Consistent and strong communication are at the heart of every successful organization — and face-to-face communication is a big part of achieving this. However, while the benefits of a one-to-one exchange cannot be ignored, you’d be hard pressed to find a business that doesn’t rely on technology in some form or another to help them communicate more effectively.
At B2E Solutions, we’re no stranger to communication. Our people excel at it, and our human capital management (HCM) solution, Workforce Ready, is decked out with an impressive amount of communication friendly features. There’s more than we can share here, but let’s dive into a few fan-favorites that’ll make your communication efforts that much better, faster and easier.
1. Notifications
Whether you use our Payroll solution on its own or you leverage our entire Workforce Ready suite, our Notifications feature will hands down make your life easier. Notifications allow you to automate communications based on a specific action or trigger. For example, if you want to notify employees when their pay statements are available, you don’t need to email them one by one. Rather, you can set up a Notification that automatically triggers an email, text message or Workforce Ready inbox communication based on payment dates or other parameters. You can also tie Notifications to more complex workflows to improve communication at various points in a multi-step process. For instance, you can set up Notifications to alert different managers when it’s their turn to complete a performance review or let employees know when a time-off request has been approved.
2. Tags
Personalizing your communications helps employees feel like they are more than a number. But, when you’re automating messages or sending emails at scale, it’s more challenging to give employees that reassuring one-to-one feeling. Tags, a helpful neighbor to Notifications, allows you to insert recipient- or situation-specific information into communications. By selecting from a list of preset Tags, you can quickly automate the inclusion of custom information, such as dates, gender pronouns, names, employee ids, cost centers and more. And, although personalization goes well beyond inserting a name or location, Tags are an easy, automated way to pop a little customization into automated messages.
3. Announcements
Sometimes you need to get the word out. Announcements allow you to broadcast free-form communications to an intended audience. Want to announce the release of a new employee handbook? It’s as simple as customizing a message, filtering who it’s visible to, attaching your handbook, and scheduling your Announcement. From here, the right employees will see your Announcement in multiple locations — on their Workforce Ready dashboard, as a pop-up at login, and within the navigation menu. There’s a ton of flexibility; we’ve seen companies communicate everything from timesheet reminders to wacky office days, trainings and more.
4. Events
Similar to Announcements, the Events feature in Workforce Ready helps you communicate important happenings to an intended group of system users. However, Announcements and Events are not one in the same. Unlike Announcements, Events do not have native broadcast capabilities like pop-up and dashboard reminders. Rather, Events provide employees with a one-stop location within Workforce Ready to access a company calendar with the activities, trainings, and date-specific affairs that apply to them. With this said, you can always put a little rocket fuel behind your Events by tying them to Notifications, asking employees to add an Events widget to their dashboard, or incorporating them in your Company Hub … which leads us to our next point.
5. Company Hub
A Company Hub is a dashboard template that you can customize and update with corporate communications, such as company event information, videos, news and announcements, documents for employees, your mission statement, corporate policies, employee accomplishment highlights, and more. You can truly make it your own, giving your employees a designated location to access company information and critical corporate communications.
6. Attestation
Using our Time & Labor solution’s attestation functionality, employers can customize questions (as well as response options) and pose them to employees at a convenient point of data collection — whether that’s at the InTouch time clock, in the HCMToGo mobile app, Workforce Ready Web Clock, or any combination of the three.
Workforce Ready’s attestation capabilities are great for gathering employee feedback on compliance-related questions, such as whether or not an employee was given their required rest break. However, it’s also great for engaging employees with communication prompts like, “Congrats, you made it to the end of the week. Did you have a good work-life balance this week?” Or, “We’ve detected an issue with the timesheet you submitted. Please confirm your hours worked.” Like many of the communication features in Workforce Ready, attestation is incredibly flexible. Determine what you want to communicate or what you need your employees to communicate to you — and let our automated attestation solution do the rest.
7. Checklists
If you use our Human Resources solution, you’ll have access to Checklists. Checklists allow you to create to-do lists and assign them to employees. This feature not only helps you communicate action items, but also track if requests are in-progress, completed or overdue. This feature is a dream come true for managers that need an organized tool to manage projects and employee accountability. You can make Checklists as simple or complex as you want. Send a one-time checklist to track that employees download and complete a training material. Or, build out comprehensive onboarding Checklists to ensure that new hires complete each and every task that’s needed to hit the ground running.
8. Visual reports
With real-time visibility into workforce analytics, you can take the guesswork out of people management. However, data can be overwhelming. If you and your team have to comb through lines and lines of information, it’s tough to understand and then communicate what needs to happen to move your people and your business forward. That’s why Workforce Ready takes a visual-first approach to data. With our visual reporting capabilities, users can pull interactive charts and graphs directly into their homepage or a custom dashboard, helping them understand, interpret and communicate information faster. From here, it's easy to schedule email reports to keep managers and employees up to date — and the communication flowing!
9. Mobile app
With the ever-increasing number of people using mobile devices on a daily basis, it’s more important than ever for businesses to prioritize mobile-friendly technologies. Our mobile app, HCMToGo, provides managers and employees with on-demand access to Workforce Ready. Not only can users accomplish key payroll, HR and timekeeping tasks right from the convenience of their mobile device, they can communicate wherever and whenever. Want on-the-go employees to complete a questionnaire? Just schedule your Announcement instructing employees to do so, and they can conveniently complete your request right from their mobile device. Employees can even set their mobile notification preferences to receive updates like shift-swap requests and important manager approvals.
We are here to help!
Workforce Ready can help you automate, scale and streamline time-consuming communications. It takes care of the tedious and repetitive communications, so you have more time to engage and collaborate with the people that move your business forward. If you have questions about how to take advantage of all the great Workforce Ready features we discussed, send us a note today!
Editor's note: Updated May 18, 2022 to reflect new product features.
