Did you know in 2021, as per the estimations 26.7% of employees will be working from remote locations and 22% of the American workforce is estimated to be working from home by 2025?
In 2020, the world has changed drastically. The global outbreak of COVID-19 not only affected the health, but also the economies, employment, businesses, industrial markets, and more. The spread brought radical changes to our lives and given a push to work from home, which was already known but less adopted.
Though it was the need of the situation, however, the convenience and advantages of work from home have redefined the way business was conducted and the jobs were carried out.
Why Remote Work is in Trend?
After the pandemic, work from home became significantly important as a safety precaution. Almost the entire world is hard-hit by the COVID-19, and that is the biggest reason that many companies and employees get a chance to operate from home. A safe environment became the first and foremost need of every individual, and to balance the work for livelihood simultaneously, remote work has become the never-fading trend.
Is managing a remote team a headache in 2021?
Do you think remote work is as easy as ABC? Well, like every coin has two sides. The idea of remote working too has some pros and cons. On one hand, employees perform their jobs from a distant location, on the other hand how the employees have been performing is always a concern. To let things, happen in accordance with organizational goals, there is a need for robust Employee Management Software.
The What, Why, and How of Employee Management Software
Remote work in organizations is the new normal and has been widely in popularity. To make the idea of work from home peace of mind, there comes into play the automated employee management tools featuring advanced employee tracking & monitoring. From employee acquisition to retaining, the software does everything.
The all-in-one tools are designed to provide a complete line of services to small, medium, and large organizations to evaluate the capability of the on-premises and remote workforce. Building a productive work culture is the core objective of employee managing and tracking systems. Streamlining the employee lifecycle is crucial for any organizational success.
Is firing employees for not being the right fit is the only solution? Of course, not Undeniably, employees are humans and no one can change the fact that not every day or situation is the same. To help the employees deliver the best of their capability, it is necessary to encourage, engage, and motivate them.
The employee management software as the name suggests is an unbiased tool that assists managers & HRs to hire the best candidate, tracks every employee’s work performance, monitors behavior, generates reports, and helps employees stay up to date on their productivity levels.
In managing remote staff, strategies alone won’t work. Industries of all types and sizes must benefit from employee managing software.
Key Functionalities of Employee Management Software
- Talent Acquisition Management
Hiring the perfect fit with the use of the software is hassle-free. It allows easy identification of candidates with the desired skill set, acquiring, assessing, and finally streamlines getting them on board. Regardless of size, all business verticals take advantage of the software to take the pain out of the candidate hiring process and it reduces the administrative job. Talent acquisition is one of the HR practices that involve analyzing the needs of the organization, preparing & approving job requisition, determining the criteria for selection, finding candidates and engaging, selection procedure, onboarding, and evaluation.
- Online Training Scheduling
The remote employee managing software provides a platform for managers and teams to schedule training courses. The online tool provides control to the managers to appoint trainers, arrange training, create training groups, and more. The benefit of scheduling online and physical training is to know the strengths and weaknesses of employees and help them overcome them. The software supports employees across all the stages and ensures to bring each employee the best learning experience. It further involves easy sharing of documents and training material. The training can be scheduled without a time zone difference.
- Automatic Attendance Tracking
In addition to employees’ productivity management, the employee management software tracks the attendance as well. The attendance tracking provides the real-time visibility of employee’s working days and hours. The insights into the data help managers about the presence and non-presence of employees. The auto attendance tracking system in the employee managing tool generates reports with every minute record of clock-ins and outs. Along with tracing the availability of the employees, the software tracks work logs, authorized/unauthorized activities as well. Tracking the location and attendance of remote employees is quick and transparent.
- Customize Leave Types
There are different types of leaves and which employee has taken sick or casual leave needs to be differentiated. Therefore, the employee management software allows the HRs to customize the leave types. Each employee while applying for leave can select the desired type. The leave type selection eliminates the confusion of managing the leave records of each individual. Also, the software helps you create specific leave types like compensatory offs, bonus leaves, and more. The customizable software easily gets fits different organizational needs. With the automated tool in place, configuring leave policies and customizing types is stress-free.
- Advanced Approval System
The approval systems play a vital role in managing remote teams. To get time, expense, and leave requests to approve, there should be approvers. The automatic employee management software is integrated with the approval management system. The managers/HRs can create sequential & non-sequential approval chains to share accurate feedback. In custom approval chains, the user can create hierarchies to streamline the process and workflows. The automatic approvals via a robust system remove the bottlenecks and results in bias-free approvals or rejections. Moreover, the user can get audit logs of approvals and rejections.
- Privilege Settings
Assigning user access privileges in employee management software is another great advantage. The managers can set the role-based access controls to each employee to prevent data breaches. The privileges are only granted to selected users. The predefined roles enable the users to access only those features and functionalities that they have the right to. This helps to prevent the excessive and unapproved use of the software. The managers can assign a specific role to different employees and keep records to avoid conflicts. With role assigning, the security of the business data is also improved.
- Multi-Level Reviews & Appraisals
For better evaluation of employee performance, the employee management software integrates a performance review system. The multi-level reviewer chain can be set to create sequential and non-sequential review structures. To assess the performances, the employee’s day, weekly, monthly, and annual productivity levels are measured by multiple reviewers in the system. Further, the appraisals are managed by the HR departments and managers based on each employee’s overall contribution to each task/project. The online and accurate reviews, plus appraisals benefit both the organization and employees.
- Online/Offline Time Tracking
Automated time tracking is one of the important functionalities of employee management software. Along with online tracking, the software surprises businesses with offline time & productivity tracking. The offline mode tracking involves tracking employee’s remote desktops and take snaps of multiple screens opened and activities in stealth mode. The software tracks employees every moment on their systems and measures the amount of work done during working hours. To track the data no internet connection is required. The user just needs to login into the account once, then the tracker will work automatically. The data in the system automatically gets synced at the times the internet connection is set up.
- Real-Time Productivity Reporting
A real-time view of each employee’s work habits is necessary to understand what and why of their performance. In the competitive business world, employee’s credibility can’t be judged based on random guesses and measurements without a proper system. The employee management tool not only tracks every employee’s work from home activities but also provides project and user-specific reports. The efficiency calculations are automatically get translated into detailed reports. The online employee managing systems also provide Gantt chart functionality in which the data is presented in the form of graphics.
Final Thoughts
There is no denying the fact that ‘remote work’ or ‘work from home’ is the new trending buzzwords. The fast-paced industries with both on-site and remote teams need to choose reliable employee management software to keep employees under careful observation. The software helps in setting & tracking the working hours, reduces commuting stress, and more.
Many believe work from home involves more distraction and disturbances. That is why to keep employees on track and stay productive, automated business management systems are introduced with an ability to keep a bird’s eye on unlimited employees at a time.
Further, flexible working promotes a lower turnover rate and keeps employees connected to the organizations for a lifetime.
Though the world is recovering from the Coronavirus, many organizations have decided to let employees work from home permanently.
Annie is an expert technical content writer and a worldwide leader in Business Management Automation. She has extensive knowledge of writing high-quality content for varied websites and business verticals. She has been a writer for the last 10 years and possesses exceptional writing skills be it writing Blogs, Press Releases, Articles, Ad Copies, and more. Her writing has helped many businesses stand apart and reach a great audience worldwide.