HCM in the times of an epidemic – how to streamline work in your company and HR departments

Remote work is gradually becoming more and more popular. However, the current events have put us all in a position where remote work is not a possibility but a must. This is what we’re going to focus on in this article. In the present situation, facing the threat of COVID-19, our clients are able to make full use of HCM Deck solutions in order to continue and coordinate their training schemes as well as the work of their teams.

Home office is now recommended to all companies wherever it is possible to be implemented. In many organisations, cooperating with individual remote employees is nothing new, but adapting whole departments to working from home is a great challenge and a real experiment. In these conditions, what you need is a specialised product. Making good use of a helpful solution is crucial not only for work evaluation and scaling but also for the sake of the employees and teams themselves.

Let’s have a look again at the recommended procedures concerning remote staff management, published by HCAMag.com on February, 21st. These include:

1. Organising your team’s remote work in a transparent and open manner: make sure you keep your remote employees informed about all the safety measures and be ready to answer their questions promptly, as the number of questions will probably go up significantly in such situations.
2. Providing your remote employees with easy access to any necessary information and software – SaaS solutions seem to be the best ones in this case.
3. Being visible for your employees: make sure they are visible for their managers and HR management as well. Regular communication with the employees is crucial to maintain their constant involvement.
4. Remembering about your remote employees in the evaluation process and monitoring the company’s accounting liquidity.

There’s one more piece of advice worth adding: 

5. Despite the unusual circumstances, it’s a good idea to keep the workflow and training scheme in order. Self-isolation can affect the wellbeing of some of your employees, just like suspending the planned company events. Trainings don’t need to get cancelled (as this is quite costly as such) – they can be organised in a different way.

How can products like ours respond to the current needs and challenges?

I. We are a SaaS solution

What does this mean? This means all our products collect data in the cloud and operate in the cloud. Thanks to that, each employee is able to access the products purchased by their company from his or her own computer, smartphone, or tablet – anywhere. The employees don’t install anything – they just enter a hyperlink in the browser and log in, which allows them to use all the necessary functions.

The Customer Success department takes care of all our customers not only by helping them implement our products but also by reacting any time help is needed.

No matter if you organise courses or build a verifiable knowledge base, your employees will find it easier to find their way around if all the tools are accessible in one place. When you use multiple solutions, your employees need to learn to work with a number of platforms and programmes and sometimes use them all at once, which makes it difficult for them to concentrate. What is more, they are more likely to miss a notification or even forget their passwords and access details. That is not helpful at all. In the case of our product, the clients have access to one dedicated space which compiles all our active products. 

Meet the platform that will help you ensure the development of your employees.  Try HCM Deck

II. Our product: eLearning

Our e-learning software helps organise and standardise all the training materials in the company: online courses (SCORM, AICC), tests, stationary courses, files (PDF, DOC, PPT, videos, etc.), and articles in the knowledge base. 

Thanks to this functionality, you can create advanced learning paths and personalise access to the materials, resources, and data. You can even customise the notifications to make them sound more personal and adjusted to the company’s tone of voice. Besides, you can send mass notifications to selected groups within the platform (regular employees, managers, coaches, instructors).

What is equally important, HCM Deck will help you delegate particular tasks to your employees and maintain regular communication with them.

Last but not least, thanks to HCM Deck, you can implement fully automated onboarding, which is a perfect solution especially for new remote staff.

Try it out! Check the demo version.

III. Our product: Knowledge Base

It is good to have a reliable source of information related to the company, especially in the times of crisis. Sending email messages to a group consisting of several dozen employees won’t work. Firstly, they will waste their time scouring their inboxes for updates; secondly, there’s a risk they will follow outdated instructions. Thanks to a central and regularly updated source of information, you can prevent such situations.

In the article on the recommended procedures for HR departments during the epidemic, we described particular steps that must be taken if it turns out that an employee might be down with COVID-19. Tips number three and four went as follows:

3. To prevent a panic outbreak, provide all your employees with updates on the development of the situation […]. Inform your employees about the actual degree of risk […].
4. Inform your employees about the measures taken to ensure their safety and comfort in the workplace in the face of the existing threat.

The abovementioned information should be available to the employees in the knowledge base accessible on a platform which they all use.

Remember that the knowledge base is the best place to gather and organise all the company information for the employees, who can access it any time they need to. It doesn’t have to be all about the existing threat. This is where you can store the data concerning the company’s know-how, pre-training and post-training resources, onboarding documents, marketing materials, product descriptions, and other materials useful in your daily work.

Try it out! Check the demo version.

IV. Our products: Chat and Communication Channels

As we’ve already mentioned, if you manage remote workers, especially in such hard times, you need to be visible for your employees and make sure they are visible for their managers and HR management as well. Regular communication with the employees is crucial to maintain their constant involvement.

A company messenger will help you communicate smoothly with your employees. The chat forming a part of the HCM Deck platform is intuitive and easy to use; the users don’t need to switch between the tabs in their browsers, which can be really annoying. Moreover, HCM Deck Messenger is available as an app for smartphones (Android and iOS), so the employees can receive direct notifications to their phones and be immediately aware of them, even if they’re not working at the computer at the moment.

If you need to discuss a problem in a larger group, the chat makes it possible to create a group conversation for up to 30 users.

This solution is definitely better than emails which get mixed with external communication and SPAM and can be easily overlooked when you simply forget to refresh your inbox.

Try it out! Check the demo version.

There are, however, some issues, which must be announced to all the employees of a company at once and discussed with all the personnel, all the members of a particular department, or all the managers. They can be connected with some important questions or simply support the creation of organisational culture (for instance, by allowing the managers to publish real-time updates about the successful performance of particular tasks). To do this, you can use our Communication Channels. Apart from their purely practical purposes, they are great for building organisational culture and ensuring the involvement of your employees – especially when they are not able to be present in the company/shop/factory.

Try it out! Check the demo version.

V. Evaluation surveys

Remote work has lots of advantages but in some situations, it can also have a negative impact on the employees. The persons who are not present in the office may be unable to understand the meaning of particular decisions or even feel bad about being isolated. Moreover, they are unlikely to speak openly about this, but you should be able to notice the problem beforehand. This can be done by monitoring the problem through pulse-check surveys. Our Survey function will be ideal for this task.

VI. Our product: On-site courses (which don’t really have to take place on the site)

In fact, all the SaaS solutions that we offer are great for the era of remote work – even if their name suggests otherwise. The Training Courses product helps in managing a course at each stage: from inquiries and reports on training needs, to budget and schedule planning, to the evaluation of the process as a whole along with its certification. That doesn’t mean the course must take place in a classroom! One of our clients uses this function to arrange in-company webinars. This way, the client maintains the continuity of training even in the present situation, at the same time preventing the company’s staff from being infected with the coronavirus.

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All of the abovementioned solutions are literally made-to-measure for the current state of affairs. The truth is, though, that the popularity of remote work is growing regardless of the present crisis situation. Access to training platforms for employees should be a standard now. To quote Ed Smith: “If the employees cannot learn on the go, they will go”. And that’s a fact. We are all used to having access to all the knowledge we need, at once, at hand. This is made possible thanks to smartphones and SaaS solutions.