That is where HR software comes in. It enables you to monitor employee morale in real-time, provide ongoing support, and continually improve and adapt your company culture in this new digital age. Read on for a list of the top 10 ways HR software can improve your company culture.
1. Gauge Employee Morale
HR software provides tools to help you understand how your staff is feeling in the form of anonymous company-wide surveys. You can distribute them regularly to keep your finger on the pulse of employee morale. You can also send them out in turbulent times, such as during the launch of a new product or after a quarterly reporting period, to gauge employee reactions to a specific change or event.
While surveys can be an excellent tool for gauging employee morale, they only remain effective if employees feel that management acknowledges their feedback. If an overwhelming number of employees recommend a change, management should address this publicly and take steps to enact it. If employees do not feel heard, they will be far less likely to engage with the next round of employee surveys. To ensure that employee morale doesn’t start to suffer, survey your employees regularly and acknowledge any notable feedback.
2. Leverage Agile Performance Management
Traditionally, management sat down with team members on a quarterly, semi-annual, or annual basis to review performance, set goals, and provide feedback. While these reviews are better than nothing, this model is nerve-wracking for employees and time-consuming for managers. Technology has provided us with a better way to handle these tasks.
HR software enables you to maintain a constant back-and-forth cycle of feedback and coaching while removing the need to single out individuals for regular 1-on-1 sessions. Instead, thanks to instant communication channels and ongoing goal setting within HR software, managers and employees can both address any issues immediately.
This means that you can focus on what works in the moment rather than attempting to fix issues in retrospect during a quarterly or annual review. It also does away with a time-consuming and potentially unpleasant process.
3. Facilitate Training and Advancement
Job postings, educational materials, and even professional certifications can be made available to interested employees directly through your HR software. This takes a lot of the ambiguity out of corporate advancement and ensures that job postings are immediately made available to interested employees.
Having postings and relevant training publicly available fosters a culture of motivation and constant learning, which results in a healthy and positive relationship between the employee and their place of work. This also helps remote employees and employees at satellite locations feel less out of the loop since all advancement opportunities are made available online to both in-office and offsite employees.
4. Enable Work From Home and Hybrid Work
With work-from-home and hybrid work increasing in popularity, HR software plays a crucial role in bridging the gap between at-home and office workers. It brings the whole team together with lightning-fast communication, secure remote connections, and online HR processes.
Generally speaking, the more digital systems your company has, the friendlier it feels for remote workers. This is especially important in the case of HR since remote workers should never be cut off from essential functions like conflict resolution, payroll, and time-off requests.
If your office has a hybrid or at-home work component, it is essential to invest in HR software. This will reduce the division between in-office and at-home employees.
5. Motivate Staff Through Peer Recognition
Many HR platforms come with a reward point system, which can be used to recognize top-performing employees. Rewards can be purely in the form of recognition or come with more tangible prizes such as gift cards, pizza lunches, or days off. You can use them to recognize high achievers and celebrate team milestones. We strongly encourage you to reward the entire team when the company experiences a successful quarter or year. This fosters a culture where the team feels like they also prosper when the company does and better aligns corporate interests with their own. HR software has tools that enable you to do this effectively.
6. Find Staff to Fit Your Culture
Automatic screening and interview assistance are 2 integral parts of any HR program. They will help you locate employees that are a good fit for your existing corporate culture. This saves you time and effort, as you will not need to make as many changes to accommodate people who are already a good fit for your organization.
That said, your culture will still require active management in the form of listening to employee feedback and keeping staff motivated. Even well-adjusted employees will quickly lose motivation unless they feel heard and adequately rewarded.
7. Improve Communication
Inter-departmental communication is always a challenge and will only become more challenging as your company expands. Having an effective digital chat platform and a social media-like posting system ties your whole organization together. Good HR programs will provide both.
Management can make the best use of such a platform by being open and approachable. This flattens the traditional hierarchy, enabling everyone, including senior executives, to be directly accessible for front-line staff. Flattening the hierarchy like this can be helpful from an operational standpoint. Team members can quickly reach out to a relevant manager or expert if they require assistance or approval for certain actions. More importantly, it can also serve as a pipeline for feedback and ideas.
Customer-facing employees have firsthand experience with your customers' responses to changes, product launches, and company initiatives. Often, management is too far removed to experience this firsthand, so active feedback from front-line staff should be recognized, acknowledged, and taken seriously.
8. Gain Data-Driven Insights
HR software tracks everything and provides detailed reports to management. This can show you how many employees are engaging with the platform and in what way. If communication is purely related to immediate work with little feedback or engagement with HR initiatives, it may signal the need for a cultural overhaul. Employees that do not engage with surveys or initiatives have something holding them back, whether it’s that they feel intimidated, believe that they will not be heard, or something else entirely.
Direct and open communication, aided by your HR software’s chat and social media capabilities, is the best way to address these concerns. Reward employees for engaging with you, and make operational changes based on their recommendations. Make your employees aware that you are acting based on their feedback. This will build trust, drive engagement, and lead to a happier workforce.
9. Scale Culture Alongside Your Business
As your business grows, it is easy to lose the values that held your small, tight-knit team together back when it started. Culture can get diluted if no one puts in an effort to preserve it. New hires may feel that they are not part of the original in-crowd, and many other small rifts can eat away at your organization’s culture over time.
HR software can help keep everyone connected in real-time, regardless of time zone, team size, geographical location, or position within an organization. Leverage this to keep everyone in the loop and encourage managers to maintain the same culture whether you have a team of 20, 200, or 20,000 employees.
10. Encourage Employee Participation and Feedback
Culture is nothing without real buy-in from your team. It’s better to have 1 successful initiative with 100% participation than 100 initiatives with only 10% participation. You know you’ve really made it when your employees are engaging laterally with each other and not just vertically with management.
Once employees are actively participating on the HR platform’s social channels, collaborating in the chat, and recognizing each other with the rewards system, you know that they have internalized your cultural initiative and that it has taken on a life of its own.
This is the time to switch roles from creator to enabler. Encourage employees to share their own ideas, embrace their plans for internal initiatives, and join in celebrating their successes. If you have successfully navigated your team to this point, congratulations! Your hard work preserving your organizational culture has paid off with increased employee engagement and job satisfaction.
Conclusion
Maintaining a positive work culture in our increasingly isolated digital environment can be challenging. The rising trend of remote work can make this process even harder.
By leveraging the power of HR software, you can effectively bridge these divides, taking respect, acknowledgment, and reward into the digital age. The principles of fostering a great corporate culture have not changed, but with HR software, you get the technological tools to take these principles into the ever-changing environment of the modern workplace.
