Workplace Culture

For all employee engagement strategies, rewards and recognition programs are an essential component. By providing rewards in line with your unique organizational values and employees’ personal preferences, you can encourage, motivate, and push for better business results.

However, HR managers and small business owners often believe that rewards are a cost center, draining company resources or, at the very least, displaying poor ROI. This doesn’t always have to be the case. By exploring creative employee reward programs to personalize the benefits, it is possible to align organizational resources to employee desires and expectations. Here are four ideas for making your employee reward programs more meaningful in 2019.

1. Let your Employees Choose their Own Rewards

Across the board, companies are always seeking creative approaches to employee reward program outlining. However, this is difficult to achieve, often resulting in cookie-cutter gifts, irrelevant perks, or impersonal gift cards.

Letting employees explore an extensive reward bouquet and choose their preferred mode of compensation is a good way to empower and motivate the workforce. Snappy, a new corporate gifting startup, is building an extensive network of benefit partners across local and global markets. Employers can share rewards worth anywhere between $15-1000, disbursed as a flexible gift card. The employee then chooses their favorite gift from local experiences, vacations, Amazon products, and other attractive options.

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In this interview Aron Ain, CEO, Kronos, talks about how digital transformation enables HR leaders to retain talent. From the best practices of employee engagement to business success, we discuss how there is a direct link between these components for sustaining talent. Ain elaborates on employee engagement as a growth strategy to create a place where employees truly love to work. We discuss all boomerangs and how are they a win for both employers and employees.

While digital has been around for a while, adoption of technology in enterprise scenarios doesn't match the numbers witnessed by the consumer market. Bringing consumer-grade user experience quality to the workplace can reduc1.Strive for Recognition and not Recall

You cannot expect employees to remember and accurately recall every single process flow documented in FAQs, learning sessions, and other documentation. Human memory can handle only a certain number of tasks at a time. Therefore, it is advisable to ease the cognitive load through guidance aids and real-time enablers. This could include chatbots, micro UI elements like micro-copy and micro-graphics, and built-in alerts triggered whenever a certain functionality is chosen.

1. Offer Self-service as a Driver of Flexibility

With more and more millennials entering the workplace, flexibility has become a buzzword for HR providers. “About 63% of the organizations surveyed said that their organizations had already implemented a formal flexibility policy which allowed flexible work options that are tailored to the individual preferences of their workforce,” reports Mercer’s 2017 study on global talent trends.e learning curves, drive adoption, and boost returns. We share four ideas to enhance UX in HR tech.

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From upskilling employees’ digital competence to refining talent decisions with cloud-based productivity data, executives are ready to work hand-in-hand with HR to invest more in their people to drive growth. Mercer’s Kate Bravery examines the 2018 global trends shaping the workforce of the future, and how HR can leverage digitization to unlock human potential.

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Compensation is still the number one way to positively impact employees and retain top talent, but other factors aren’t far behind. For example, 53% of employees want employers to focus on supporting health and fitness. There are also stressors outside of work that still affect employees at the office, for example, financial worries - employees spend on average 13 hours every month worrying about money while at work. Sedentary lifestyles and increasing social and financial pressures are impacting employees' mental and physical wellness as well. Benefits professionals can combat that by focusing on initiatives that make employees happier, healthier, and more engaged.

Businesses face a growing number of major incidents that can affect the well-being of their employees and the organization’s operations. While it is now common practice to plan and prepare for the practical side of disaster management, with backup IT systems and emergency office relocation, managing staff safety during such an incident is much more complicated. But what use are IT systems and offices without employees, so shouldn’t they be your top priority?
A growing risk

Even without an increase in the volume of incidents, the changing nature of work practices with greater remote working and travel leads to a higher risk of employees getting caught up in them. However, we are seeing an increase in the number of these incidents both naturally derived and those caused by human action.
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Rising healthcare costs and an increasingly regulated business environment have made employee benefits software a necessity for modern businesses. This article will help you evaluate and choose the right benefits software for your business.

HR is an important part of several businesses globally. This role has evolved over the past few years. An HR is not just limited to the recruitment and exit process of an organization, it has more crucial parts to play. With the increasing competition across industries, it becomes challenging for the HRs to find and recruit the best talent in the organization. From recruiting for a vacant position to finding and hiring the pool of talent, it’s a tough job and the tasks of a recruiter directly affect the bottom line of a company. In order to help the HR department validate its important role as a contributor to business performance, HR analytics is applied.

As technology has enabled workplace flexibility, it has also made detaching from work more difficult – making intentional work-life balance even more important. Whether to meet family needs, personal obligations or just to avoid rush hour – it’s clear that having increased control over their work schedule is desirable for employees. And, if done right, a flexible work culture can lead to better business results. With that in mind, here are three reasons why business decision makers should embrace flexible working.
1. Technology has made flexible work realistic and productive.

With smartphones, tablets, and laptops readily available in today’s workplace, staff simply no longer need to be in a centralized office to do their jobs effectively.

Most workers now have all the tools they need outside the cubicle, which means they can comfortably work from anywhere – at a coffee shop between meetings, at home, or wherever they can best work undistracted. Cloud technology gives employees secure access to documents, and collaboration and communication tools like Skype, Zoom, and Slack enable staff to work together from opposite sides of the globe – making flexible work possible and productive for businesses.

Any workforce where the number of full-time or permanent staff is less than third-party vendors or independent consultants is said to be part of the ‘Gig Economy’. In the near future, 40 percent of all workers are expected to be engaged in some form of short term contractual labor. This is being driven by advancements in technology and an overarching change in attitude – where employers are more open to connecting with workers on a flexible basis, and there are tools available which allow them to do so.

The low unemployment rate has shifted the balance of power back to the employee. Scarcity drives demand, and the shrinking talent pool is increasingly selective.

Employees are settling for nothing less than positive work experience. And HR professionals have taken note: 83 percent of HR leaders agree that the employee experience is very important to their organization's success.

However, “employee experience” is a dangerously broad term, one easily misconstrued as meaning expensive perks and flashy offices. While cold brew on-tap and weekly happy hours are nice additions to the workplace, they do not necessarily equal a healthy, positive employee experience. In fact, without a strong foundation, these perks can erode positivity and create a culture of entitlement.

It’s important that leaders approach the employee experience as more than just perks and vacations days. The employee experience is the human experience: the thoughts, feelings, emotions, decisions and overall qualitative experience that anybody has while working at a company. It’s how someone feels, the quality of their relationships and communications and the level of performance that they are supported in achieving.

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Companies continually reiterate the fact that people are their greatest asset, that engagement is critical to business outcomes, and individual performance is directly linked to business productivity. However, employee reward and recognition (R&R) programs often fall short of genuinely acknowledging employee contributions. While organizations are trying to hardwire a ‘recognition culture’ into daily operational models, there is still a long way to go, towards employee satisfaction and loyalty. Ineffective rewards and recognition programs can have the exact opposite impact, demotivating employees and adding to HR costs. We decode five common complaints around R&R programs, looking at what your employees are probably saying, and how it can guide your strategies in this space.

Big players like Microsoft, AT&T, and Morgan Stanley are already experimenting with predictive analytics in HR. Is 2019 the year when SMBs enter this space? We discuss this further and share insights from KPMG’s report for 2019.

First, what are the 1094-C and 1095-C? The Affordable Care Act requires employers with 50 or more full-time, or full-time equivalent, employees to offer health benefits. The 1094-C and 1095-C forms demonstrate that the employer is compliant with this regulation.

The 1095-C form provides details about the coverage offered, as well as which months employees were covered. This form is distributed to employees as well as filed with the IRS, whereas the 1094-C is filed only with the IRS.

Paper filing must be completed by February 28, but employers filing more than 250 forms are required to file electronically and by April 1. This requirement has led to the development of software solutions to handle the 1095-C filing process.

In much the same way as the finance and healthcare industries have adopted the digital transformation, learning and development (L&D) also need to do the same in order to be in-line with the present-day trend and need for attaining things quickly and smartly. Relying on traditional workflows wouldn’t allow enterprises to meet the evolving needs of organizations and employees.

You may not realize it but, as an HR leader, you and many of your colleagues are already using modern technologies described in the news as cutting edge.

Whether it’s through talent search engines, recruiting platforms or personality indexes, technologies such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, and predictive analytics are helping HR teams connect with the right candidates by turning human factors such as personality attributes, skill sets, and experience into measurable data.

Recruiting talent will always be a top priority. But with employers bearing a majority of ever-increasing healthcare costs, many HR leaders in 2019 will once again have to make the difficult choice between smaller, reactionary adjustments and a major overhaul of their entire system.

It’s an exciting time for HR technology. Most leaders are already using modern technology to attract and retain talent. In 2019, increased data and analytics will continue its rising impact on the other side of HR: employee health and productivity

Innovation that is built on proven behavior change science and principles of behavioral economics can maximize health benefits.

Taking care of one’s health isn’t easy or fun but finding a trigger to motivate your employees to engage in healthy behavior can make a difference when managing lifestyle and chronic conditions. Looking ahead at 2019, digital health management platforms that are personalized and use behavioral economics to tap into the human element to motivate behavior change will replace traditional cookie-cut corporate wellness programs. As a diabetic, I am highly motivated to take my meds and get out to walk every day because my daughter wants me to be alive for her wedding. In its simplest form, my behavior embodies the principle of risk aversion. But, having an app that allows me to assign my daughter as a support team member that gets a notification when I don’t comply with meds add greater assurance to compliance.

In 2019, companies will look to their workforce to ensure a strong foundation for enterprise-wide modernization. Companies will be required to step beyond the big ideas and enact specific tactics that narrow in on particular technologies, such as leveraging insights gleaned by Business Intelligence (BI) functionalities. Implementing an effective workforce digitization strategy is a necessary first step in this process. By taking advantage of these tools, a company will be able to better manage their resources.

From the Gen Z entering your office to extended tenures for Baby Boomers, 2019’s workplace is poised to be a diverse and dynamic environment. Here are seven workforce management trends HR managers should follow to maximize their company’s biggest asset -- its people.

Human capital management is undergoing a profound change – the emergence of social capital as a key value driver for organizations is transforming how HR engages and interacts with both internal and external stakeholders to create a social enterprise.

A new category of business software has emerged called “team collaboration” solutions. Although most people associate these tools with employee productivity, there are important ways team collaboration software can also boost your company’s recruiting and retention efforts.

For businesses to thrive in this ever-changing climate, it’s no secret they must embrace digital – but how can an organization successfully do so

The workplace today is a vibrant and exciting space, comprising multiple generations, cultures, and work approaches under one roof. Add to that the complexities of digitally native workers and rapidly transforming systems, and you have a space that’s both challenging and full of new opportunities.

With 2019 just around the corner, we explore the top five skills that will drive the job market next year and HR’s role in the emerging talent landscape.