Any company worth its salt has HR policies for Attendance, Leave,Overtime Pay, Permissions, Claims, Promotions and Taxation, Benefits etc. They bring transparency, equity and order and most importantly they reflect the attitude of the company to employees. However, are the policies being implemented, and if they are not, is the purpose of having the same being defeated?
In todays world, policies cannot be implemented without automation as soon as your employee count goes up beyond 20. Sceptical? Here is an example of policies that are nearly impossible to track, without going digital. To expand the point, lets just take one policy, and see how long it takes to process manually
If employees work more than one hour extra on a weekday, they are eligible for 1.75 times fixed pay/hr if between grade 15 and 11, 1.5 times their fixed pay/hr if they are between grades 5 and 10, and none if grades are above 5
- To track this a biometric device to capture time is absolutely essential
- A shift allocation mechanism for all employees is required
- One has to calculate is an employee is eligible for overtime
- One has to check of the overtime is more than the normal shift hours, and also greater than the minimum extra hours – in this case one hour
- If yes, then grade based rules apply, hence all employees grades need to be recorded and used
- The fixed pay has to be calculated for the employee, and its possible that the employee may have just joined or given an increment or promotion or transferred in the period
- One should check if the employee has been separated, or if pay has been held due to a resignation
- Since is pay is based on the number of days, the number of days in that month should be considered to determine the exact fixed pay that month.
- Possible contradictions should be eliminated for those days e.g. no punch while going out, or a leave request occurring on a day the person has worked etc.
- An then apply the formula
- This has to be repeated across all rules
- It has to be repeated across all employees
- It has to be completed in the few days between the end of the month and before payroll is calculated
- A single mistake can lead to employees being unhappy or management over paying
Without automation, its stressful, error prone, monotonous and unnecessarily manual and costly too. Even if you have only 30 employees its worth going digital, rather than trying to manage via spreadsheets or manually.
Automate the process and you get speed, stress free payrolls, satisfied employees, lower costs and much more. If you take automation to the next level where employees and supervisors handle the requests and approval for exceptions on their own via self service portals, it gets far better for everyone. Interestingly, automation is not expensive. The Cloud and the software revolution has made it affordable.
In short you can’t manage without automation, but if you do, you are likely to be inefficient and have too many overheads, and your competition is likely to get ahead. Its only a matter of time before you have to. Do it proactively rather than being forced into it.
At www.KServeHRMS.com, we have automated Workforce Management, HR and Payroll for a large number of companies, and we can do it quickly and give you near immediate return on investment.