How Do You Maintain Team Discipline During The Holidays?

Team Discipline

Managing a team especially in the last quarter of the year can be a problem. Aside from dealing with daily tasks such as attendance, absences, shift schedules, leaves, and schedule adjustments, you’d also have to make sure that you are providing discipline and motivation. And more than often, it can be very difficult to provide these especially in the months where attrition rate is higher than the rest of the year.

The work is no joke, especially for companies who are in the growth or expansion phase like in the business process outsourcing industry. According to a recent labor statistics report, the turnover rate of jobs in Metro Manila alone for Q3 2016 is at 3.67 percent since 2011. When you compare it to Q2 2016 (at 3.20 percent) and Q2 2016 (2.30 percent), the increase is pretty significant.

Traditional and Progressive Discipline

In a typical organization, traditional discipline involves building enough documentation of the erring employee’s actions to justify a disciplinary action. The communication style is similar to how a parent scolds a kid for eating dessert before a meal and is usually uncomfortable. It’s also time-consuming as well, considering the number of sit-downs a superior would need to allow time to discuss the infraction.

In the last few years, HR managers prefer this popular approach: progressive discipline. Progressive discipline involves four steps (verbal warning, written warning, final written warning or suspension, and termination) to address disciplinary problems like tardiness, excessive absences, or infractions that affect team productivity.

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Great Work Cultures breaks down the differences between traditional and progressive discipline.

While there are some good points in traditional and progressive discipline, they both do not always encourage a positive response from erring employees. Even with drawing up a standard warning letter can already build animosity, more so when you add this particular line (or something similar to this) to legally protect your company in the instance you have to meet out a disciplinary action:

“Failure to correct the problem may result in further disciplinary action, up to and including possible termination.”

Policies are policies, sure, but even the best members of your team or organization might react to a disciplinary action negatively. In the same labor statistics report, people who quit their jobs actually outnumber those who got terminated (7.94 percent to 2.94 percent).

Personal Accountability

There will always be that employee who wants to take advantage of the team and company’s expense. But you wouldn’t want to alienate the rest of the team and foster an environment that could disrupt productivity. So how then can you carry out your HR duties without acting like the “Judge Dredd”? You have to share accountability with your team.

Sharing accountability will make every employee feel part of the team or organization’s success. Showing how your employees can have a hand in working towards specific goals (zero lates and absences, staffing compliance) will make the organization more efficient and productive.

Here are the tools to help you accomplish these:

1. Easier Clock-Ins

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At PayrollHero, your employees can clock in or out via #MyClock Web, TeamClock Web, or TeamClock Chrome App,  #MyClock for iOSand TeamClock for iOS/Android.

Most companies use fingerprint or ID scanners for employees to clock in and out for their shifts. This requires an employee to be physically present to carry this out, and reduces instances of “buddy punching.”

But for growing companies, a convenient and cost-effective way to allow team members to clock in using a web or mobile app. These apps utilize Internet connection and a camera, and is a godsend for those who are physically outside of the office but are on official businesses.

2. Time and Attendance Software

Time and Attendance

Employee clock in devices and apps are usually paired with a time and attendance software that has both an employee and manager interface. Employees can not only check their logins, they can also check any log in discrepancies that could have been resulted in device or software issues and resolve them using the interface in real-time. This eliminates attendance errors that could translate to payroll disputes and encourage shift accountability.

As for HR personnel, most time and attendance software have features that would notify, process and resolve any employee issues or requests. HR can also set up an automated email drip or response whenever an employee sends a request or a response. A feature like this helps foster and maintain open communication without spending so much time crafting every email response.

3. Analytics

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A time and attendance software like PayrollHero comes with data analytics that could provide real-time productivity metrics to both employee and HR. To the employee, there’s nothing more satisfying than checking out your progress in real time and having access to data that would help meet productivity goals.

HR will not only have access to employee data but will be presented with organizational data that’s easy to interpret. This way, you can spot out employee behaviors, recurring trends, or company issues that you can use to either improve your current company policies or create a highly-receptive employee motivation program.

Final Words

However you see an erring employee, remember that the rest of your team are still responsible adults. They are as much capable as you to address a problem once it is brought to their attention. Traditional and progressive discipline could work, but tools can help build a build a culture of accountability where employees to have the confidence to take charge of finding a solution.

New Feature on the PayrollHero App!

We have a new feature on the PayrollHero app!

Our Devs (developers) are constantly working towards improving functionality of the app. To that end, we have a new feature to enhance a human resource manager’s tools. It’s a simple addition to the app that allows the HR manager or payroll administrator to:

  1. check the GPS coordinates of employees who are clocking in.
  2. record which device they are clocking in from

The feature sits in the Employees tab and under the Rollcall Days section. You can see the list of days that the employee has clocked in, their IP address, GPS coordinates linking to Google maps and the device that they used: TeamClock or #MyClock. If there are any issues with clocking in with a particular device, the HR admin can point out what specific device the problem arose from. This information can also be used as Business Intelligence to make decision on staffing and installing the best devices in your outlets.

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The feature is already live for all PayrollHero users!

Customer Happiness Tools – Being Ridiculously Client Focused

Customer happiness is essential to everything we do at PayrollHero. One of our favourite catchphrases is “ridiculously client focused”, which means that we want to devote our resources towards making our clients happy. Everything else is secondary. And we aren’t the only ones with that perspective.

Over the last week, the PayrollHero team has been traveling all over the world. While spending an unnatural amount of your time in airports, you can’t help but notice the little things that pique your interest. The pictures that you see are from the London and Dublin airports, where customer feedback stations have been installed. Whether the feedback is about security, bathroom cleanliness (as in the case of Singapore’s Changi airport) or customer service, the idea behind these tools is to ensure that the customer experiences the best that we have to offer.

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Dublin Airport Security Feedback

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London Airport Security Feedback

The customer feedback tool can be extended to any service. Restaurants, retail stores, bathrooms, anything that involves customer interaction. With data analytics, you can do more than just find out how your outlet is performing. You can reward those who make it happen.

In that vein, PayrollHero created the TeamClock customer feedback tool. Imagine this: the sports apparel retail store you own is visited by a customer five minutes before it is time to shut down. While any other employee would request the customer to return the next day, this employee – let’s name him Bob – decided to let the customer in. Over the next 30 minutes, the customer went through your store and made the biggest purchase of the week, while Bob patiently helped him. While walking out, the customer spent a few seconds on the iPad sitting on your counter, typing out comments about the best customer service he has ever received.

Using the Xray Insights app, you noticed that a particular outlet received excellent customer feedback. With a closer look, you realized that the same employee – Bob – has been consistent with winning awesome feedback from customers. Not only do you have information about how well that outlet is doing, you also know who has contributed towards that outlet’s success.

This makes for an easy and efficient way to reward reliable employees. With data to back you up on how capable your employees are, you can make decisions on whom to promote, to manage other staff or simply reward at the end of the week. This approach allows your employees to be ridiculously client focused as well.

So this is what we have been working on at PayrollHero. The customer feedback tool is currently in beta stage. We will keep you posted with updates and changes that we introduce to the app. Till then, we hope the feedback you are receiving helps you identify the Bobs that make your outlet ridiculously client focused.

Want to get the PayrollHero Customer Feedback tool for your business? Reach out to us today and we would be pleased to speak further about how we can get your establishment setup to gather real time data.

5 Reasons Why Smiling Increases Productivity

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At PayrollHero, we help cultivate a happy working culture by having employees start and end each day with a SMILE!

How?

Our selfie TeamClock captures your amazing smiley faces as you clock in and out of your office or work station. Gone are the mundane punch cards! We can uplift your mood by having you coming to and leaving work feeling much more invigorated, motivated and Happier!

Smile Every Mile…

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Did you know smiling from real emotions or even faking it has been scientifically proven to lower heart rate levels and decrease stress? (Source)

 

 

 

Here’s 5 reasons why smiling contributes to higher productivity:

  1. Happy people work better with others. People who have happy energy are a lot more fun to be around and consequently have better working relationships with others. In fact, researchers have found that happiness is contagious. Nicholas Christakis, a professor at Harvard Medical School explains that “Everyday interactions we have with other people are definitely contagious, in terms of happiness”. He says that when one person is happy, the social network effect can increase up to 3 degrees- meaning friends of friends.
  2. Happy people are more creative. Productivity means being able to come up with new ideas. If your job depends on developing new ideas, then you have to be happy at work. Check out this study by Teresa Amabile for proof. She says that:“If people are in a good mood on a given day, they’re more likely to have creative ideas that day, as well as the next day, even if we take into account their mood that next day.
    There seems to be a cognitive process that gets set up when people are feeling good that leads to more flexible, fluent, and original thinking, and there’s actually a carryover, an incubation effect, to the next day.”At PayrollHero we keep customers on their toes as we keep coming up with fresh features to optimize time, attendance, scheduling and payroll for businesses.
  3. Happy people fix problems better. No problem is a mountain too high for the engineering team at PayrollHero. We will gear up and fix any problems. A recent study has proved that “a way to improve software developers’ productivity and software quality is to focus on people and provide incentives to make developers satisfied and happy”. Happy programmers are better problem- solvers. Science says so!

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    Adventure Engineers in Danang, Vietnam

  4. Happy people get sick less often. Getting sick is a productivity killer. If you don’t like your job, you’re more susceptible to have major diseases including ulcers, cancers and diabetes. This is especially so for women, where one study has assessed the impact of job strain on the health of 21,290 female nurses in US and found that those who are at health-risk are those who didn’t like their job (source). So, being happy with your job prevents you from being sick and burning out.
  5. Happy people make better decisions. People who are happier make better, informed and consistent decisions. An article in the Journal of Consumer Research determined that mood influences the very basic element of decision making- whether we like something or not.

Curious about how PayrollHero can create happier work environment and improve productivity for your business. Come to our FREE in-house event! 

PayrollHero In-House Event: Retail Hero, 14 May 2015

Click me! Get tickets on Eventbrite