Tag Archives: remote team

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

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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