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3 Tips to Help Your Company Embrace a BYOD at Work

September 26th, 2018 | Posted by ATS in Employee Productivity | HR | SmartPhones | Time and Attendance Canada | Time and Attendance Toronto - (Comments Off on 3 Tips to Help Your Company Embrace a BYOD at Work)

Bring your own device (BYOD) concept, has been gaining in popularity for several years and some companies have implemented them with varying degrees of success within their organizations. If your company is considering implementing it, make sure you understand both the pros and cons that come along with it.

3 Tips to Help Your Company Embrace a BYOD at Work

Here are three tips from Jane Harper’s article titled Creating an Effective Cell Phones at Work Policy

“Employee cell phone policy must be consistent: Policies are more prone to collapse when a group of employees are living above them or observing a different version of it. You don’t want to bring in misunderstandings, resentment among team members or be accused of unfair treatment – enemies of productivity. Keeping the policy consistent regardless of sexual orientation, race, age, level, etc, is what makes it effective.

Specify the smart devices employees can use: Is there no need for some smart devices to be allowed? Your policy will be ineffective if it restricts only cell phones. That means employees can bring in personal tablets or similar smart devices to still create the problem you are trying to avoid by limiting cell phones. The policy should categorically state the personal technology permitted during the time of restriction.

Consider safety, security, and privacy: While creating an employee cell phone policy, there is a need to consider safety, security, and privacy. Presenting your policy as a means to only stop employees from work time theft or to only maintain productivity level is not totally ideal. Employees should understand the dangers of using devices while operating machinery or driving. It should be clear that downloading infected attachments on their personal devices could shut down the entire office if passed into to the office network”.

Bring your own device concept (BYOD) will not work for all companies. Because, while the costs will likely be borne by the employee, in such a situation, what happens when that employee leaves the company? It’s obvious that the company the will want the data, and if there is no policy that was drafted to deal with this, it could end up being a bad break-up between employer and employee.

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To learn more, register for one of our weekly webinars, or download brochures or a pre-recorded demonstration. To speak to a representative, call; 866.294.2468.

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What Is The Point Of Ghosting Potential Candidates Anyway?

September 18th, 2018 | Posted by ATS in Careers | HR | Recruitment | Time and Attendance Blog, Workforce Management Software - (Comments Off on What Is The Point Of Ghosting Potential Candidates Anyway?)

The practice of ghosting in the world of work equates to some recruiters leaving job candidates guessing whether they are going to be hired or not, because the recruiter, has decided its best to simply ignore the candidate’s emails or phone calls. In other words, the candidate will eventually get the message that the company is not interested in their services. Wow! Who would want to work for company like that?

What Is The Point Of Ghosting Potential Candidates Anyway?

Of course, this worked well for the companies that employed this practice, for several years, until, the workforce demographic started to change with millennials, turning the tables on some companies and started doing the ghosting themselves.

In Riia O’Donnell article, Are your applicants ghosting you? Written for HR Dive succinctly describes this phenomenon. It reads in part;

“Ghosting has come full-circle. Dozens of websites are devoted to the complaints of candidates who’ve been ghosted by employers — never receiving acknowledgement for their application, no callback after an interview, being left hanging for a hiring decision. And now employers are seeing the same actions (or non-actions) taken against them.

Recruiters who hire for almost every level of employee, from entry-level to management, are experiencing the phenomenon. It runs the gamut from applicants who never respond to initial calls; those who miss interview appointments; candidates who hem and haw over offers, promising to ‘get back to you soon’ with an answer; and those who simply vanish off the face of the earth, never reporting for their first day on the job.In relationship-speak, ghosting is clear: no response is the response. As the market tightens, with competition getting even more fierce, ghosting may be a new paradigm.

How common is ghosting? The phenomenon may be learned behavior from when employers would ghost candidates. It may be that some candidates and employees believe its acceptable business etiquette. In a recent piece, LinkedIn suggested ghosting may be partly due to inexperience. Younger workers who aren’t accustomed to multiple job offers may simply not know how to say no politely and professionally.

To save time, some recruiters are starting to act like doctors or airlines, LinkedIn said — double booking interview slots, particularly for entry-level openings, in anticipation that up to half the candidates will no show. Others recommend hiring managers remain in a continuous recruitment mode to adjust for those who will walk off the job without notice. This, of course, could lead to more candidates being held at bay, which of course could lead to them believing they’ve been ghosted: bad manners coming full circle.

At its core, ghosting is a lack of communication. To minimize the chances of it happening at your company, it’s important to communicate in a way that invites job seekers and employees to be forthright. If a candidate can’t make the interview or won’t accept the offer, a recruiter can let them know he or she understands, but that the company would appreciate the honesty and professionalism of an upfront word. Another tack may be to gently let candidates know they would be eliminated from consideration for any future openings if they failed to make the interview or accept an offer without notification.

Bottom line: Job hunting is hard work and recruiters and hiring professionals alike should do a better job of communicating with job seekers. And, job seekers are not innocent themselves, since some of also practice ghosting. In the end, no one wins when both sides engage in the practice of ghosting each other.

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To learn more ATS, register for one of our weekly webinars, or download brochures or a pre-recorded demonstration. To speak to representative, call; 866.294.2468.

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Using Time Wisely Is Critical To The Success Of Your Organization

September 12th, 2018 | Posted by ATS in Cloud Computing | ERP | HR | Leave Management | Payroll | Software-as-a-Service (saas) Workforce Management Software | Time and Attendance Blog, Workforce Management Software | Time and Attendance Canada | Time and Attendance Toronto - (Comments Off on Using Time Wisely Is Critical To The Success Of Your Organization)

Happy and productive employees, is at the heart of an organization’s success. So, it goes without saying that using your employee’s time wisely is likely to help you reap favourable results. For instance, using an effective time and attendance application to track employee time will improve accurately boost morale and help you keep pace with regulatory compliance.

Using Time Wisely Is Critical To The Success Of Your Organization

For example, an ATS time and attendance tracking application analyzes employee work hours and provides you with real-time reporting. And, in addition to assisting payroll and HR personnel streamline labour costs, ATS time and attendance tracking application captures and reports on, the number of; sick, vacation, and paid-time-off days for each employee by week, quarter or per year and provides your company with the with tools to facilitate a smooth transition to payroll.

Additional benefits to ATS Time and Attendance includes:

Enhanced Efficiency: ATS time and attendance reduces the amount of time needed to perform routine tasks. For example, instead of asking payroll or HR personnel to manually input employee data into your payroll or ERP application, they can now submit that information electronically.

Reduction in Compliance Risk: ATS time and attendance eliminates the traditional and clucky time clock and welcomes best-of-breed manager and employee self-service dashboards, delivered in the cloud, complete with 21st HR and payroll functionality.

Control Attendance and Streamline Payroll Costs in the Cloud: ATS cloud computing time and attendance helps you reduce payroll costs with an intuitive and easy-to-use workflow processes- eliminates the burden of manual processes, thus improving operational processes.

To learn more, register for one of our weekly webinars, or download brochures or a pre-recorded demonstration. To speak to representative, call; 866.294.2468.

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Attention: Hiring Managers, Candidates Want Straight Answers

September 10th, 2018 | Posted by ATS in Careers | HR | Talent Management - (Comments Off on Attention: Hiring Managers, Candidates Want Straight Answers)

We have all, at some point in time, left an interview confident that we had aced it and thought that in all likelihood secured a second interview was imminent. Sometimes, this over confidence could have been as result of the cues, we got (or so, we thought at the time) from the hiring manager that made us believe we had shot at eventually landing the job.

Attention: Hiring Managers, Candidates Want Straight Answers

Prospective employees, according to John Hollon, from his article Hey Recruiters: Here’s How You Can Be Frank and Honest With Candidates want the truth.

If you are an HR or hiring professional, here are 7 tips from the article that you will find useful:

  1. Communicate early and often: The best organizations respond and communicate with candidates quickly when they first apply, and then as often as they can during the entire application and selection process. More is always best, and the more you keep them informed, the better they will feel about the process.
  2. Help candidates manage their expectations: I applied to a blind ad that turned out to be from a company that I used to work for and had been happy with me. When I was contacted about the job, I went through a whirlwind three days of interviews. Then, nothing for a week except a text on Day 8 saying they were far down the road with another candidate but hadn’t hired anyone yet. Well, they eventually did hire someone, but not me. My expectation was that they would at least tell me I wasn’t going to get the job. I’m still waiting.
  3. Communicate the outcome, no matter what it is: This past year, I’ve had two companies that said they wanted to hire me, then suddenly fell off the face of the Earth and would not respond to any of my communications asking what happened. Yes, it’s hard to give bad news and say that a situation has changed, but that’s what good companies do. Leaving people hanging isn’t being frank and honest; it’s never a smart approach.
  4. Don’t give false hope:Has anyone ever been contacted again by a company that tells them, “We’ll keep your application on file”? I’m sure it happens, but broken clocks are right twice a day too. Telling a candidate something like this gives false hope — and that’s wrong.
  5. Remember Tim Sackett’s rule for multiple rounds of interviews: How many interviews do you need to have to decide to hire someone? Well my friend Tim Sackett has this rule, and it’s pretty simple: “No one needs four rounds of interviews to decide if a candidate is the right candidate for your organization. A fifth round, or any number higher, is just adding insult to injury.” 
  6. Be completely clear with someone who really MIGHT be good candidate later. My son had a job interview for a position he didn’t get, but one of the executives at the firm told him, “We like you a lot. We’ll be in touch again because we have job opening up all the time.” THAT’S how to keep a rejected candidate engaged and do it right.
  7. At the end of it all, remember the Golden Rule. Yes, at the end of it all the Golden Rule still applies —treat others as you would like to be treated. If more companies handled candidates with that in mind, nobody would ever be talking and writing about how bad the candidate experience is.

Bottom-line: Treat all candidates with dignity and respect, even if you know you are not going to not hire them. Anything less says more about you and your company, not prospective employees.

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How to Build a Feedback Culture When Working Remotely

September 4th, 2018 | Posted by ATS in HR | Productivity | Scheduling | Telecommuting Employees | Time and Attendance Blog, Workforce Management Software - (Comments Off on How to Build a Feedback Culture When Working Remotely)

By Jock Purtle

A lot of things are changing about the way we work. The traditional 9-5 workday is slowly disappearing, or at the very least changing. And every year it seems more and more people are working remotely—currently around 43 percent of the workforce performs their jobs remotely in one way or another.

In general, there are a lot of advantages to remote work. Not only does it make it easier for people to achieve the coveted work-life balance, but remote workers actually tend to be more engaged and productive, when managed correctly.

How to Build a Feedback Culture When Working Remotely

But there are some things from a traditional office setting that remote work struggles to recreate, such as the ability to gather feedback from employees. Hearing people’s opinions about the way things work and the ideas they have for improving them is key to improving your business. But with less-frequent and less-personal digital communication replacing face-to-face interaction, some are wondering if feedback culture is in jeopardy.

In short: it’s not. Yet to make sure you can maintain this all-important feature of a successful, business, you do need to change some of your management techniques and adapt to the nature of a digital work environment. Consider the following to help you build a feedback culture when working remotely.

Hold Regular Meetings
In a remote work environment, efficiency is king. Having flexible work hours means people want to organize their days in the manner that makes them the most productive. And we all know people’s opinions of less-than-productive, something that makes people want to cut them out completely.

But you’ve got to avoid this. Just because people are working remotely, it doesn’t mean they are less important. You still need to maintain constant contact with them, especially if you’re hoping to build a culture of feedback into your remote work environment. You can certainly reduce their frequency, choosing to hold them once a month instead of bi-weekly, for example. Less contact discourages people from speaking out and making suggesting, stunting the development of a feedback culture.

During these meetings, make sure to actively solicit feedback. Ask people questions about your processes and about their jobs so as to encourage a dialogue. Saying just “Anything on your mind?” doesn’t promote dialogue, so you need to work extra hard to fight make it happen.

Give People an Outlet
No matter how often you tell people they can feel free to speak their mind, they are going to be more hesitant around management. You could have an incredibly open organizational hierarchy, but people will rarely say exactly what’s on their mind.

As such, to really develop a culture of feedback in your remote work, it’s important to establish another way for employees to express themselves. For example, you could set up an ombudsman program where people can discuss what’s bothering them under the protection of anonymity. Or, you could outsource your entire HR organization to a professional employer organization, streamlining this aspect of your business while also giving people an outside entity to speak to.

When you go this route, you can have this third party report on the general thoughts and feelings of your employees, which will make people, feel more comfortable that they won’t be singles out or reprimanded for speaking out against the way things are done.

Follow Through on Suggestions
If you want people to feel as though their opinions are valued—something critical to creating a feedback culture—then you need to make sure you follow through when people bring things to your attention. Of course you don’t need to implement every suggestion, but you do need to try.

In the cases where change just simply is not possible, make sure to discuss why this is the case. During your monthly meeting, let people know you’re aware of their concerns, and then explain to them why their suggestions cannot be accommodated, perhaps indicating at the same time that you’re going to continue to look for alternatives.

If you do this, then your employees will be able to see your words as more than just words. It will become clear to them that you care about what they have to say, and that your request for feedback is not just lip service but rather a genuine attempt at including them in the running of the business.

Work Hard to Build Trust with Remote Workers
Remote workers tend to fall out of the loop. Since they’re not in the office, it’s common to “forget” about them. And when this happens, you can be sure that they are not going to want to offer any feedback.

But just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Make sure to spend time getting to know your remote workers by asking them about things other than work. Learn about their families and their hometowns, and do your best to cultivate a relationship as if saw this person in everyday in the office. Sure, it won’t be the same, but if you show people you care and that you trust them, then you can expect them to open up more when it comes time to solicit feedback.

Another way to build trust is by managing remote workers in a hands-off manner. Telecommuters value their flexibility, so if you harp over them at all times, then they will interpret this as an encroachment on their autonomy, which can create feelings of resentment and distance. Try to let people do their thing and enjoy the benefits of remote work, and you’ll soon see how this can open up the flow of communication and make it easier for you to learn about people’s thoughts and opinions.

Remote Workers Can Do It All
The most important thing to remember is that remote workers are the same as traditional workers in every sense. They may operate with different schedules and you may need to manage them a bit differently, but they are fully capable of doing everything your in-office employees can do, including offering feedback that can help make the company better.

About the Author: Jock Purtle is the founder and CEO of Digital Exits, an online brokerage service specializing in the buying/selling and appraisal of online businesses. He’s been an internet entrepreneur since he launched his first business when was 19-years-old, meaning his entire career has taken place online. He’s an expert on managing remote teams and enjoys sharing his experiences to help others.

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