HR Apps Available Now Plus Checklist for New Technology

Seals, a senior partner with Mercer Atlanta, offered her tips at WorldatWork’s annual convention and exhibition, held recently in Philadelphia.

Examples of New Technology Available Now

Seals offers the following examples of new technology that are available now to help you do your job:

Globoforce.com

Social recognition tools to nominate, approve, congratulate, and redeem awards efficiently and on the go. One user company achieved an 88 percent increase in satisfaction with rewards.

Touchbase

This is a next generation device for employee self-service. A tablet mounts on the wall and takes a picture of you when you enter the building, does facial recognition, and tracks attendance. No more fingerprints, no more buddy punching, says Seals.

HOTSEAT

HOTSEAT offers wellness apps where employees compete to stay active at work. HOTSEAT finds time on your calendar and prompts you to do a 2-minute activity—you can select which one.

Socialtext

Socialtext features collaboration tools embedded in talent management activities. One organization with many home-based recruiters used this for onboarding and training, including managing the organization’s mentor program.

Benefit focus

This app allows employees to “shop” for their benefits.

ShiftPlanning

Managers schedule their employees via text messaging. Managers text employees their schedules, and employees can use the system to trade shifts.

talentBin

This app features recruiting through “Social Exhaust” written on social networks to identify otherwise hidden candidates for open job requisitions. You set up your profile and enter a job to fill. TalentBin scrapes sites (publicly available) for candidates. An engineering company found more hits through talentBin than it found on LinkedIn.

What are your competitors offering workers these days?  Check your state’s edition of BLR’s exclusive Employee Compensation in [Your State] program to find out. Try it at no cost or risk.

What’s Next?

Here are Seals’ predictions for where we are headed with HR technology:

• Enterprise social networks will become the primary channel for work.
• Smartphone, tablet, and laptop will be all-in-one leveraging DaaS (desktop as a service).
• Mobile-first strategy will overtake the PC.
• Big data and predictive analytics will drive workforce decisions.
• Bring-your-own-device (BYOD) will soar in the workplace, but companies will implement lockdown software.
• Personal cloud will grow, reducing digital content on PCs.
• Moving to always on, people can track and store what’s in their line of sight.
• Data from wearable electronics will be used to improve productivity and asset tracking.

Checklist for Success

Here is Seals’ checklist of helpful questions concerning new technology:

• Is the next great technology right for your organization?
• Can you align the technology with talent strategies that deliver business outcomes?
• Is it a cultural fit with your organization?
• What’s the opportunity cost of not taking advantage of the technology?
• Will you have the access to the data needed to run the technology?
• Will the technology support the business processes and workflow?
• Will it meet the infrastructure requirements?
• Are you replacing something else? What alternatives are there?
• Can you quantify the return of investment (ROI) with soft/hard dollars, employee/business impact?
• Is the technology provider financially viable?
• Do you have an exit strategy if the provider fails?
• Will you remain in control of your data?

Keeping up with new technology—certainly part of your job description these days, but equally certainly not your only challenging duty. From audits to commissions to market pricing to executive perks, compensation and benefits hit you with something new every day. You need a trusted, go-to resource. For more than 20 years, experienced comp and benefits pros have relied on an extraordinary program from BLR®.

In fact, thousands of managers have put their faith in Employee Compensation in [Your State]. The [Your State] refers to the fact that a separate edition is published for each of 43 U.S. states, plus the District of Columbia. So if you live in Illinois, Employee Compensation in Illinois is the reference you receive.

Don’t just look at national data when you can have data specifically for your state. It’s all in BLR’s famed Employee Compensation in [Your State] program. Try it on us! Here’s how.

Each edition of the Employee Compensation in [Your State] service contains these key elements:

• Recommended Rate Ranges localized for your state and region for hundreds of jobs, based on surveys and official data. You shouldn’t pay the same in Manhattan, Kansas, as you do on Manhattan Island in New York. This program makes sure you don’t.

• A to Z State and Federal Law Comparisons. Comp and benefits are regulated by a tangle of laws. Employee Compensation offers an alphabetically arranged set of practical analyses on how to comply. Look up “ERISA” or “Overtime” or “Workers’ Compensation” and you instantly have a plain-English explanation of how the controlling laws—state and federal—apply to you.

• A Full Job Descriptions Program. Employee Compensation offers a complete tutorial for setting up a job descriptions program. Many ADA-compliant sample job descriptions are provided, ready to copy and use.

• Free newsletter and updates. The Employee Compensation newsletter helps keep you on top of new state and federal compensation and benefits laws. Six updates throughout the year keep your book current with all new compensation laws.

• Complete wage and salary administration guidance. This walks you through the entire compensation process with step-by-step instructions for analyzing and pricing jobs, writing job descriptions, employee compensation policies, and more.

Use the links below to see samples of the program and newsletter, as well as a full table of contents of what’s included.

The program is priced affordably for small companies as well as large, at only a few dollars a day. That’s coffee money for just about every form of information most managers need to run a competitive and efficient comp/benefits program.

You can check out the entire program in your own office for up to 30 days, with no need to buy. (We even pay return postage.) Just click the link below, and we’ll be happy to set things up.

Start a no-obligation free trial.