Got Problems At Work? Don’t Resign Yet

working on laptop

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.

Giving credit to the ‘little guy’ in your company

The PayrollHero Way
Giving credit where credit is due is an important task for managers to keep the morale of their employees up. Employees like to be noticed and praised for a job well done.

Why are managers not giving enough praise? Besides the fact that you are busy running around, taking care of daily operations; making sure everything is running as it should, finding out which employee did well for the last 4 weeks will take more effort. Most of the time, this task is not on the top of the priority list and so easily overlooked.

PayrollHero can help you look good to your employees!

Surely there are times where you wish you would have remembered to at least say ‘Good Job’ to Bob the cashier for working 8 hours and being the most helpful. Human errors like this can be avoided by using a simple app, where you can monitor your employees day to day work and track how they are performing accurately.

By using the employee feedback app, Daily Pulse, employees are able to ‘like’ their colleagues that was the most helpful at the end of the shift. Another plus, your customer can give their feedback using the Customer Feedback app too- by voting for the employee that was the most helpful to them.

You, the manager, will receive the data in real time via Xray Insights app. The app will show a clearer view of each employee performance and tracks the employee who is getting the most ‘likes’ on that particular shift. Information is readily available for you at a touch of a button. This makes your job so much easier! It also eliminate subjectivity in your decision as it is based on figures- not hearsay.

Work Place Transparency

At PayrollHero, we want to break the conventional workplace hierarchy by making information more transparent within the company. Using mobile or web apps, all managers can readily access whatever information required anytime, anywhere. We recognize that being on the ball is important when running a business- so time should not be wasted on you waiting for information from other managers.

The Data Might Even Surprise You! 

You may be glad to find out that the employee that is actually doing great is the person you least expect. It could very well be the person who is clearing the dishes- that is the most helpful employee among the rest and the most ‘likeable’ to your customers.

The app works by making sure every employee is acknowledged, from the chef to the janitor. You can be the best manager who knows exactly the deserving employees to give credit to at the end of the day.

Read our post on Scheduling Best Practices for Managers.


Want to learn how to be a better manager?

Join our next Meetup on 10th Jun 2015 @ 4pm in Singapore.

We will be focusing on tips and tools you can use to better optimize HR and payroll processes, while cutting costs on time and creating a happier work culture.

To register >>> Capture

 

 

 

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…

#BePunctual And Win with UBER and PayrollHero

Screen Shot 2014-02-05 at 10.28.28 AMUBER has launched in the Philippines to much fan fare. Their private car service is a great addition to the current transportation options and is a great way to travel.

Want to give it a try?…. FREE.

UBER has partnered with PayrollHero to provide free rides to punctual employees. All you have to do is consistently show up for work on time and you could win a free UBER ride.

For those that don’t know how UBER works, they are a technology company that provides an app to make it quick and easy to find a ride.

From their website; “UBER is evolving the way the world moves. By seamlessly connecting riders to drivers through our apps, we make cities more accessible, opening up more possibilities for riders and more business for drivers. From our founding in 2009 to our launches in over 70 cities today, Uber’s rapidly expanding global presence continues to bring people and their cities closer.”

My favorite features of UBER… emailed receipts with exact trip details, cashless (no need to argue with driver about his lack of change), slick app that lets you see where the vehicle is and a rating system so that you can provide feedback on the driver or vehicle.

Want to give UBER a try?

#BePunctual and you could win!

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#BePunctual and Win with FourEyes.com.ph

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Our friends at FourEyes.com.ph have given us a few Gift Certificates for P500 off new glasses. For the punctual PayrollHero employees out there, this might be your chance to get some new glasses. For your chance to win, just make sure you are early for work!!

Never heard of FourEyes? They are 1st online eyewear store in the Philippines. Plus…

“For every pair of eyewear that you buy from www.foureyes.com.ph, we would donate a pair of FourEyes prescription eyeglasses to someone in need of eyewear. We work with various recognized partner charities in making sure that the glasses are delivered directly to them.”

So don’t be late!

5 Reasons You Should Never Be Late ~ #BePunctual

blog-post-reasons-lateI have heard “Island Time” or in the Philippines “Filipino Time” as a way of justifying why you are late. Of course, one of PayrollHero’s missions is to help employees be punctual for their jobs, so I thought it would be a good topic for a post on 5 reasons why you should never be late.

1. It is Disrespectful
When you are late, you are telling the person that you are meeting with that your time is more important that their time.  It shows a lack of respect and common courtesy to others.

2. It is Stressful
Or it should be. When your running late, you worry about the repercussions at work, with your appointment, etc. Lower your stress and plan your travel time accordingly. Your body will thank you for it.

3. It Can Cause a Chain Reaction
When you’re late, it makes other people late.

4. Bad Reputation
Being known for tardiness is never a good thing and is a hard reputation to shake.

5. Its not Professional
As you move forward in your work life, tardiness is less and less accepted. Best to get in good habits right from the start!

How can you improve your punctuality? 

– move closer to your job
– budget more time for your commute
– take weather conditions into account when leaving for work
– leave enough time between appointments to account for traffic delays
– change you mode of transport if it is the cause of your tardiness

What are your ideas on how to improve?