Devising effective strategies to engage employees is rarely straightforward. Fortunately, today’s organisations can bank on human resource management systems (HRMS) that streamline work flows, unite employees and facilitate critical decision-making.
HR Pro® from COL Limited, an IT services subsidiary of Wharf T&T, is a comprehensive HRMS solution that combines core functions, such as employee management, payroll, benefits, taxation, MPF, leave management and end-user reporting, with employee self-service (ESS) and HR analytics.
The web-based ESS platform supports leave management, personal-record updating and an e-community platform for sharing company announcements and policies.
“This is very useful for a company to deliver its messages to employees. It can be used to promote corporate social responsibility, spread company culture and give employees a sense of belonging in the company,” says Ruby Ng, head of sales operations, professional services, at COL.
“Every generation of employees wants to get information faster and do things quicker. An ESS platform that provides instant information access and leave management benefits them all,” she added.
Ng also emphasises the value of company transparency to employees. “It is important that employees – whether they’re from generation X, Y or are baby boomers – know about the organisation’s objectives and values. They want to know what the company is doing and its expectations of them. New hires especially will be able to quickly adapt to company culture through the e-community platform,” she adds.
The advanced function of HR Pro®, HR analytics, assists management and HR professionals in making timely, accurate and fact-based decisions. It enables in-depth analysis from regional to individual level and provides user-defined parameters for customised analysis. The dashboard’s graphic-data displays clearly show patterns, “so that HR professionals need not worry about which data they should analyse,” says Ng.
“The attendance dashboard shows various demographics such as age, gender, job title, department and even job nature. It not only tracks whether you are late or not, but also whether you always need [to work] overtime. This is critical for employers to promote a work-life balance. If most of your employees are working late and coming in late, perhaps it is time to adopt flexi-hours,” Ng says.
“From the talent-retention dashboard, HR professionals can see which group of people is performing well but is paid below market median. These people are at high risk of leaving the company. HR can also see those who are low-performing but are paid above market rate. This prompts HR to create development plans to improve their skills by giving them training or asking colleagues to mentor them,” she adds.
The performance-development programme “embeds the best practices of performance appraisal in an automatic platform, enabling practices to be implemented consistently throughout the whole organisation,” she says.
COL also offers the ESS platform as a standalone system or add-on module called We Pro®. Another product, DecisionHR®, is the standalone version of the HR analytics module.
