Great Elements of an Employee Management Software System for Small Business

Small businesses across the nation face a wall of challenges today — and opportunities.An erratic U.S. labor market is making its impact on worker hires and quits, all while input costs, inflation, and other obstacles throw some volatile curve-balls into the mix.

Meanwhile — for some business owners — sales, revenue, and the bottom-line have all rapidly increased over the past year. Whether serving individual customers or other businesses in the marketplace, keeping up with demand during worker and material-supply constraints has been a major nemesis to getting more product in consumers’ hands.

How do you efficiently and cost-effectively optimize your entire workforce, their employee expenses, operations, and technology at the individual team-member level?You need a small business employee management software system that prioritizes the special needs of your small business. And at the heart of your search, easy-to-use technological functions should be at the top of your list.

Great Elements of a Small Business-Focused Employee Management System

A small business doesn’t need a full range of advanced human resources features — it needs the right ones that are intrinsic to its staff and operations. Whether you have a human resources function or department (or not), choosing the right HR software requires considering your business needs and selecting software excelling in these right areas. As a result, you can get the workforce management features needed without paying too much for features you won’t use.

Consider the following:

• Automation is key.All businesses must deal with payroll. It is the single-most important HR function. You should automate certain basic payroll processes by setting up those that monitor hours worked and pay employees automatically.

• Self-service is important too.You should allow employees to handle some simple HR tasks independently with self-service functions.For instance, maybe your small business can produce pay stubs without contacting anyone else in the company. Everyone gets what they need quickly while you spend less time on these tasks.

• Don’t forget about tracking.Consider tracking who works when with an attendance tracking system. One that integrates with payroll to automate payments and provide visibility into potential staffing issues is important.

• Having a bird’s-eye hiring will cover any issues.Having hiring management features on any external website or even your internal intranet may be vital if your small business grows quickly.You can use these tools to post job advertisements on job boards and social media sites, as well as gather and manage applications.

• Employee empowerment is essential.Automating employee on boarding while off boarding specific workflows can be extremely helpful for small growing companies. Consider creating an overview of all the things employees need to do before starting, sending them a web link to the exact tool, and empowering them to work their way through the tasks.

What to Look for When Comparing Employee Management Software

For small businesses, choosing the best management software system requires a lot of consideration.

First, your expense and time are the most important. If a solution cannot enhance your employee-management processes to give you operational scale and economies-of-scale, it isn’t right for you. Your small business will want to use minimal time on workers and channel more into the business itself.

Second, any software must have an easy-to-use interface. A navigation-experience interface on mobile and desktop devices provides some of the best and most convenient tools to optimize your employees’ experience, efficiencies, and response times.

Third is user-friendliness. Human resource tools for small businesses should appear, look, and act friendly so they communicate correctly, keeping team members “on the same page” regarding the task that the user-application is trying to execute.Providing good documentation and support can also contribute to this.

And fourth, if a task can be automated through integration with other tools, that’s golden. Whether it’s a workforce or professional social media channel, or a payroll-accountant function (or something else), integrating with another tool is highly important for engagement.

What Small Businesses Can Learn from Larger Companies’ HR Functions

Your small business can glean from the human resource strategies and functions of larger companies.Consulting firm PwC’s 2022 Tech Survey found that:

• Most technology investments meet or exceed expectations for HR leaders, with a move to the cloud especially valuable.
• Many HR leaders report missing opportunities to drive tech adoption, resolve cloud challenges early, and build a business case for disruptive tech.
• The need to track and monitor remote work may require not just new technology but an entirely new approach.
• Dissatisfaction with cloud vendors is common — and can be avoidable.

The survey’s findings also focused on five ways human resource leaders can make the most of their technology investments, which is relevant for choosing an employee management software solution:

• Deploy effective methods to drive tech adoption.
• Use tech to better manage remote work.
• Address common cloud challenges early.
• To avoid vendor regrets, focus on what matters most.
• Build the case for the disruptive tech you need.

What’s more: In an earlier PwC study from 2020, approximately 74 percent of companies surveyed stated they had planned to boost their budgets on HR technology over the next several years. The largest driving factors and benefits? Doing so increases productivity, provides insightful workforce details, gives great analytics and data, and overwhelmingly improves the employee experience.

Where Does an HR Department Fit In?

It doesn’t, necessarily. Human resource departments are not common in small businesses. As many already know, having one is not a requirement under the law.

But smart-driven HR capabilities in a competitive business environment IS a necessity to surviving and thriving. Whether or not you have dedicated staff managing the administration of payroll and finding and on boarding new employees shouldn’t matter when developing and integrating employee management software innovations. To be successful, small businesses need a solution having features they precisely need without paying for unnecessary extra features.

All these processes can be simplified using the right employee management software for your small business. You can stay relevant on compliance using unique tools, saving you from hiring outside expertise.Utilizing a software system can aid you in managing HR more efficiently.

It’s easy to overlook workforce technology since there are fewer exciting functions that deal with growth or revenue for your business.But if you can’t handle HR functions efficiently, they can quickly eat up your time. VCS Software has the answer to your needs.