particularities of your company. For instance, you might need an app that can integrate the company’s access card system.

Another particular case is when you want the employees’ time keeping being done differently according to their activity.
The first criterion is the degree of control that you seek to offer. High control allows the employee to keep time at the work unit, either in the office or on site, from a device belonging to the company – even remotely, from his/her work laptop or tablet; for the most flexible variant, the employee can keep the time from any mobile device, straight in the app.

Another criterion is whether time tracking is performed both at fixed and mobile points. Mobile time keeping is a great benefit of an online time keeping app – using a mobile time keeping device (the card reader), together with a mobile tablet connected to the internet, you can keep time directly in the app, with 100% control over real time keeping – which is a very good advantage for teams working on site.

The time management software provided by HR Sincron is flexible.

The app has many options – such as configuration, filtering, parameter setting, timesheet analysis, from various managerial perspectives.

Indicators such as the number of hours worked and total hours recorded by the time keeping devices or the overtime are calculated automatically. Moreover, Sincron HR Software time and attendance software will manage the leaves of any kind and all types of absence from work. If the time keeping app is integrated with an employee Portal, where the people can manage their own leave requests, then the Time Keeping tab will automatically record the leave requests generated by the employees.

Choose a module-based software

The tasks of the HR department are interdependent. Staff management will always be correlated to attendance but also to payroll.

Basically, it’s an umbrella option, combining the functions of a staff management app with a time keeping app and a payroll app, and automating the main repetitive tasks of the HR department.

Contract data is entered in the database via the Staff management module and the Time and attendance app takes over the standard necessary information (number of leave days, number of work days set out in the contract, etc.). The payroll app takes over data from the time tracking software.

A practical and important advantage of the Sincron HR Software platform is Self-Service. The app interconnects all players in the organization – employee, manager and HR expert, using this facility. Any employee can automatically generate a leave request, which is automatically sent to the manager for approval.

Once approved, the request is registered automatically in the time tracking app, and the data is taken over by the payroll app. The flow is fully automated.

Choose a software solution that is easy to implement and use

This is an important aspect: every employee will be using this app, so you need to make sure that the human resources software you choose has a user-friendly interface and is easy to use. Many of the companies offer training programs for their software solutions, enabling the employees to become familiar with the entire range of necessary functions.

Choose a trustworthy supplier, with history on the market and with a vision for the future

An HR time and attendance software requires a mix of functionalities within a legal framework – the needs can be adjusted according to the changes occurring in the field.

A stable company, with an established market history and a significant number of clients, will quickly adapt to the developments in the field or to your company’s needs, which can vary as the company develops.

The complete human resources platform Sincron HR Software was created specially to answer the digitization needs of modern companies, providing an umbrella solution which can be customized according to the specifics of every client’s activity.

Either you use the all-in-one solution, or you prefer to purchase separate modules that you consider to be a priority, the HR Sincron solution was created to adjust to all your company’s needs.

You will benefit from a user-friendly interface and a GDPR compliant approach, the software being designed to protect the safety of the personal data stored by the HR department.

© 2019 Sincron HR Technologies Inc.

HR specialists are constantly faced with problems when they try to handle a task or a request from the company’s employees. It’s part of their job, but, when it implies a lot of frustration, a lot of energy wasted on activities that don’t directly contribute to their success, the effect of the problems is amplified, and you need an efficient way of solving them.

As you know all too well, HR technologies can turn your department into a strong strategic partner within your company, eliminate useless manual work and increase the efficiency of the HR processes. As an HR director or manager, it’s your duty to use the existing tools to look for solutions to your department’s persistent problems.

Recruitment

Recruiting new talents is one of the greatest challenges that your HR department faces. Finding the right mix of abilities, personality traits and motivation is a difficult mission, even when the pool that your recruiters can choose from is large. With the increase in the number of competitors comes an increase in alternatives for your potential candidates. Attracting the right persons can become a real problem, especially for niche, specialized positions.

Regardless of whether you perform the recruiting process in-house or you use a company specializing in recruiting, it’s important to manage all the actions and data in a centralized and efficient manner. You end up having hundreds of applicants and your team must review and compare each one. If your people do this manually, they become more and more frustrated from one resume to the next and valuable energy is wasted checking off tasks that a recruiting tool would perform automatically, based on certain parameters set by you. Such a recruiting tool or HR software solution helps you accelerate the recruiting process and dedicate more time to tasks that are truly important.

Retention and Performance Management

When you say that you work in HR, a lot of people assume that you spend most of your time recruiting and hiring new staff. However, a large portion of HR activities is actually focused on retaining the existing staff, a challenge most of the time more difficult than recruiting.

The responsibility of the HR department is to protect the company’s most valuable resource and, in order to do so, all employees must be appropriately rewarded for their efforts and feel like they are part of a tight-knit team. In the absence of a clear performance management system, the HR department will start having problems satisfying the expectations and needs of employees. Automating certain HR flows through employee self-service is a good step forward in going digital and using technology in a positive way.

Payroll

In an HR department, the most challenging period of the month might be when you must perform payroll-related tasks, especially when you are a smaller company that didn’t outsource this task. Payroll is not just about processing employees’ salaries as it also involves calculations pertaining to the company’s policies, bonuses, commissions and deductions. HR has a challenging mission and the risk of error is high.

The simplest solution in order to eliminate this problem is to automate the payroll process. The accuracy of a payroll software integrated with your time and attendance tool can protect you from problems generated by human error and employees dissatisfied by miscalculations.  Finally, making corrections after the process is over is much easier and hassle-free.

Solving employee requests through Employee Self-Service

The HR department is the bridge between the company and the human resource so that work-related requests first go through your team. You and your co-workers within the department are already busy with various tasks and it’s not at all easy or pleasant to be frequently interrupted by employees that are only requesting information that they are entitled to. Receiving such requests is normal. What’s not normal is wasting a lot of time gathering the data necessary to respond to these requests.

The best long-term solution in order to handle these perfectly entitled requests is to have all the information in one place. When all the data is centralized, your employees can enjoy a self-service type tool, that offers answers to a lot of the questions that they would have interrupted you or one of your co-workers with. Among these for instance: access to their employment contract, performance assessments and goals, days off, pay-slips etc.

Employee training and legal compliance

Training is a key element of your employees’ development and it’s important for their professional satisfaction, as well as for maintaining high standards for your company’s activity. There are roles within your company that require the existence of special certificates or training, regulated by law. Even if each employee is responsible for keeping track of them, when your business is based on certified skills, you don’t want to run late when it comes to planning, executing and obtaining such certificates.

A tool dedicated to managing training courses (or certifications) and ensuring compliance with internal regulations and the law will make the job of your HR department much easier and will facilitate the tracking of each type of course and certificate. It will also ensure that notifications and reminders are sent so the concerned departments will be able to track course schedules and their associated costs.

The categories presented above represent only some of the challenges that your HR department are faced with. The solution to solving them quickly is the same in most cases: ensuring access to relevant data by digitizing the data and automating your HR processes. Achieve this by choosing and implementing an HR software adapted to your company’s needs. Your company might need a mix of tools in order to efficiently solve the specific problems that the HR department is faced with.

Discover the different features of an HR platform that can ensure the efficiency of your HR department. Details here.

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For every vacant position that you post you receive hundreds of resumes, but how many of them are submitted by qualified candidates? Any recruiter knows these words to be true: ”I don’t need more candidates, I need more competent candidates.”

Finding valuable candidates is a challenge for a lot of companies and part of the problem is how your recruiting process is carried out. There are definitely qualified candidates out there, so you can’t put all the blame on the labour market. Therefore, it’s time to find which of the elements below is lacking from your company’s efforts of attracting the best candidates for the available positions.

Every recruiter is also a salesman

We can safely say that staff recruitment is a type of sales – you try to reach out to the right people and convince them that they will find the best employment opportunity with your company. That’s why any recruiter needs to put their salesman hat on and:

Understand the importance of empathy in the process – a successful recruiter listens to candidates before speaking, in order to determine what they are lacking in their current job and whether the vacant position within the company would be a good fit. It’s not always about the money – the benefits, the balance between work and personal life, or a new start could be the main motivator.

Use the right language – a knowledge of psychology is very helpful in establishing a strong connection with the candidates from the get-go. Use an authentic language instead of email templates or copy-paste job descriptions so candidates understand that they are communicating with a friendly person that wants to help them find an excellent job.

Visualize the hiring process like a funnel – more and more companies are monitoring and adapting the recruiting and hiring process as they go, in order to adjust the actions in the funnel that are not efficient. Their focus is to determine the actions that attract qualified candidates and turn them into the right employees with the right job.

The employer brand needs to be consolidated

When the number of recruiting processes becomes overwhelming for the recruiters, you run the risk of their job only entailing finding candidates to fill vacant positions, which would be very harmful to the company. That kind of pressure to achieve objectives at any cost should be replaced with a common effort of communicating the fact that you are an excellent employer.

Think about a few of the successful companies around the world or from your country and you will notice that it’s not a coincidence that they have the strongest organizational cultures and appealing work environments.

Try to see the employer brand through the candidates’ eyes. All employees want their contribution to the company’s success to be recognized. Be sure to create the image of a work environment where exemplary work is recognized and rewarded through bonuses, possibilities of advancement or of working within the organization on an international level, gifts, trips, flexible working hours and other health-related benefits.

Create a strong online presence on the media where you know you can find the valuable candidates that you are looking for and emphasize the benefits of being part of your company through blog articles, video content, original team pages, etc. It’s essential to emphasize that a job is not all about the work, but also about building harmonious friendship relationships in the workplace, about recognizing the value of each member of the team.

Create descriptions that attract quality candidates

The job description can be the first form of communication that many of the candidates receive from your company, so they form their first impressions before setting up a telephone conversation or a meeting.

In order to hold the attention of valuable candidates that you want to attract as part of the process, start with an attractive job title and continue transforming each detail of the description into a small career story that eliminates any trace of passivity.

For example, an important section of the job description is the one where you specify the few performance objectives that you expect from the future employee. This is where you have the occasion to draw attention to the performance that a candidate can reach by becoming a part of your company, instead of providing a banal list of the qualities that the candidate should possess.

Improve communication between managers and recruiters

Candidate quality is related to previous experience or the potential to learn how to meet the job requirements so when such requirements are not clearly formulated, this generates problems.  People are often hired without anyone explicitly telling them what is expected from them. The reason why companies often have to deal with this scenario is a faulty communication between recruiters and managers approving the hiring.

That’s why it’s important for your company’s managers and recruiters to collaborate in order to establish the features of ideal candidates. This way, you can also eliminate unclarities between the parties involved in the recruiting process and the costs generated by the low quality of the candidates going through the process.

Simplify the recruiting process

Candidates’ experience is essential. But what do you do when the job application process works against you? If a person needs to go through a complicated, time-wasting process in order to apply for your job, many of the talents that you hope to attract will be extremely reticent when it comes to working with you. As we were saying, each element of the pre-hiring experience creates an image of how things are going to go as an employee.

Nowadays, top candidates don’t have time to fill in complicated questionnaires. On the other hand, they are open to a video conference that saves them the trip to your company’s office or the need to take a few hours off from their current job to have that discussion with the recruiter.

When you’ve identified candidates that stand out, make sure that their interest in working for your company is growing and apply more rigorous assessment methods, such as assessing their competencies through a small test or face to face interviews with the managers.

Once you’ve developed an efficient process of attracting valuable candidates, you should not forget about post-hiring performance assessments that can help you see whether you’ve really found the perfect recipe. An HR software application is very helpful in this effort, due to the complexity of the data that it stores and the reports that you can create using it.

Finally, by using such a tool, you can automate your recruiting process, making it much easier to manage candidate pools or access their history, manage approval flows and recruiting sources or communicate using various online channels. Discover details here.

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Are you looking for the most talented candidates? In order to achieve this objective, smart companies start to develop relationships with candidates showing potential long before they need them. An efficient way of ensuring the success of your recruiting campaign is to use dedicated software tools and apply measures such as those presented below.

Take advantage of employee networking

When you are looking for a talented candidate for a new position opened in the company, don’t hesitate to spread the news amongst your employees so that each of them looks for and recommends people with superior potential. Encourage your employees to also share the vacant position on their personal Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter accounts, etc., wherever you think or know that your potential candidates can be found. It would be a shame not to take advantage of the networks that your employees have formed both online and offline – during conferences and events, so recommend that they keep the business cards that they receive.

Find out where qualified candidates can be found

Researching the target audience helps you increase the odds of reaching the quality employees that you want to attract during a recruiting campaign. Identify the information sources that they use and what they need to read, create a list of niche publications, of groups that they have joined on social media, forums that they are active on. All the information that you collect can be used to develop creative messages, that will ensure that your recruiting ad attracts the right persons.

Build your employer brand and become a sought-after employer

Branding is not just about your products, it’s also a very important part of your recruiting strategy. Build a brand as an authentic, positive employer, with elements of identity that can be found both on the career page and on other channels, as well as in the direct interaction with your employees. Your brand needs to be reflected in the description of the job for which you want to attract qualified candidates. Boring ads that are full of clichés will be ignored by the most valuable candidates. You need to prove to them that joining your team is the best decision that a candidate can make. Think of all the reasons that could convince a candidate to sign on with you and communicate the benefits that working for your company entails as clearly as possible.

Use more recruiting channels

You probably already have 3-4 recruiting channels that you use constantly, the most important of which is your career page. But don’t just stick to the same channels, especially when there are so many online promotion options that help you raise awareness of the vacant positions and that will attract new candidates. There are tools that help you distribute vacant positions within your company from the dedicated HR software directly to your social media accounts. The advantage that such a tool offers is that you can automate the tracking process and message posting in a user-friendly way.

Create a first experience that is as pleasant as possible

This is about how the candidate applies for your company’s vacant position. Since the candidate’s experience starts when he applies, you need to build trust from the get-go. If the process is too complicated, repetitive and time-consuming, you risk losing the best candidates. Nowadays, most candidates search for jobs on mobile devices, so it’s important to have an HR software solution that provides the mobile-friendly tools that are necessary to add the most appropriate persons to your database.

Eliminate manual applicant filtering

Manually filtering each application is a task that consumes a lot of resources – time, as well as money – uselessly. Considering the requirements that potential candidates need to fulfil, you end up eliminating more than half of the applicants through filtering. This is a process that should be automated in order to help you quickly filter applications so that you can allocate more time to recruiting the best candidates for the job.

Establish a connection with the best candidates

Regardless of whether you hire them or not, it’s important to establish a connection with the candidates who showed the most potential. You’ll create a good impression and, even if they’re not a good fit for the current position, they’ll be on a list of potential candidates for future jobs. Even if you refuse candidates, don’t refuse them through a cold, standard e-mail. Allocate time to explain why they did not go through to the following stages and inform them that you will contact them when new positions are available.

There’s an infinity of recruiting ideas out there, just like there’s an infinity of challenges that you’ll face in the course of this important process. It’s very important to minimize the resources dedicated to the manual performance of tasks in the course of the recruiting process and to use automated solutions to increase the time invested by your HR specialists in tasks that require abilities that cannot be replaced by any software.

Discover how you can automate your recruiting processes. Details here.

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Risk Management: Youth Exploitation and Human Trafficking Webinar for Social Service agencies

Human trafficking, a great shame to humanity, is the third most rapidly growing criminal industry involving many parts of the world. This forced exploitation of humans includes slavery, child labour and sexual exploitation. According to Psychology Today, 200,000 women are forcibly involved in sex trafficking in the United States. In Atlanta, CNN found people involved in this criminal business earning around $35,000 a week – more than any criminal human activity. 

Why aren’t we identifying human trafficking or youth exploitation with greater success? What are the risk factors for the client groups we serve? Do policy and procedure manuals adequately equip team members to assess internal and external risks? Would staff know what to do if they suspect trafficking? Is human trafficking addressed in safety plans, screenings, treatment plans, discharge summaries, etc.? 

Joy Kelleher will unpack these questions and more as she shares critical insight on how to address human trafficking in the workplace through compliance and risk management. 

Topic: Risk Management: Youth Exploitation and Human Trafficking Webinar for Social Service agencies featuring Joy Kelleher (Carter Brown USA) 

Host:Sincron HR Software – The premier HR platform for Social Service, non-profit and education organizations in North America. To learn more about how Sincron HR Software is tailoring its platform to help the social service industry please click HERE. 

Audience: HR professionals and supervisory staff in the Social Services sector 

Date: Thursday, January 24, 2019 

Time: 10 am PST | 11 am MST | 12 pm CST | 1 pm EST 

Length: 60 minutes 

Cost: FREE 

Register Here

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