Your team likely puts a lot of effort into keeping candidates engaged throughout the hiring process but it’s just as important to support employee engagement post-hire. In today’s applicant-driven economy, if you don’t offer your team a top-notch employee experience, your most qualified employees won’t hesitate to seek opportunities elsewhere.
A recent study from ServiceNow found that employee engagement dips by 22 percent after a few weeks on the job, and 52 percent of employees in the same study don’t believe their employers invest in improving the employee experience. And according to the study, the employee experience gets started off on the wrong foot, with barely half (51 percent) of survey respondents indicating their employers made it easy to access a new hire portal.
To drive employee engagement from the moment an offer letter is signed, it’s critical for your team to invest in the right technology, such as a seamless payroll and HR system. Below, we’ve highlighted some key criteria your team should look for in a payroll and HR system to ensure it’s helping you boost engagement and productivity post-hire.
1. Automated Integration with Your Hiring Platform
As soon as a new hire signs an offer letter, easily make the switch from candidate to employee through integration between your hiring and HR system. You’ll already have the employee’s information on hand from the hiring process, so you can automatically create an employee profile and ensure you have everything you need before onboarding begins.
2. Digital Onboarding Before the First Day
Most employees spend the majority of their first day filling out administrative paperwork. But the more time that’s spent on these administrative tasks, the longer it takes for employees to start contributing your to your business. And while employees spend time filling out paperwork, their initial excitement about the new role might start to wear off.
To avoid manual paperwork on the first day, your team should look for a payroll and HR system that has digital onboarding capabilities. Digital onboarding enables new employees to fill out paperwork once their offer letters are signed and kick off their day-to-day work sooner rather than later. And it saves your HR team from manually repeating the same onboarding tasks each time a new employee is hired.
Onboarding tasks that can be completed before the first day include: filling out direct deposit information for automated payroll, completing tax forms, filling out benefits paperwork and signing the employee handbook.
3. A User-Friendly Interface
To keep employees engaged and productive, it’s important for day-to-day administrative tasks to be as streamlined as possible. Kicking off with onboarding and throughout each employee’s time at your company, your team needs to have the right payroll and HR platform in place to make HR-related tasks user-friendly.
Many employers require employees to log into several different systems – such as payroll, benefits, time and attendance and several other systems – to complete HR tasks and access important information. This can easily cause employee engagement to taper off and might even make employees frustrated enough to leave your organization. And while employees spend time accessing different HR systems, they’ll have less time to complete productive tasks.
With the right payroll and HR partner, you can offer employees a user-friendly interface, so they only need to remember the credentials for one system to retrieve pay stubs, input benefits information and access tax forms. This will make all HR-related tasks easier on employees and enable them to spend more time on their day-to-day responsibilities.
4. Effective Reporting
When considering a new payroll and HR partner, make sure to look for one that offers robust reporting, which will help your team gauge overall business health. The right payroll and HR platform will provide insight into: turnover analysis, benefit plan spend, wage spend, headcount analysis, new hire analysis and employee profitability. Using this data, you can more effectively make key business decisions, such as hiring or letting go of employees based on business needs.
On the employee side, an effective payroll and HR platform can help you provide overall transparency into employee benefits. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates benefits make up about 37.6 percent of employees’ total compensation. But many employees don’t have centralized visibility into their total compensation and benefits.
A centralized, automated benefits statement enables employees to not only see their paycheck and salary information, but also such benefits as: health insurance, dental insurance, vision insurance, flexible spending, life insurance, commuter benefits, retirement benefits, time off, and more. This type of report will help employees feel valued and better understand just how much your organization in investing in them.
Beyond employee engagement, having a payroll and HR partner that’s integrated with your hiring platform can help you save time and money, and drive productivity at your organization. To learn more about selecting the right payroll, benefits and HR provider for your business, read our resource, “The Hireology Payroll Buyers Guide.”
