Mask mandates may soon be going away in cities and counties throughout the country. Viruses - Covid or otherwise - certainly are here to stay. One positive effect of the pandemic for many companies is that more attention has been brought to the physical health of their overall workforces. At workplaces where employees have already returned or will do so soon, allowing a few potentially ill employees to interact with lots of healthy ones in close quarters has become a true threat to conducting business. Employers can't afford to have large groups of employees out sick for an unspecified amount of time, especially in such a challenging hiring environment. Increasingly, companies are looking for contactless technologies that will help protect the wellbeing of their employees, their customers, and their business operations alike. Touchless timeclocks are a key component of this health-maintenance strategy.

In our recent post addressing the need for and benefits of an employee handbook, we mentioned the importance of having employees sign off on having received and read an organization's employee handbook. This is a vital step in creating and distributing a handbook because it encourages employees to read the document, ask questions about its contents, and signal that they understand the information provided. We also noted that sign-off should occur when each new edition of the handbook is given out.

Okay, not really. It's inconceivable that any company can create a comprehensive solution to its workplace health and safety concerns in just two minutes. However, two minutes is plenty of time to watch a reliable overview about specific aspects of workplace health and safety as well as obtain some basic direction about how to proceed towards creating a safe, compliant environment. We actually call this video library 2-Minute HR, and it's just one of the resources that can be found in the HR Support Center section of People Savvy HCM Essentials. Here's how it works.

As The Fixx sang anxiously in 1982, "One thing leads to another."

Here in the anxious environment of 2020, that statement may be more true than ever. The arrival of COVID-19 led the federal government to pass economic relief legislation, such as the FFCRA. Responding to that, employers updated their policies to comply, but in many cases they also re-evaluated existing leave policies to adapt to the required changes. All of this filtered down to HR departments, which needed to codify these policies in employee handbooks so that employees could understand what all of this realistically means for them. Then more legislation, then more policies, then more handbook changes.

In her blog post last week introducing this month's HR topic and webinar, Four Critical Handbook Policies for 2020, Christy talked about the employee handbook builder available to subscribers of People Savvy HCM Essentials. This is a great resource to help HR professionals and part-time HR administrators alike create, maintain, and keep compliant employee handbooks that are custom tailored to their organizations. Behind each employee handbook created in the builder is a team of professional HR Advisors, who work on your behalf to generate a handbook that aligns with your company's specific policies while remaining compliant from a regulatory perspective. Here's how easy it can be to generate a new employee handbook or update a current one.

A recent Ankura survey found that 48% of employees wish that workplace technology performed as well as personal technology. This high number indicates a broad divide between employee expectations for information usage and what employers are actually delivering. While data-driven apps, mobile-ready devices, and search engines like Google offer people near instantaneous access to information in their personal and social lives, as employees they continue struggling when at work to access basic information regarding time off accruals, hours usage, and scheduling. Furthermore, they frequently find themselves tethered to non-mobile points of access. These technology impediments are also expensive for employers, since excess time, energy, and costs are continuously expended when employees have to waste time seeking basic information and answers.

Coordinating Human Resources wasn't in your job description when you were interviewed and hired at this little company of 47 employees. But you're a fast study and have a friendly personality, and so after six months at work you were asked to show a new hire around. Afterwards you thought, "There should probably be an orientation and initial paperwork process for when new people are hired," and so you took the initiative and created one. The benefits enrollment process interested you, and so you became the main contact with the broker. One day, somebody asked if the minimum wage poster in the break room was current. It wasn't, so you retrieved the latest version from the Department of Labor website and started checking and replacing the other notices from time to time. HR tasks didn't take up too much of your time, and it was kind of fun keeping on top of things.

Then a pandemic hit.

A couple years ago, Gallup conducted a survey that categorized employee engagement into three levels. The results showed that, in any given organization, 30% of employees are actively engaged in propelling the company along, half of the employees are just coasting on the efforts of the others, and 20% are actively attempting to disrupt progress within the business. Do you know which of your employees fall into which categories? More importantly, do you know how to improve these conditions?

As employees begin returning to the workplace from an extended period of home isolation, it is quite possible that we'll see a short-term bump in accidents and Workers' Compensation claims. It's going to take some time to restore old routines and form new ones in the offices, warehouses, and work spaces that have been quiet over the past few months. Mistakes are going to happen, and some of those mistakes are going to cause accidents that result in Workers' Compensation cases. How much time will you waste juggling all the different tools you use to manage those cases? With an integrated Human Capital Management solution like People Savvy HCM, the answer might be, "Not much."

You may have previously considered, or even had plans for, giving your employees the ability to work remotely. Due to the recent social changes in response to COVID-19, those considerations may have accelerated into a necessary reality to keep your business running during this time that we're all supposed to remain at home.

A few days ago, our I.T. Manager, Dionne, published a blog post about the various technologies that you might need to rely on so that your employees can get their work done seamlessly and securely from a remote location. That post addresses how people can stay connected to your organization. But how does your organization stay connected to them...informationally, culturally, practically?

A cloud-based Human Capital Management system offers many built-in solutions to keep your organization aware of your employees' activities and help them stay informed in the face of rapid change. The following features keep everyone working together, even when they're in different places.