Got Problems At Work? Don’t Resign Yet

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It always starts with a feeling. You feel that your current job is not utilizing you to your full potential. Or you feel that your superior is not sharing opportunities where you can apply for a lateral or higher position. Or you feel that it’s okay to be a little more reckless and cut corners on work or incur more lates, absences than usual since they don’t pay attention to you anyway.

Then that feeling turns into something you can’t shake off. Your superior would no longer share or confide work opinions with you. Some of your work responsibilities have been endorsed to a teammate. Instead of commendations, you start getting an infraction or warning letters from HR. You’re getting excluded from meetings you used to attend before. Conversations with colleagues are no longer warm, and people you’re close to are already advising you to look for new job openings instead.

If you have experienced some of these things, it’s more likely that you are on thin ice at work. But don’t resign yet.

Resign or Stay?

If you think resignation is a pragmatic solution, you’re not alone. In fact, most employees opt to quit their jobs when things don’t go their way.

But quitting doesn’t usually solve your problems at work, and it is most likely that you’d be encountering the same issues in another job if you don’t know how to deal with it in your current job.

So before you write up your resignation letter, ask yourself these questions first:

1. Do I have the money to keep me afloat until my next job?

Money is usually a good reason for you to stay right now. It is definitely a solid reason, especially if you are receiving a hefty paycheck or a salary amount that covers the bills and allows you to enjoy certain conveniences.

But for some people, they usually hang on to their current job until they have built enough savings to support them the moment they resign and move on to the next job.

2. Is my unhappiness at work because I am unsatisfied with what I currently do?

While a hefty paycheck is a good motivator, doing a job you hate will obviously burn you out in the long run. If you tried applying for a higher position in the company but got rejected, you should probably think about your current potential and what skills/higher education you need to acquire to be more desirable. Staying put in your current job could be extra points for you if your company values loyalty, so the next best thing to do is to put in extra work on skills improvement.

The best people to assess your potential are:

  • Your current team lead/supervisor
  • HR; and
  • The current team lead/member if the role requires being transferred to a different department.

PayrollHero Daily Pulse

Daily Pulse is a TeamClock iOS beta feature on PayrollHero that measures the team’s KPIs (key performance indicators). Data mined by Daily Pulse could help you and your team lead or supervisor assess your main strengths and improvements needed to be better at your job and be a potential candidate for a position you might want to pursue in the future.

3. Will my stay at my current company open doors for me for my career?

Considering your company’s influence is still an important assessment to make when deciding to stay. Staying in your current job at a top company for a while longer is a good idea, but it doesn’t mean you have to rely on your company’s reputation alone.

Build a referral network of people — establish relationships with people who can speak to your core personality and strengths and your on-the-job conduct and work-related skills. While your supervisor or team lead could be a perfect character reference, try to seek managers or executives who can attest to your work ethic.

4. Do I need to stay to master certain skill sets that would be great for my career progression?

It’s tough to be positive about your current job when you don’t like to do it or feel that you are not progressing from it. But think about your current job as an opportunity to master skills that would be vital to your career progression.

In order to do so, you first need to change the way how you view your work. For example, taking calls may not look like a skill to you, but being a master of customer service is. Inputting data might be a mundane task, but being an Excel or spreadsheet expert could be the very edge you’ll have a future position you want.

5. Are you feeling uncertain about your job security?

People who have received infractions at work typically take the easier way out by preempting HR’s move to fire you and resigning instead. This way, they avoid getting bad marks on their record that could affect their employment chances for a different company.

On the other hand, there is a way to turn your situation around. We’ll let you in an industry secret: it’s cheaper for even big companies to keep people than hiring new staff to replace you. Unless your company does not foresee the need of keeping the position or would need to lay off people, or you have done something that accounts as a criminal offense, they will want to work with you to see to it that you’d remain to be an effective member of the team.

If you’ve been missing too many work days, messed something up at work, or been incurring too many lates, it’s always best to reach out and have an open, frank communication with your supervisor or team lead. This way, you can both work out a plan on how to overturn your infractions and improve your current performance.

PayrollHero Analytics

Your supervisor or team lead can provide a data-backed assessment of your work performance using Analytics, a PayrollHero tool. Analytics provides insights about employee attendance so you and your supervisor or team lead could come up with strategies like flexible or behavior-centric scheduling and site assignment.

Final Words

People flounder in their jobs every now and then, so not doing great at work is not a unique problem. The best thing for you to do if you are in this position is to establish first what you really want to do, assess steps on how to get there and tough it out to get a solid handle on things in your job you don’t really like. There’s no point in resigning if you’re jumping into a new one that you end up regretting over.

At PayrollHero, we believe in creating a happy workplace for both employees like you and your boss. We develop products and features specifically designed to create an environment where you can reach your potential to do not just great things for your company, but also to your career.

6 Ways To Increase Employee Happiness

happy-employeeWe have been working to understand Employee Happiness across our clients at PayrollHero and have come out with our first report to help our clients make changes based on data.

The first version of our Employee Happiness Reports have started going out to our clients and you can see an example of one here:

We are working to understand employee happiness and how it relates to commute distance, wage, weather, who you work with and much more.

Inc Magazine wrote an article that gives you actionable ways to boost employee happiness;

  1. Celebrate Your Employees’ Individual Milestones
  2. Allow Employees To Express Their Individuality
  3. Foster Growth
  4. Implement a Two-Way Feedback System
  5. Recognize Them
  6. Give Breaks

Check out their complete article here.

How Happy Are Your Employees? Want to Know?

How happy are your employees? Do you know? Do you think it matters?

employee happiness reportWhat if you could tell how happy your employees are. Would that change how you make decisions? Would you adjust your operating procedures?

Today we are pleased to announce the Employee Happiness Reports.

“Optimizing Work Productivity with Happiness!” ​is the core ideal that drives PayrollHero. We’re always looking for ways to measure, track and help clients improve productivity, performance and happiness across their organizations.

We have begun a deep analysis of thousands and thousands of clock photos to analyze the sentiment of the photos. We can then correlate the happiness ratings across other metrics like commute distance, wage, location, plus much more.Optimizing Work Productivity with Happiness

Some clients have begun receiving their beta Employee Happiness Reports and we will continue to work with them to understand what data is useful, how it can be actioned and what else should be included.

Some of the questions we are working to answer are;

  • Are my happiest employees the highest paid?
  • Which of my retail locations are happiest?
  • Do my employees commute times effect their happiness?
  • Are my happiest locations my top revenue generators?

Already a PayrollHero client? Want to know the answers as they pertain you your business? Contact us and we’ll get you your first report free.

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Continue reading

Improve Your Restaurant Performance with HR Analytics – FREE Webinar from PayrollHero

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Whoever said that nothing in this world is free was lying!

Because on December 8, 2015. At exactly 11 AM (UTC +8), Singapore Standard Time, we’ll be hosting an epic webinar that talks about leveraging HR Analytics to improve restaurant performance.

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In this webinar, restaurant owners will learn about the following:

  • Learn how to respond to business in advance using predictive analytics for HR
  • Improving organizational performance
  • Optimizing talent supply chain
  • Benefits of HR Analytics to your restaurant’s sales performance
  • Data-driven decision making

And many more! 

We don’t want to spill too much info, but we’d really love it if you could join our webinar

If you’re a restaurant owner, or an HR director / manager of a restaurant, this is a webinar that you definitely shouldn’t miss. 

We’re going to provide content that you can implement and leverage right after the webinar.

The best part about this webinar is that you will have instant learning in just 27 minutes of content!

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^ It’s really that simple. You’ll be able to implement your learnings immediately and make a direct impact to your restaurant’s positive performance.

So to all restaurant owners / HR personnel, do spread the word and save the date:

December 8, 2015 (Tuesday), 11:00 AM (UTC +8) Singapore Standard Time

This webinar will surely be worth your while. Save your seat below!

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We’ll see you there!

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.

Cloud Computing Part II: 5 Companies that are Changing the way Business is Done

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As a sequel to our previous post on cloud computing, we thought we would give you an idea of how cloud computing is being used by companies to help businesses in South East Asia. Below we have 5 companies that are changing the way businesses function. Some of them are catered towards bringing in more consumers through the door while others are helping business move day-to-day operations into the cloud so that businesses can spend more time and money on their core competencies.

Loyalty Apps

Perx: This Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software collects loyalty cards into one neat app. For a consumer, you earn points every time you purchase something. Accumulation of points leads to rewards. Perx says that consumers spend 7 times more with the app than without it. Some of the merchants under Perx’s belt are Subway, Joe and Dough’s, Maki San and Salad Stop.

For you, a merchant, Perx gives a huge client database by putting you on their map. The company uses Amazon Web Services to control all the data it collects. Perx’s data analytics gives information about consumption trends, how much a consumer would spend on lunch, where they are located: in short, everything you would like to know about your customer. Perx offers this wealth of data to all its merchants for a fee. As an added marketing platform, Perx features companies on their email and blog which is sure to boost your presence in the community.

Foursquare: While Foursquare does not collect virtual loyalty cards, it uses its core competency – geolocation data and services – in order to bring businesses to consumers. For businesses that claim their names in the Foursquare directory, all rewards and deals that are offered will be displayed to the user.

Inventory Management

TradeGecko: Singapore’s leading user-friendly inventory management software uses the Cloud. It helps retailers and wholesalers to manage multiple warehouses and the entire supply chain without using conventional methods like excel. TradeGecko allows remote monitoring which helps retail managers to control operations at multiple locations. TradeGecko also has Xero integrated into it to digitize the accounting end of the business as well.

Unleashed: Similar to TradeGecko, Unleashed provides analytics on turnover rates, overstocked items, managing margins across different channels (retail, wholesale, e-commerce) and all this in real time.  Unleashed also integrates other Cloud solutions to its app.

Food Delivery Apps

Slurp: Created by Silent Mode, Slurp is the Malaysian version of Foodpanda. It uses cloud based POS systems that help restaurant owners process delivery orders. While Slurp does not deliver food, it has a data analytics service along with a customer app and a waiter app, all in the effort to make ordering food a smoother and error-free process.

Meetup on Growth Hacking in Asia

silicon straitsYesterday, Aulia and I stepped out of the office after work and headed to Ayer Rajah Crescent for a Meetup. It was on Mastering SEO to Boost User Acquisition, hosted by Growth Hacking Asia and Silicon Straits Co.Lab. Growth Hacking Asia is an organisation that advises Asian startups on how to succeed. The speaker was Jeff Li, SEO Manager at Expedia Asia and Head of SEO at AirAsiaGo. Jeff gave us some invaluable insight that we thought we should share and spread the love a little bit.

Jeff first explained to us how Google crawlers work. Page rankings are based on how relevant the page is according to Google. The factors that make up relevance involve keywords, links that lead to your page, quality of links, responsiveness of your page and site structure to name a few.

While keywords are important, Jeff says:

“SEO strategy has shifted from
keyword focused to topic focused”

Content in your website is key to bringing in traffic. The search user’s journey begins with the Search Interest, then to the Search Engine Results Page, followed by the landing page and finally the conversion from just a page visit to the action that we want the user to take. Therefore, having content that is relevant and useful to your target audience will get more hits and pull up your rankings.

A good reminder about content: Content should be shared in a way that makes your site look original, not in an attempt to crack Google’s algorithm.

Next, focusing on content will get you nowhere unless you know where to put it. Spamming is a big no-no because it creates a bad name. Paying a blogger a minimal fee to write about you may backfire if the channel that the blogger posts it on is not relevant to you. However, asking a guest blogger to write on your site may bring links back to you. Similarly, writing about another blogger and going by a pay-it-forward philosophy is great for both parties’ site traffic and creates goodwill: something like good internet karma.

While we are on the topic of linking, we never forget to link our site’s homepage to different parts of the site like the product category, the merchant page and general content pages. These pages are further linked to our products. However, linking these pages back up the chain is important too. A good internal linking strategy keeps the user on the site by giving more relevant information, which could lead to a higher conversion rate.

Jeff then gave some neat tools to learn how to optimize websites. Screaming Frog is a tool that simulates search engine crawlers. It helps you understand whether your site is accessible by crawlers. Google Search Console (previously known as Google Webmaster) is a great tool to pull up your page rankings and “be found”, as Google puts it.

With all these tools, the 2 biggest challenges with SEO are the following:

  1. Understanding the huge amount of data that you have on your site
  2. Figuring out what your competitor is doing

While the second point is an inevitable evil, we can do more about the first point. When asked what an SEO team should aim for, Jeff gave us some KPIs:

  1. Conversion rate
  2. Traffic
  3. Rankings

The second and third points lead back to the first: how to generate leads by first generating traffic, then pulling up your page rankings and eventually taking off your business from there. Simple in theory, but an elusive concept at best.

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Part I on Cloud Computing: 3 Reasons Why Your Business Should Use Cloud Computing Now

cloud computing Cloud Computing, by definition, is “the practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage and process data, rather than a local server or a personal computer.”

Let’s be honest, that sounds terribly boring. And you’re probably wondering: I don’t even know what half of that means.

As an intro to cloud computing, take a look at the infographic we have for you. Now, let’s talk about why your business needs to upgrade its IT infrastructure and adopt cloud computing with arms wide open. Using cloud computing services helps you increase efficiency, cut down on costs, and change the way you do business.

  1. Demand-Supply management: Cloud computing gives you the opportunity to be ridiculously client focussed using big data and data analytics. Imagine owning a gaming store that sold console games. If Game A was trending that week and Game B was not doing so well, data analytics would allow you to identify that trend, allowing you to stock up accordingly. Not only would you improve sales, you would manage inventory better and improve your turnover rates. For your business to be flexible and sustainable, you need solid data to back up your decisions. Cloud computing offers insight into your customer’s preferences. Using this data will give you the competitive advantage that you need.
  1. Cost reductions:
  • By using the Cloud, you can cut costs by moving from the CAPEX model to the OPEX model. This is particularly useful for companies that have a high debt burden. Initial capital expenditure on IT assets or building your IT infrastructure is not fully deductible, which leads to higher taxes. On the other hand, operating expenses on running services through the cloud are fully tax deductible. By moving your system to the cloud, you will be able to free up capital for other investments.
  • There is another benefit to cloud computing on your balance sheet. Think about the IT infrastructure you have set up for your business. You have 10 servers that work perfectly well on a regular basis. All of a sudden, during a special discount that you are promoting through your website, you notice greater traffic. Now you need 5 more servers to sustain the traffic. However, the investment is too expensive for the limited amount of time that you are using it for. If you could rent and pay for servers for just a short period of time, wouldn’t that make more sense than investing in assets that will not pay off in the long run?
  1. Remote-monitoring: This one is easy. By using the Cloud, you can access your company’s data anywhere and at any time. When you’re on that much needed holiday in the tropics, your spreadsheets back home will be of no use to you. With Cloud Computing, you can get back to your business at a moment’s notice and respond to any emergency, all this while sipping on some mai tais and preparing for the beach volleyball game.

Now, if you already knew all of the above, then you have probably contemplated the next question. What about security? We understand, recent security breaches that have led to disasters for some companies do not instil confidence in what we are talking about. Sensitive information is at risk when you are using Cloud Computing. But here is what’s important for your business: if IT is not your core competency, then no matter how much you invest in security, a company that rents out servers probably has a more secure system in place. Again, this is about how you want to use your resources to focus on your business.

Singapore is a great example on how Small to Medium sized Businesses (SMBs) have adopted cloud computing. Cloud Comrade, a company that provides solutions on cloud management, says that around 63% of businesses in Singapore turn to companies like Cloud Comrade for cloud technology solutions. Singapore is one of the fastest adopters of cloud computing services.

Altogether, the reasons for cloud computing, especially for SMBs was put very simply by Pavel Ershov, Parallels’ vice president of service providers business for the Asia Pacific and Japan regions:

“SMBs today have the best of both worlds to help them grow their businesses–cloud services offerings with enterprise-grade capabilities at affordable costs”


Want to learn more about PayrollHero? Check out our country specific websites:
Singapore, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand | Canada, USA

 

Scheduling Practices: Hallway Test!

Today marks two weeks of my internship at PayrollHero. To celebrate my two-week-erversary, I went out to do a little survey. The aim was to understand what systems businesses have set up to manage scheduling, measure attendance and calculate payrolls.

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The Costa Coffee crew.

I surveyed 10 cafés in the Central Business District in Singapore to find out how they schedule workers in their outlets. Some of the outlets I visited were Cedele, Starbucks, Joe & Dough and Costa Coffee. They all had similar systems set up to schedule workers, with a few interesting anomalies:

  • With the exception of one cafe, everyone uses the punch card system or a regular excel sheet for workers to clock in and clock out. The exception in question has software set up to monitor attendance.
  • Scheduling is done on a weekly basis. The worst case scenario is when a worker notifies the admin that he or she can’t show up just a few hours before the shift begins.
  • Usually, the outlet manager calls another outlet to find a substitute. In the case of one cafe, Whatsapp groups are used to coordinate and find substitutes. Most outlet managers believe that the best way to reach someone is to call them. Texting or emailing is not a common communication channel.
  • The HR admin in every outlet takes around 2 to 3 days to calculate payrolls.

With that simple survey, it was evident that cafés in Singapore use conventional ways to schedule shifts. While workers rarely drop shifts, outlet managers need to be on standby to call nearby outlets for substitutes immediately.

Using Data Analytics to Improve Productivity

When the weather is bad, or there is an MRT breakdown, the situation is worse because all outlets in the same region are affected equally. While an outlet manager is calling multiple outlets for substitutes, customers are walking in and waiting for service before walking out, disappointed and unhappy. That directly affects the bottom line. Managers should be able to access an online database and use data analytics to see which outlet is on top of things in real time in order to call that outlet directly and ask for a substitute.

The top priority for every outlet manager is to make sure the day runs smoothly. It becomes much harder when the manager is not equipped with the right data to plan ahead of time. In a country like Singapore that has high internet penetration rates and high cell phone penetration rates, installing an application that stores this data in the cloud is easy and inevitable. If managers had access to this data, it would also be a way to motivate workers to be regular in order to move higher up in the rankings among outlets.

Calculating Payrolls

The systems put in place for measuring hours worked per employee in order to calculate payrolls should also be revamped. It should not take a manager 2 or 3 days to calculate payrolls when she has a million other things to look after. What’s more, the hassle of buddy punching, human errors and shifts in multiple locations add to complications for the manager. More errors equal higher costs. Higher costs equal lower profits. The bottom line is affected by inefficiencies that can be wiped out by a one-time change in the basic infrastructure.

Finally, the idea behind having an app that does all of the above is predicaSingapore Payrollted on increasing productivity: be it that of your rank and file workers or your manager. Higher productivity leads to a better workplace environment and happier people, which further leads to higher productivity. That is a virtuous cycle, if ever I saw one. In effect: optimizing work productivity with happiness.

Now, where have I heard that before…

Asia HR Leaders Forum in Singapore with Roffey Park

Earlier today, PayrollHero co-founder Stephen Jagger spoke at the Asia HR Leader Forum organised by Roffey Park. If you don’t know Roffey Park – they are an internationally renowned leadership institute based in the UK and Singapore, focused on developing people who develop organisations. Find out more on what they do here – www.roffeypark.com

Roffey Park had a unique approach for the forum. The most interesting segment would be the facilitated table discussions – where the 30+ HR professionals in attendance were split into 5 smaller groups, and each group was given a specific topic to discuss concerning HR with a “subject-matter-expert” leading that discussion. Each discussion was deeply insightful as participants actively shared their thoughts and experiences on major HR issues: changing employee mindsetsemotional intelligence, developing strategic thinking capabilities, staff morale and understanding the human dimensions of productivity.

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Facilitated HR Table Discussions

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Participants in discussion

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PayrollHero Xray Insights

Stephen closed the forum with a presentation on the importance of integrating a business intelligence component into HR systems. Steve shared the PayrollHero Xray Insights app, which provides businesses with useful analytics based on employee data, so managers can make better, intelligent decisions on human resources. He also ran through how our Adventure Engineer program works to attract and retain talent.

Read more about Xray Insights

“I found the session yesterday really inspiring with the passion you have to make a difference.”

Simon Lau
Leadership Effectiveness & Organisation Development
Group Talent, Learning and Culture Standard Chartered Bank

You can see Steve’s presentation deck below:

Here is some of the material covered by Roffey Park:

 Want to learn more about PayrollHero? Register for our next event on May 14th 2015.