How To Create A Lasting Onboarding Experience For Your New Hires ?

 

Traditional onboarding is often a stereotyped experience for majority of new hires because it is focused on extremely dry and monotonous processes, like filling a lot of forms, attending company induction, going through heap of new rules and regulations, etc. Almost every organization follows a similar process forcing new employees to experience ‘not so good’ first few days.

Surveys reveal that organizations who don’t concentrate or put efforts in making this process better, are more likely to face lower retention rates and significantly declined employee motivation and satisfaction.

Follow these simple yet effective measures to make the process a long-lasting memory for your new hires.

Don’t leave everything for the joining day

Make sure that all the necessary paperwork (which doesn’t include employee’s presence) is completed before the employee’s joining date. In this way, his/her first few days won’t be occupied in just filling out forms. Welcome your new employee with a welcome kit having all information regarding his/her role, company policies, common rules and regulations, etc. Also make sure that the team he/she is joining already recognizes the new hire by his/her name. This will give them a sense of friendliness and will help them in gelling with the team more easily.

Embrace technology to collect & reuse new employee information

No one likes to complete same forms again and again or provide the same information over and over again in different forms. Same goes with your employees; they too feel irritated when you give them a bunch of forms to fill and every form starts with, Name, Address, etc. Leveraging the power of technology and using online forms requiring candidates to fill information only once as well as automated workflows will help you remove the hassles and headaches caused during the on-boarding process. It will help employers / HR managers pull out some general information about the new employee and spare them the horror of filling never-ending forms right on their first day of joining.

Assign a mentor for work-related help and a colleague to guide them around

When a new employee joins an organization, he/she is not in any way different than a school child on his/her first day at a new school. Everything needs to be figured out, like where’s the classroom or the cafeteria, etc. Your new hire is also in the same confused state. Thus, assign one of his teammates to show him around and get introduced to every concerned person. Also, make sure you have a mentor assigned for him to help him get introduced to his work and how things are getting done at his new workplace.

Use gamification to make his/her first few days full of fun

Several organizations have started opting for gamification strategy to make their new hires comfortable as soon as they can. This includes several games that are played in the organization or within the team so that new employee can easily bond with the company culture and his/her colleagues. This is a far better way to have your new employees get comfortable, than providing them with monotonous presentations, lectures, reading materials, etc.

Taken as a whole, these simple tips will help your new hires connect with the organization’s culture more quickly and easily. Moreover, they will have a lasting experience with extensive satisfaction and motivation to work for the organization in a much better way.

Let The Superheroes In Your Talent Pool To Take Over!

After spending some time in corporate environment, everyone realizes that surviving and winning is not a child’s play. The nature of challenges and issues that crop up on daily basis, can only be dealt effectively if the organization’s talent is full of superheroes who can turn impossible into possible! The article discusses the charismatic superheroes and what lessons can be taken from them.


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Coupling Today’s HR With New Age Corporate Strategies

Those days are long gone when HR function could be handled by a single person. The typical “HR Lady” is being replaced by a complete staff of professionals having diverse roles & responsibilities. Today’s HR is seen as the catch for handling all aspects of employee relations and organizational culture. Furthermore, their role continues to evolve on a daily basis in the current employment environment.

Every business has its own strategies and visions in place but they somehow lag behind in bringing all things together at the same place and pace. Aligning organizational goals includes connecting to all employees individually, delivering to customers, operational excellence processes, measuring outcomes and rewarding the worthy personnel. This job requires certain talent that only an HR could possess and implement in a stipulated manner. 

“HRs are the makers and keepers of an organization’s culture; and they are the one who run the show”.

Here are some excerpts from what the industry experts believe HR teams must have:

• The HR team should contain people who possess business knowledge so that they can take decisions according to the business perspective. The team will then be more comfortable in talking about strategies and will understand the business operations in a better way.
• HR pros should be analytical and technology-driven so that they can suggest new ways of handling the workforce.
• HR has the responsibility of an overall organizational development thus they should be well-versed with the organizational capabilities, its design and strategic talent. 

Challenges Faced By The HR Role In Growing Markets

Unlike in mature markets like that of US and Europe, HR role faces many sorts of challenges with respect to growing markets (as in Asian countries). Mature markets are focused more on upgrading themselves to a higher level of technology or automating new processes. Whereas in other markets, in spite of having organizations that are growing really fast; there is a lack of required infrastructure, the consistent processes and the teams. Some of the challenges encountered by growing markets are mentioned below - 

• Availability of talent in the local marketplace
• Need to pay higher salaries as the price of scarce resources is way higher
• Binding talent with the organization
• Managing and measuring in-job performance
• Complex employment law provisions
• Difficulty in justifying technological investment

Other facts like facilities and infrastructure that definitely impacts overall productivity. Using smart analytics tools can help HR pros to overcome these challenges. It can help in identifying issues according to a specific country and develop customized approaches to resolve them. With the adoption of a Workforce Management System, HR pros can create a high performing workforce; keeping in mind the intangible things that form an organization – employee engagement and workplace culture.

Managing Employee Life Cycle Through The Finest HRMS Solution - TeamWise

 A lot of balls juggle at the same time when it comes to HR activities or managing your organizational workforce. To keep your business’s head above water, HR need to create transparency in communication, handle remunerations, manage time and labor for optimized performance, administer company benefits and track employee skills to predict and manage future needs.


Current era marks as the new additions in HRMS, unlike before when it was meant only for hiring and payment. Thus to drive your business strategy in the right direction, utilizing a great HRMS solution is a must. Generally, HR time is mostly taken up by administrative works, leaving minimum time for analysis, planning and improvement. TeamWise is all set to balance this dissimilarity and will equip your HR Team to work smart.


“Take care of your employees and leave all HR activities to TeamWise – Your One Stop Solution for effective Human Resource Management.”

With TeamWise You Can:

Perform hassle-free recruitment.

Automate and accelerate all on-boarding activities to ensure a perfect start for an employee to the corporate journey. Our recruitment solution helps in ensuring complete transparency and control throughout the hiring process right from initiating resource request to joining of the employee. This not only quickens up the administrative processes, but at the same time makes the candidate evaluation process easier.


Analyze individual’s performance.
It enables you to identify and analyze employee performance through reports based on monthly performance tracking defining their contribution towards the organization. This further helps the employers to take crucial decisions best suited for fulfilling organizational goals and make future arrangements.


Track employee in-out timings.

A fully automated system for recording and managing employee attendance which can be seamlessly integrated with any time tracking devices such as Card swipe systems, Biometric readings, etc. The employee in and out timings are properly monitored to analyze the employee productive hours which eventually helps in generating the remunerations according to that.


Manage leaves and leave requests.

Our leave management system helps employees send leave requests and get approvals without any hassles. On the other hand, employers are provided with the ability of tracking the applied leaves and get the necessary reports as and when required.


Have a smart compensation management system.

With the payroll system provided in our HRMS, it is extremely easy to manage employee payrolls and other financial accounts without any errors. The hectic job of calculating various taxes can be easily performed in a single click with utmost accuracy and 100% precision keeping the attendance calculation in account.

 Identify and retain top talent

This system provides you the enterprise-wide visibility of your workforce so you can easily identify successive employees for key future positions. It simplifies this complex task by reviewing monthly performances and ensures success and growth of your organization. The top talent identified, then can be retained by providing training for their overall development thereby nurturing company’s benefits.


Handle employee grievances.

The grievance handling system makes sure that employees’ problems are handled before they are escalated and employees develop a sense of trust in the organization and its policies. The process includes assigning of complaints and monitoring its status until it is completely resolved.


Have employees give and take feedbacks.

Feedback system is extremely important in making your employees realize their performance and growth. This system sets a platform to give and receive feedbacks from subordinates, managers and supervisors on a regular basis based on the individual’s performance.

Carry out the overall workforce management with auditable records.

The dashboard provides a bird-eye view of the overall insight of workforce potential. It enables HR managers and senior executives to analyze HRM practices, employee statistics, organizational success, reports and any upcoming tasks. Along with this, employers can identify their competitive advantages and the areas where special attention is required.

Experience the ultimate TeamWise Advantage

TeamWise caters the HR executives with the most powerful system that will help them in improving recruitment and selection costs, reducing administrative burden, deliver organizational benefits with improved profitability, enhance the quality of day-to-day management, create a best-fit workplace environment and most importantly build a better workforce culture.

What Kills HR Productivity??

As the roles of HR keep evolving in the organizational set-up, a clear fact is that HR is made to be directly related to strategic business planning and initiatives. 

A recent survey on what consumes maximum HR professionals’ time versus what must consume it revealed that the major threat to HR productivity is managing employees that includes solving their queries, resolving issues, maintaining discipline, and employee recognition. About 71% HR professionals admitted that their maximum time is utilized in handling these employee issues and queries. 

Other areas that eat up their time include recruitment and company compliance matters.  

Seasoned HR professionals have a more strategic role to play in the company rather than investing it in routine tasks. Their scope is beyond manual employee documentation or payroll processing or taking regular employee trainings. Moreover, these professionals also want to be in the roles of overseeing and managing workplace culture and involving in strategic workforce planning and other related activities. 

Though it is believed that HR people are well-trained, maximum HR respondents revealed that they take trainings at regular intervals as well as try updating themselves with weekly HR updates.

Thus, the findings have clearly emphasized the need to analyze the gap between the functions HRs are involved in and what are the ones they actually need to be instrumental in.  

These mundane HR tasks can be regarded as the productivity killers for seasoned HR professionals as they consume their maximum time and deter them from focusing towards more strategic roles. However, using all-automated HRIS software can scale down these functions and free the department from tedious manual tasks. 

The major functions include employee management, recruitment, managing timesheets, updating employee information, Leave And Attendance Management, performance management, etc. TeamWise can be an answer to all those HR professionals who are looking forward to improve their performance and enhance role within the organization. By getting adaptive to the technology and shifting routine tasks to the system can help witness a new age HR that is more strategic and has more power!

Dropping Employee Performance: Whose Fault Is It?

Has it ever happened that you are so contended with your great hiring and just waiting for the teams to thank you with positive feedback that you acquired a wonderful resource, but to your surprise, you get negative feedback from the team and the performance of that candidate is in negative numbers. 

Alas! Bad luck…But this might have happened to every one of you once in your career. You get to regret your decisions some time later, even being cent percent sure about the respective candidate at the time of joining. 

Though, underperformers are everywhere, but the worst case scenario is when smart candidates start to underperform. There are many reasons that contribute in deteriorated performance of these individuals.

 Some of the major contributing factors are listed here:

Unclear Goals or Deliverables: Many employees struggle so hard, but still fail to clearly understand what is expected of them. This cannot be completely their fault as their managers may give them vague or incomplete description of what exactly they want from these individuals.

Mistakenly Misjudged: Famous saying, ‘don’t judge someone through the cover’, same applies here. Sometimes, hiring managers just judge the candidate through the skills and qualifications written on the resume. They might overlook the other skills gap in front of the confidence shown by the candidate. 

Not the Right Fit: “Fit” is the keyword for today’s dynamic corporate scenario. It is probably most difficult to determine if a job candidate will be the right fit for the organization or not. Moreover, the success (or failure) of an individual very much depends on how he/she gels with company interests, goals and objectives.

Unhealthy Relations with Manager: This is the number one reason for any employee to underperform. Usually, managers fail to understand that their approach “one size fits all” does not work while managing different individuals.  Poor rapport with the supervisor or manager generally lowers down employee morale and will to perform. 

Being Underpaid: While many believe they don’t, but, compensations DO matter! Every employee wishes to be fairly and competitively paid. While an employee is in his/her learning phase, he/she may work being less paid, but a good performer cannot work in considerably less salary as per industry standards.

These are the major reasons why smart Employees underperform. To have a consistently higher performance from employees, organizations need to put some hard efforts in these areas and try to keep the zeal and enthusiasm intact within the employees. 

Are Purple Squirrels Always Recognized When Recruited or Can Be Recognized Later??

Every HR professional must be thrilled with the term “Purple Squirrel”. Quite a familiar term among HR industry, but to all those who don’t know: 

“Purple Squirrel is a candidate who has the perfect combination of qualification, work experience and skill set for any particular job position.”

 

This breed is one of the rarest one and every recruiter aspires to recruit these individuals with extreme talent and innovative capabilities. If recognized in time and given proper space, they can directly impact an organization’s growth and success instantly. 

However, they have those pioneering capabilities; they are mavericks and tough to manage and are definitely not good team players. They can only be well integrated if the team understands their intentions and is prepared to take on their unconventional ways. Despite of these facts, they are like the trophies for recruiters and can be the game changers for any business. 

 Growing recession has further increased the interest of recruiters in these candidates. It is obvious that business leaders want to put these pioneers in senior positions to get the ultimate solutions to business challenges. But, they need to understand that conventional ways of recruitment are not suited to find such talented individuals. 

Many perceive this purple squirrel concept as an unrealistic expectation and can be a reason for unfilled job positions. However, this is not completely true, but the traits can be even found through internal hiring or monitoring a candidate’s performance who has been giving outstanding results. They can be easily tracked through their high-impact work in the organization. Here only what the organizations need is an efficient Talent Management System that can monitor individual employee’s performance and bring it in notice of the management.

You may never know that you have a purple squirrel within your existing workforce, if you don’t have proper performance indicators that can detect the hitherto unrecognized talent.

TeamWise: Your Ultimate Solution for Workforce Management

TeamWise is the leading workforce management software that helps HR and Payroll professionals to perform routine employee-related tasks. The all-automated technology and user-friendly interface makes it possible to execute all tasks with complete accuracy and zero errors. It comes with an array of features including Employee Self-Service, Leave and Attendance Management, Payroll Management, Recruitment Management, Performance Management, Grievance Redressal or Complaint Center, Employee On-Boarding, Talent Management, etc.

 

Learn more @TeamWise

Highly Experienced or Less Experienced: Which One Will You Choose?

Recruitment styles and talent development practices have seen ‘n’ number of forms and patterns. There are various fascinating stories about how some great leaders tried on new recruitment styles and brought in those precious stones that drove the organization to unmatchable heights!

To reiterate, some of them were 

conventional while most of them were UNCONVENTIONAL!

Here’s some food for thought:

Would you prefer a candidate with great experience of working in a particular area or a candidate with considerable experience (or say very less experienced)??

Maximum responses would point towards a greatly experienced one!

Probably, a wise decision…but a wiser decision would be considering the less experienced.

You all must have heard about the common management practice saying throw people over their heads on the jobs and make it a matter of life and death to ensure that they don’t sink. This absolutely goes well with the point I am about to make here. 

In my opinion, to bring the best candidate over a job is to find the people who are familiar with the domain, but not the masters of it! Why I am saying this is only then they will enjoy exploring the area and finding new ways and techniques of doing the job. Unfortunately, many of the hiring managers don’t agree with the point as they believe that it will involve more costs on training and development and dropped ROI as if the candidate fails to learn, then the whole process need to be repeated.

Moreover, they feel that majority of people prefer fishing in areas they have fished and don’t welcome any challenges. But, THIS IS THE CATCH! They don’t want challenges and will show the same attitude at the workplace. They will be reluctant towards taking any negative feedback on themselves as they are always over confident of their performance. 

Thus, you need to bring the serious change in your perceptions and practices and emphasize on hiring swimming beginners and not the ‘already declared’ champions!

• Target the active candidates who are ready to learn and explore new areas.
•  Post job openings that focus on challenge accepting candidate and not just an impressive CV  holder. 
• Identify the ones who will prove to be great swimmers. Try judging them on their opinion towards your clues like promotions, deadlines, risks, etc.
• Ask them their accomplishments in non-familiar areas. 
• Try to assess their style of working and their plan of action for success.

You need to bring it on because even if you provide ‘test n try’ opportunity to those who ‘know it all’, you will never find any new scope area, as they will keep on evolving in just a single direction where they are comfortable. 

Now if you go with this Recruitment Style, then surely you can bring in the talent that can not only take you to new heights, but can also help you take on bigger risks with a strong backup in them.