March 18, 2016

A few weeks ago, we rolled out our leave management application. After receiving feedback from our clients, we are releasing a new feature to the application – custom leave types.

When an employee is applying for leave, she needs to enter a type of leave – maternity, child care, leave, etc. Previously, we added all the most popular types of leaves that were applicable, as directed by the ministries of manpower (or their equivalent) in Singapore and the Philippines. However, Singapore and the Philippines each have 8 different types of leaves. Moreover, individual companies may record the same leave under a different name.

To make the system more flexible, the app now allows you to set your own custom leave type. Employees may choose from these custom types when they apply for leave. This benefits the manager when there is a change in the rules and leave types are added or removed. It also allows managers to set what leave types are most commonly used by their employees instead of a long list of types that the government has stipulated but no one actually uses.

A manager can add an unlimited number of leave types. Every type must be unique. Leave types can also be renamed at any point of time. Finally, if a leave type is not used anymore, it can be archived and accessed later.

We hope the custom leave type will be helpful and we’d love to hear feedback on it!

We recently announced that PayrollHero can generate employee happiness reports for our clients. What does that really mean?

PayrollHero takes in data in the form of selfies that employees have clicked on the app. The selfies are used to evaluate employee happiness by looking for certain metrics and correlating them to other selfies. For example, smiling for photos results in a different set of facial expressions than a serious face.

We know what you’re thinking. What if an employee smiles but isn’t really happy. Faking a smile is not hard and the metrics used to evaluate a real smile are the same as those used to evaluate a fake one. An employee could easily fool the app into thinking that the employee is happy when she really isn’t. Well, faking a smile has its own merits.

A Harvard study showed that a smile – whether fake or real – can be uplifting for one’s emotional well being. Granted, a momentary smile for a selfie certainly does not equate to happiness in life because a smile can be fake; but the act of smiling itself is a positive way to cope with sadness. Our preconceived notion that happiness causes us to smile is not always true. In fact, the reverse of that can work as well. A fake smile may be a better path towards happiness than others. It signals a willingness to stay positive in difficult times instead of suppressing ill feelings.

How does this relate to happiness reports? Well, from a high level, the happiness reports suggest a correlation between smiling and happiness and therefore suggest which employee or work site is the happiest. But with deeper inspection, the reports find a correlation between smiling and employees’ positive attitude. As a manager, you should consider the happiness report as a way of measuring positive sentiments in your workforce.

Finally, PayrollHero can use this data against employee records to find a trend in employee behavior. We can provide insight into whether happier employees are generally more punctual; whether unhappy employees experience a longer commute to work everyday; whether the happiest worksite equals highest earnings. This information is unique to PayrollHero’s data. Companies can leverage on it to make more informed decisions on what it takes to improve their bottom line.

Want to learn more? Contact us to chat further.

Daily Archives: March 18, 2016

Leave Management Custom Leave Type

The New Employee PayrollHero Happiness Report