Category Archives: featured

Effective Ways to Manage Employees in a Remote Environment: The New HR Department

In these unprecedented times, employers are forced to make difficult decisions around how much of their team they can sustainably keep on. Unfortunately, when teams working remotely, the first department that seems easiest to trim down is the HR department. Once the HR department is eliminated or whittled down, it leaves employers without the tools or resources they need to navigate the pandemic and vulnerable to litigation. Before eliminating your HR department outright, we’d advise seeking out creative solutions that can help keep the functional use of your HR team while keeping within your budget.

The Danger

Google can not replace a trained HR professional. Which of us hasn’t quickly typed an HR or payroll question into Google and found the answer that we needed? But be warned, Google is good until it’s not. Letting Google be your HR department can easily lead to large claims and getting sued by employees.

The employee/employer environment is as litigious as ever, making the wrong moves can come back to bite you. Add a pandemic with constantly updating rules and regulations to the mix and you have a real recipe for disaster. In our future post-COVID world, many employees who have exhausted unemployment may look for ways to get more compensation which could lead them to file claims against former employers.

How to Avoid

Don’t fire your HR team. It sounds simple but many business owners are trying to save every dollar they can and when making difficult cuts, HR can seem non-essential in the short run. This couldn’t be further from the truth, we believe it may be the most vital time in the history of your business to have a strong HR person(s). With so many new regulations, you need a trained HR professional to help you navigate the complex policies. Trust us, it will ultimately save you a ton of time, frustration, and money.

The Opportunity

Right now is the time to make sure you have all your ducks in a row by completing an HR audit. Even if you still have a full-time HR person, a CorpStrat HR representative can help you take a good look at your HR infrastructure, discover any vulnerabilities, and find ways to improve on it. In times of crisis, it’s important to find creative, sustainable solutions. For example, if you can’t afford to keep on your entire HR department during the pandemic, there may be a way to combine fewer HR team members with an HR outsourcing firm to maximize efficiency and stay financially viable.

CorpStrat Tip:

Hire a good labor law attorney—it’s worth the added expense. A good labor law attorney can help employers avoid a lot of headaches. Many business owners hire HR consulting firms and assume that they are compliant but not all HR consulting firms are created equal. Without a labor law attorney, you could unknowingly be overlooking important legal documents and leave yourself open to litigation. This is why we’ve included unlimited phone and email support with a labor law attorney in our CorpStrat HR Plus and Pro services.

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Interested in a full HR audit? Schedule a call with a CorpStrat agent: marketing@www.corpstrat.com

Effective Ways to Manage Employees in a Remote Environment: Workforce Automation

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There’s no doubt about it: our workplaces are going to look very different post-COVID-19. This might mean keeping some of your team remote indefinitely, changing the layout of your offices, or switching up your workflow to fall in line with health and safety guidelines. We can’t force things back to how they were but we can focus on setting you and your employees up for success in the “new normal”.

A few weeks ago, we gave a webinar on “Effective Ways to Manage Employees in a Remote Environment” in which we shared how companies can streamline their HR processes and maintain company culture. We’re excited to bring you the webinar in four parts: Workforce Automation, the New HR, Benefit Package and Company Culture.

Part 1: Workforce Automation

According to Capterra, 91% of professionals who work at small and medium sized businesses say workforce automation software is crucial, but almost 58% of them are not using it. That’s a huge gap. In our post-COVID-19 new normal, we believe more teams will adopt work from home policies which will make automated HR management software even more necessary.

The Danger

What’s the danger of not having a workforce automation system? Companies have done it the old-fashioned way with paper for over 50 years. What’s the fuss?

The reality is too many things can fall through the cracks. The fact is, relying on paper processes when you have a remote team becomes inefficient very quickly. A simple paid time off (PTO) request can mean piles of paperwork, redundant requests, and scrambling to calculate accrued balances—all leaving opportunities for potential oversight. With the technology available today, it’s a no-brainer to make the switch to an automated workforce system. With an automated system in place, your employees can submit a paperless request via their self-service portal, their time gets deducted, and it automatically updates in payroll.

How to Avoid

Help your employees help you by giving them self-service logins that allow them to access and edit their information. There’s a dual-sided benefit: if employees are able to make edits to their W4, change their address, view and sign items, submit PTO requests, and enroll in benefit plans, then they’ll feel empowered AND it will relieve the stress of managing manual processes.

The Opportunity

In addition to making things run more smoothly, there’s also an opportunity to eliminate potential lawsuits. Instead of worrying that employees can cite “you never told me”, you can keep track of everything in one database. This ensures nothing gets lost in the mix. Integrating employee lifecycle events into one system means that events are readily accessible at all times.

CorpStrat Tip:

We’ve seen many employers embrace workforce automation, but only in part. The market is filled with systems that offer piecemeal solutions: some just do new employee on-boarding, others only do benefit enrollment. Adopting separate services that don’t work together creates more manual work for your team.

We think employers should focus on making sure to streamline all employee lifecycle events into a single database that connects payroll and employee benefits into one system and has a powerful mobile application.

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Interested in streamlining your workforce automation? Schedule a call with a CorpStrat agent: info@www.corpstrat.com

Solved: Tracking Time & Attendance in a Remote World

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Timesheets, punch cards, time clocks… it’s one of the very fundamental HR monitoring duties— confirming that employees work the hours for which they are paid. In a COVID-19 affected world where teams are still working remotely, HR departments have been met with the unique challenge of accurately tracking employees’ hours. This is where our Workforce Automation system can make a huge difference. Having an automated system with a powerful mobile app allows your company to easily track your employee’s hours, no matter where they are. Plus, it makes it convenient and accessible for your employees.

Read on for ways utilizing our technology to automate Time & Attendance can save you time & money.

Improved Timekeeping/Absence Management

A fully-integrated HR attendance module can simply make timekeeping better. Timesheets are more accurate and reliable. Accidental errors are avoided, thus having the time and effort needed for corrections. This also ensures that paychecks are accurate, ensuring your company isn’t overpaying for hours not worked, and vice versa.

Scheduling is a Breeze

Nothing’s more frustrating than unintentionally overstaffing or having to fill a shift when there’s a last minute absence. Tracking in real time makes it easier for your company to forecast overstaffing and overtime, communicate quickly and efficiently with staff members, and minimizes the financial impacts of absenteeism.

Built-in Accountability

Complicated issues can be reduced to minor levels, such as time theft and “buddy punching” (one employee clocking in on behalf of another). In turn, payroll errors and the cost associated with correcting them are reduced.

Compliance

With an automated system, paid time off calculations are much less subject to human error and compliance is virtually assured. Plus, you’re able to show your work—companies can easily pull reports that accurately show employee work records and PTO requests.

Data, Data & More Data

As with all HR software, once the data is in the system, it can be dissected in numerous ways. The first advantage of doing this with HR system attendance is that managers receive real-time alerts. Better-informed decisions on workforce deployment can be made on the fly. Beyond basic scheduling benefits, data can be used in more strategic ways with analytics and reporting, giving manager’s insights into trends and patterns.

Remote Portals

We live in a time when physically “punching the clock” simply isn’t a relevant solution. For many organizations, online and mobile access to time and attendance is increasingly essential. This makes it easier for organizations to log on from remote workspaces to punch-in, punch-out, and see basic time and attendance data.

Increased Efficiency

Modern HR system attendance software goes far beyond the old school ways. With integrated data and analytics plus employee and manager self-service, this type of system can greatly enhance the day-to-day efficiency of your organization. This frees you up to focus on the important work of growing your business.

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To learn more about CorpStrat’s time and labor management solution, please contact us: marketing@www.corpstrat.com

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Learn more about Workforce Automation

Are you looking for a solution that can help your employees make better decisions, conduct faster enrollments, and make changes on the fly with 24/7 access? If your answer is ‘yes’, then it’s time to go paperless. Learn more

Wrap Them up – Before Your Competition Does

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Tom Peters, a best-selling author of many books on management, stated the following.
“Some employees are worth a lot of money…. some employees are worth a hell of a lot more money.”

Don’t think for a minute that your competitors don’t know who your best people are; they do. They also, by default, know who the “not so good” employees are. Every business remains vulnerable.

What happens in a thriving economy is the best employees to become highly sought after. They often pay no attention to how the economy is doing in general, but in a great economy, they know that they will have more opportunities. These are opportunities they do not have to seek out. What does it take to keep the best? It takes recognition, rewards, strategy, and commitment.

It’s an Employee Market

2019 marks the lowest unemployment rate in U.S. history. Those employed are valuable assets: those unemployed may be functionally unemployable – or simply not skilled and/or not trainable for various reasons. You have to retain to be successful.

Don’t Wait!

As a leader, you must be proactive because if you hesitate, or delay implementing or improving the size, shape and value of any “Golden Handcuffs” you are offering, your better employees won’t wait while you figure it out.

Golden Handcuffs

“Take away my factories, my plants; take away my railroads, my ships, my transportation; take away my money; strip me of all of these but leave me my men and in two or three years, I will have them all again.” — Andrew Carnegie

A ‘Golden Handcuff’ is a way to describe a specific plan that addresses an annually funded tool to retain and reward a Key (or class of) Key employee(s) – but restricts their access over time.

In general, a Golden Handcuff is a selective executive accumulation plan offers customized to selected key corporate executives…a benefit over and above those provided to all employees by a qualified retirement plan or any other employee benefit plan.

This is typically a non-qualified arrangement (non-ERISA) between a corporation/entity and selected set of key executives in which the entity promises to pay the executive a specified benefit at a specified period of time, generally annually, with a restriction on the employees’ access to or vested interest in the accumulated asset. Most plans also have a survivor benefit to the executive’s family.

Get to work retaining and rewarding your top performers – before your competition does.

Hire to Fit Your Company Culture

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The Value of Culture

Poor hiring decisions can be extremely costly for your company, in terms of business interruption, wasted recruiting and training resources, lower employee morale and more.

You may realize that an individual is not a good fit, or a new employee may choose to leave if the job doesn’t match his or her expectations. In both circumstances, many of these separations are due to the fact that the hired individuals did not fit the company culture and therefore lacked productivity, creativity and/or morale.

Culture is the unifying element that holds everyone in an organization together. Unlike an established mission statement, culture encompasses the written and unwritten behavioral norms and expectations of those within the company. Culture can set one company apart from others, and it can include the value of work-life balance issues, the way the company is organized, the extent to which leaders follow through on mission statements and many other factors.

Companies looking to hire individuals that fit with their culture must first identify and understand it. For instance, if your organization recognizes personal achievements and awards individuals for a job well done, then a team-oriented employee might not be the best fit. But if your company values the total team performance versus the contributions of just one individual, then someone looking for personal recognition might not be as satisfied working for your company.

Ultimately, if the fit is not right between the company and individual, then both will lose interest and the relationship will probably fail.

Importance of a Good Fit

Finding employees who are a good fit for the organization produces the following benefits:

Improved employee retention.
Enhanced employee performance because most individuals at the company share similar values and aspirations. When people share a common purpose and similar attitude, it can encourage people to perform better.
Improved alignment from the top to the bottom and employees may view leadership more positively.

Screening to Find a Cultural Fit

Developing a screening process that integrates prescreening based on your company culture can be accomplished with the following steps.

Ask employees at various levels of the organization how they see your company culture. Then, identify the similarities that arise among individuals—motivations, values, core competencies, etc.
When you can identify what makes the organization successful, you will know what to look for during the selection process. This technique is also helpful in avoiding hiring discrimination allegations because you have defined the key characteristics of your culture, which help you logically and fairly justify your hiring decisions.
Create a brand to describe your organization to potential employees.
Depict your culture accurately so that candidates can filter themselves in or out based on how you describe the company. If they do not see themselves fitting into your culture, they may not even apply.
To make branding more real for prospective employees, provide messages from executives, testimonials from various employees, virtual job tours, etc.
Have candidates complete an online assessment as part of the recruitment process to screen potential candidates based on their qualifications, personality, and other factors. Use properly validated assessments that meet legal and professional standards.
Ask questions about traits that you cannot or do not want to train someone how to do (being self-motivated, possessing integrity, etc.). Questions should determine if candidates have values and competencies that match with the company’s culture.
Ask behavior-related questions and then rate open-ended answers on a scale.
Ask for examples of situations in which candidates faced dilemmas or problems and successfully overcame them.
Role-play during the interview process to observe candidates in action. Or, allow them to try out the position for a day to see if it seems like a good fit for them (and for you).
This step would come after all interviewing is complete, and reference checks and resume verification checks are also done.
Know the laws applicable to hiring.
Create metrics for measuring cultural fit by determining cost-per-hire, time-to-fill, and quality-of-hire data.
Make sure management is trained on how to properly interview for behaviors.
Maintain accurate records of all your hiring decisions. During an audit or discrimination claim, you will need to produce valid justification for your decisions.
Human resources should stay on top of monitoring, learning and studying the culture of the organization, and then design policies that align with the culture. HR should constantly be asking if the organization is truly what it claims, if it needs to modify the culture to be more competitive and if it is remaining compliant with all hiring laws.