First published on Friday, June 14, 2024
Last updated on Thursday, June 20, 2024
A human resources (HR) team is meant to provide support to an organization’s workforce. How the team works usually depends on the business and what the needs of the employees are. Sometimes it’s about effective recruitment, other times it’s about training opportunities.
But despite all of the benefits it can offer, some companies are just too small or don’t have the resources to form an HR team, making it difficult to provide their employees with the right level of support to help them do their jobs better. Thankfully, there are solutions to this, such as taking advantage of HR support software.
But what exactly does HR software do? Let’s take a look at some of their most common features and how they help your business.
Clocking-in and time tracking
Accurate time tracking is important for managing your workforce. HR teams often use clocking-in systems that help to keep track of how long an employee has worked. This makes it easy to tell how long an employee has worked and ensures precise timekeeping which simplifies payroll management.
These time-tracking features will greatly reduce the likelihood of pay-related disputes with employees, and they also help you keep track of anyone who is potentially shirking their responsibilities or committing time theft.
Staff vacation planner
Managing employee leave can be a challenge, especially if you have multiple employees to consider and a tight schedule to plan ahead for. HR software can help simplify this with the help of a staff vacation planner. This will allow you to quickly examine your schedule at a glance so you can determine if leave can be approved without affecting your staffing levels.
In addition, a staff vacation planner will also help calculate how much leave an employee has. This system helps to maintain fairness and transparency, making it a great tool for managing your team.
Absence and lateness monitoring
Regular attendance is important for productivity. Monitoring this will help you identify employees who are often late for work or even absent from the workplace. Tools that moniter sick leave and lateness can even help you identify patterns of absence and generate reports for employee reviews.
Effective absence and lateness monitoring leads to improved attendance rates and workforce reliability. It also creates more transparency and data which cannot be argued or second-guessed.
Shifts and schedule planner
Any business that requires employees to work in shifts will benefit from a shift and schedule planner. Effective shift management is crucial to ensure that a business stays fully operational regardless of the time of day.
Traditional shift and schedule management could be done with a simple spreadsheet or even a pen-and-paper system. This can lead to inefficiencies and mistakes due to human error.
But with an electronic shift and schedule planner using software, there’s a much lower chance for human error to occur. The tools will also help you automatically track staffing levels, and will even alert you in the event that employees are being overworked.
Automated shift management and allocation also help cut down the amount of time spent planning schedules, and it can also handle swap and cover requests seamlessly. This can greatly enhance operational efficiency and boost employee satisfaction since they can have their requests approved instantly.
HR document storage
HR documents can include anything from employment contracts and performance reviews to compliance documents and employee handbooks. These documents often aren’t used on a regular basis, but when they’re required, it’s usually for something very important.
That's why having an online document storage system comes in handy. Keeping all of your HR files stored digitally in a single place makes them easy to access when needed. You don’t need to rummage through archives and paper documents, and you don’t have to worry about the only copy being damaged.
Expense trackers
If your employees need to buy things on your company’s behalf, then keeping track of all their expenses can be time-consuming and confusing at times. You can greatly streamline this process by using an expense tracker. This allows your employees to submit expenses digitally with their receipts, and this can be added to your company’s overall finance tracking systems.
Automated expense tracking ensures that all company policies are followed, reduces the risk of errors, and greatly speeds up the reimbursement process which contributes to overall employee satisfaction and control of your finances.
Employee recognition
Recognizing your most hard-working employees is important for maintaining good morale and motivated staff members. Employee recognition programs can be hard to set up manually, but with the help of HR support software for businesses, this can be handled much more easily.
Programs may include peer-to-peer recognition, awards, and even company-wide recognition events. By fostering a culture of appreciation and hard work, your business can greatly boost employee loyalty and productivity.
Overtime management tools
Overtime is necessary at times, but it can be complex to navigate due to varying workloads and hours. Thankfully, HR software can provide overtime management tools that allow you to easily keep track of overtime and manage it effectively. These tools help to ensure that all overtime is accurately reported and linked to the employee who worked those extra hours. It ensures that they’re compensated correctly and that they’re not being overworked.
The data produced by these trackers can also be used to provide additional insights into overtime patterns. This can help managers plan around potential overtime to help avoid burning out their employees. With proper overtime management, it becomes much easier to compensate employees for putting in the extra work and also assists in distributing workloads better.
Discover BrightHR's HR Software
HR software can provide a wide range of different features to help streamline many different aspects of workforce management. While it still requires a dedicated employee to manage the system, it’s a lot cheaper and often more effective than hiring a full HR team for a small or growing business.