Moving Your HR To The Cloud: The Top 5 Must-Haves

In these times, businesses have become aware of the importance of moving their business to the cloud, allowing all employees to work from home. Collaborative working suites like G Suite and Office 365 have allowed teams to collaborate across documents, whilst CRM and Marketing Automation software are keeping commercial teams running smoothly. However, the most important business area that you must be able to manage remotely is your HR.

Moving your people management to the cloud can be much simpler than you think, just make sure you choose an HR software provider who can help you with all of these areas! 

1) Sickness Tracking, remote work tracking and any other kind of leave type with manager approval

Being able to track where your employees are is becoming more important. Ensuring your new cloud HR software can allow your staff to request sick days, remote working and any other type of leave means you can keep track of where your employees are at any given time. Appogee Leave also has specific types of leave types relating to COVID-19, including who is self-isolating, ensuring that employee wellbeing is maintained. Manager approval workflows are also important in this set up, so line managers are able to approve any requests.

2) Employee self-service, profiles and ways to engage staff

Allowing for employee self-service in your new cloud-based HR software application means the information you have on them can be kept up to date as and when it changes. If an employee needs to change their remote working location or bank details, you need to ensure they can access this information from anywhere in the cloud so they can update it when they need to. 

Another key feature of online HR software is being able to keep your employees engaged in your business, regardless of their physical location. Showing employee appreciation via Shout-outs is a great way to keep morale up for the team and allow you to show you’re noticing their achievements, remotely. 

Using Checklists can also be a great way of ensuring employees are staying on track. When choosing your online HR solution, allowing managers to create checklists can be beneficial in many ways. One example of this might be through keeping track of how you’re onboarding staff remotely, keeping processes clean and organised or even through a wellbeing checklist to make sure staff working from home are taking breaks.

3) An easy way to stay up to date with employee information via powerful reporting tools

The best HR software will allow you to stay up to date with what your employees are updating via powerful reporting tools. Being able to schedule HR reports on data you’re storing via your online HR system means that you’re always in the loop, exactly when you need to be. Creating these reports should also be hassle-free, so you don’t need to spend much time filtering through data to get the information you’re reporting on. Having reports on a schedule also means they can run using automation and be emailed to you, without you needing to login, so if you're busy doing other work your report is still sent over.

4) Storage of company information in one easy to access area

When it comes to remote working, you need to make sure your company policies, including any potentially new remote working policies or business continuity plans, are accessible to everyone in your company who needs to see them. If these are easily stored in one place in your new online HR solution, you can rest assured that employees will be able to find them.  However, there may be policies and documents you wish to keep to managers only, so for security purposes make sure you’re able to control access to these too. 

Being able to see who has read and acknowledged any critical business information is also an ideal requirement for online HR. This means you can see who has and hasn’t read your company policies, allowing you to know which staff members are up to speed with the latest updates and who needs a quick nudge.

5) Peace of mind

One of the most business-critical requirements of online HR software is security. As sensitive employee information is being stored you need to know who has access to it and make sure the platform it’s built on is secure. You will also need to make sure you can control access to sensitive information, allowing access to certain data and documents as required. You also need to rest assured that your employees will actually use the system too, therefore an intuitive user interface that’s logical and easy to adopt, is a must-have.

The right integrations are also key. Integrating with payroll providers, collaborative working platforms, such as G Suite and Office 365, and applicant tracking systems can help ensure your data is accurate and login information, via single sign-on, is secure.

We have the perfect online HR software

At Appogee HR, we have built our software with small businesses in mind. Our app is built on Google's secure Google Cloud Platform, enabling you to feel rest assured that your employees' data is safe. 

We want you to be able to get started straight away with your chosen platform. That’s why we’re currently offering a 1 hour free set-up session to all new customers who purchase before 30th April 2020 to help ensure you can get started as soon as possible. Start your 14 day free trial today to see just how beneficial Appogee HR can be for your business, whether in the office or working remotely.