A modern HR department is responsible for many things – recruiting new employees, training staff, settling disputes and paying wages – among many others. With all these tasks to manage and often a large number of employees to preside over, it’s no surprise that HR departments can feel overworked and under-funded.
That’s where cloud-based HR programs come in. Designed to replace costly in-house systems including payroll and resources access, migrating a HR department to the cloud can come with a whole host of benefits including:
- Improved accessibility
Adopting a cloud based solution for your HR team allows for ease of accessibility among users, enabling the human resources team to work more efficiently and provide quicker solutions for team members and management.
A cloud based solution also provides a self-service portal for staff & other authorised users to access, ensuring quick and essential access to user data & information from anywhere on the network.
- Better employee engagement
A modern HR department is likely to have to manage numerous employees over several departments or branch locations. Operating a system over the cloud allows for improved engagement between HR staff and employees in real time, whilst also (depending on the role) enabling managers to and track their employees’ performance online and offer personalised solutions based on data analysis.
Programs such as Asana, when coupled with a time tracking app enable employers to track employee progress and drill down into the data to discover where time is being best spent or wasted. While this may be an effective solution for a start-up or a small business environment, a larger company with more intense HR process may require a more dedicated cloud software.
- Increased security
With big data comes big responsibility. Every year, thousands of unsuspecting companies are victim to data breaches, with fortune 1000 businesses being the most desirable targets.
Fortunately, most HR software is compliant with industry security standards, offering enough resistance to defend your company’s valuable data from potential data breaches.
Whilst a secure system is the foundation your HR department is built on, one cannot disregard human error in the role of inadvertently assisting data breaches (such as opening phishing emails and allowing unsolicited users to access the system. An adequate IT policy is therefore required to assist the security process and mitigate the likelihood of potential breaches.
- Reduced costs & resources
It doesn’t take a statistician to work out that migrating to a cloud based HR program can save a department significant amounts of money each year.
With employee data, customer information, product details, timesheets, payroll functionalities and many other features governed by a single system – this ultimately reduces the time it takes to manage & access all the information. Moreover, since the system is managed by an external cloud provider, costs involved in managing and maintaining an in-house network are rendered minimal.
A program like Neocase’s HR Power for example brings together everything a HR department might need, including email management, business intelligence and knowledge base access all in one cloud based solution. Neocase claim this all-in-one program can improve employee productivity by 40%, while delivering cost savings of up to 50%, with these savings even paying for the cost of the program within the first 9 months.
- Streamlined workflow
Whether its updating user information, sending important documents or organising employee payroll – cloud software aims to streamline many of the tasks assigned to a human resources employee. But as much time as cloud solutions save already, is there the potential to save even more?
Well with automation, the answer is most certainly yes. Delegating certain HR tasks to be automated – such as processing holiday requests, validating timesheets and hiring new staff – enables management to focus on much more important things.
About Eric:
Eric works as a HR administrator and has gotten to know the process well over the years. Should you wish to get in touch with Eric to request a guest post you can get in touch with him here.
