Category Archives: Business Technology

New Service Allows U.S. Workers to Get Paid Daily Instead of Weekly

In the tightest employment market ever, employees are asking a simple question that challenges years of standard practice: why should they wait a week or two before they see their paychecks?

It is another signal where technology meets the new world – where rewards are more instantaneous, and employers are seeking low-cost ways to make employees happy. And this helps them manage their expenses better.

While traditional employers still have to comply with federal and state laws with respect to payroll timekeeping, leave laws guard their own cash flow. A small but growing number of U.S. companies are experimenting with daily pay earnings received by smartphones instead of on a more traditional weekly, biweekly or monthly basis through electronic check.

The service, offered by many payroll providers, lets the employees tap up to half their pay they earn on a given day, perhaps even as soon as their shifts end. The offering is chiefly being targeted to hourly workers, many of whom live paycheck to paycheck and sometimes seek small advances such as payday loans to get by.

Here’s how it works

Workers are notified, typically on their smartphones, at the end of their shifts that they have an hour to tap half their pay and are asked if they wish to do so. The money is instantly downloaded onto their debit cards. No taxes are deducted until employees receive their paychecks. And, there’s no fee for workers, though businesses may pay more in administration costs each month.

Limiting the money available to 50% of their paychecks encourages saving. What’s more, is the one-hour window to draw the money discourages impulse purchases later in the day.

Seventy-eight percent of workers are living paycheck to paycheck to make ends meet, according to a CareerBuilder survey conducted in the spring.

Long term studies are not available yet to help understand if the ability to get paid each day will help employers attract, retain, reward, or improve productivity in any way. However, the signal that employee-driven tools and strategies are taking a front seat to a traditional business protocol is obvious.

For these and all other Payroll, HR, and Benefits related services CorpStrat is here to help. Contact us today to learn more.

Top 5 Resolutions for HR in the New Year

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Another year is approaching and it’s time to start thinking about how to become more effective and efficient at work in 2019. We’ve compiled 5 new year’s resolutions for your HR department to consider in the new year, so you don’t have to.

Improve the digital expertise in your HR team

Having the most advanced HR software available is fruitless unless you know how to maximize it. A recent report found that just 23% of HR managers felt their HR leadership were successful at exploiting the opportunities offered by digital technology.

Another report found that only 8% of HR respondents had usable data and only 9% fully understood the elements of HR that drive performance. HR Directors need to fill knowledge gaps in their department, either through recruitment or upskilling. Only then, can they properly harness technology and start reaping the true benefits of digital analytics.

Re-examine the way you deliver training and development

Traditional models of training are becoming obsolete as the skills needed in a digital age are constantly changing. Evolving technology is rendering skills obsolete faster than ever, so digital competencies must be constantly updated. It has never been easier to be left behind.

It’s important that HR Directors adopt real-time learning and ongoing development programs to ensure that the workforce is prepared to succeed in a digital age. Traditional learning is becoming rapidly dated, and organizations are turning to new tools that provide better content, videos, and mobile learning solutions.

Adopt a more flexible workforce model

The movement away from old-fashioned “time for hours” continues to gain pace.

New research suggests that this trend for agile workforce models will increase flexibility in the coming year. Expect to see a steady increase in remote, part-time or freelance workers. This is in direct contrast to California’s recent laws interpreting the way that independent contractor is classified.

Offering this type of flexibility will be key to attracting and retaining high performers. Studies have actually shown that work/life balance programs can help retention and improve employee satisfaction, so it is a model that clearly reaps benefits.

Investigate SMART recruitment technology

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) technology in HR is advancing in leaps and bounds and huge advances have been made in SMART recruitment software.

Additionally, predictive analytics is increasingly important to talent acquisition (TA), as sophisticated analytics teams begin to prioritize recruiting workflows, conduct workforce planning, evaluate different recruiting sources, assess the quality of hire, and use pre-hire assessments.

Not only do these technologies improve candidate experiences and candidate sourcing but they also benefit the employee brand as well. So being an early adopter of digital practices will help your business, improve its performance and prevent rivals from gaining a competitive advantage.

Consider gamification to improve business goals

It’s no surprise that a generation of workers who grew up on video games love gamification. It is now something that HR professionals are adopting to enhance everything from recruitment selection to the promotion of company culture.

Simple forms of gamification can offer employees a fun way to learn or engage in a digital sense. Like video games, the psychological reward associated with beating previous scores or improving at a game is a key driver in getting people to carry out what could otherwise be a mundane or uninteresting task. Gamification is a useful motivational tool for HR and something you should look at adopting in 2019.

The Achilles Heel for Every Employer: Time & Attendance Tracking

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Portrait of business woman holding up clock and tracking employee time and attendance

Is your time and attendance policy outdated? Is your employee time tracking inaccurate?

If you answered yes to these questions, then it might be time to take a closer look at your time and attendance policy and consider solutions that can have a positive impact on your business. With accurate time tracking, you could eliminate data errors, reduce overpayments, and limit time spent on related administrative and managerial tasks.

Employee Attendance by the Numbers

Ensuring your employees are working scheduled hours should be a key business objective. Still, it can be easy to overlook the hidden costs of attendance. A recent article on the costs of time theft revealed that:

About 75 percent of U.S. businesses are affected by time theft.
43 percent of employees admit to some form of time theft.
25 percent of employees report more hours than they actually worked, more than 75 percent of the time.
45 percent of employees record time inaccurately.

Managing Various Forms of Time Theft

A common trend in time theft is “buddy punching”, which occurs when hourly, non-exempt employees, who record their time on a time clock, punch a co-worker in and out when that worker isn’t present. If a business relies on a punch time clock or paper time sheets, it can be relatively simple for one employee to record time or punch in on behalf of another employee.

There are other situations where employees may be under the impression that they are merely doing each other a favor. Your time and attendance policy should clearly state that buddy punching is strictly prohibited in the workplace.

Simple tardiness is another costly example. For instance, a non-exempt employee who is consistently 10 minutes late and works 20 days per month in a year can earn 40 hours of pay for time not worked annually. Ultimately, you are paying that employee for a week of time that was not spent creating value for your business.

Addressing attendance problems quickly so they don’t turn into long-term issues is the best course of action. Increasingly, businesses are turning to state-of-the-art identification technology to combat the time-theft trend.

How to Prevent Time Theft

Creating a formal buddy punching policy can make all the difference. Your policy can even go as far as to set specific standards for passwords that make them harder to share or input by another coworker. Moreover, educate your staff to bring awareness to the dangers of sharing passwords. Inform them that sharing their timekeeping login could also mean sharing their personal data.

Bringing it All Together

It’s almost 2019 and employers need to deploy the most advanced and compliant tools to make sure they manage their most important assets, their people! Tools like online human resource technology now fully integrate with payroll to ensure accuracy, and they eliminate instances of paying for time not worked.

We encourage you to reach out to us and we’ll provide you with a fully integrated tool like HRIS and a Payroll platform to help streamline the entire process and more.

Posting jobs
Vetting applicants
Pre-screening and offerings, onboarding
Payroll
Monitoring credentials and licensing
Tracking logins and passwords
Integrate benefits and 401k enrollment
Track PTO and vacation eligibility make schedules, etc.

DNA Genetic Testing and Insurance: Can They Co-Exist?

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Genomics is transforming medicine, and slowly but inevitably will be reshaping insurance. It was only a matter of time…

The secrets once buried deep, hidden in the paired strands of DNA every person carries. The mysteries of the genome (an individual’s complete set of DNA) remained veiled when the Human Genome Project began, which was an international scientific research project with the goal of determining the sequence of nucleotides that made up the human DNA. Then in 2003, the international research project completed its mission, sequencing the genome.

This rapidly advancing science in forcing the insurance industry to navigate a multitude of actuarial, ethical, privacy and even reputational concerns.

The fundamental business models for life, disability, critical illness, and long-term care insurers could be at stake, given the growing existential threat of information as more people buy insurance, without disclosing their predisposition to certain diseases.

Genomics just may become the greatest disruptor to the insurance industry, the equivalent to global warming, or cybersecurity risks in the property/casualty space.

The sequencing of the human genome, DNA genetic testing (such as 23andMe), and genome editing are changing the way of how we are detecting diseases early on, treatment and even prevention through precision medicine. However, genetic testing companies are in line to influence everything from how insurance is underwritten and priced to how products are designed.

The Rise of DNA Testing

Take, 23andMe for example, which offers risk reports for multiple diseases, providing the public with intimate genetic information. Those who test positive to a serious predisposed illness could buy more coverage than they need and at an unpriced rate. And, those who test negative, could delay purchasing insurance coverage, or allow their policies to expire.

According to Nabholz, Swiss Re’s head of research and development, life and health “more than 12 million people have taken direct-to-consumer DNA tests, with almost 8 million of those tests occurring since 2016.”

“People who get a genetic test back that is unfavorable, of course, they’re going to seek to protect themselves and their family,” Nabholz goes on to say. “That’s a natural reaction.”

But, insurers will have to move cautiously. The science is relatively immature. The regulatory landscape remains uncertain with at least one state proposing a ban on using genetic information to underwrite life policies.

And then there is the matter of privacy, data ownership, and media coverage concern that would follow the rejection of applicants due to gene mutations or variants. The questions that are unanswered are as frequent as the questions yet asked.

One thing is certain: genetic testing will open doors to longevity, healthcare, prevention, and screening, and will ultimately lead to us leading healthier and longer lives.

How an HR System Forces Compliance

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Imagine if you had a foolproof way to affirm, with certainty, that each and every company policy, bulletin, procedure, and process was acknowledged by each and every employee?

No one would ever be able to say “I didn’t get that memo”, or “I didn’t know”. It’s possible, with the help of some modern technology we call an HRIS – a Human Resource Information System. Using a shared platform like an HRIS makes it easier to hold everyone accountable for their responsibilities.

Most companies have systems for everything from inventory to sales and from accounting through attendance. But, few have a fully integrated system to manage the employee lifecycle, from ‘job posting through termination’.

Imagine if there was a fully integrated way to post jobs, vet applicants, pre-screen and offer, onboard, payroll, monitor credentials and licensing, track logins and passwords, integrate benefits and 401k enrollment, track PTO and vacation eligibility, make schedules, write up and performance reviews, push out all company policies and maintain access to every aspect of the employee lifecycle. Sound complex? Too good to be true? Well, just the opposite.

What an HRIS Can do for Your Business

Let’s go back to compliance. With an HRIS, each and every company bulletin, policy, procedure and manual, including those that require annual recurring training, can be affirmed by a digital signature. Employees literally cannot go to work without affirming they have read and acknowledged any policy your company wishes to implement.

A robust HRIS, allows employees to also log in and retrieve their payroll stubs, track their PTO, request time-off, and review any document or performance review they have on file. Employees overwhelmingly want this experience.

As one of our clients said so eloquently, “a fully integrated HRIS is a sight to behold.” With today’s challenging workplace, who wouldn’t want a foolproof way to confirm and affirm your employees’ acknowledgment of any and everything possible.

Ask us how our InfinityHR platform changes everything! Call CorpStrat: 818.377.7260