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

 

Happy Labor Day | Singapore Holiday

singapore holiday

“In Singapore, May Day (or Labour Day) is celebrated on the 1st of May each year as a mark of solidarity amongst workers. The celebration of May Day as a public holiday began only in 1960 after the PAP came into power. Before then, only workers defined as such under the Labour Ordinance 1955 and those defined as industrial clerks under the Clerks Employment Ordinance 1957 were given paid holidays.” *wikipedia

 

Philippines New Minimum Wage Effective April 2015

PayrollHero is hiringAs you might be aware, effective April 4th 2015, the new minimum wage for non agricultural workers in Philippines has raised from P451.02 a day to P466 (+P15.00 COLA) a day. (Source: DOLE)

PayrollHero clients were updated of this a few weeks ago and our Philippine payroll software had the adjustments in place for companies that need it. If you are not using PayrollHero for your Philippine payroll (yet) then make sure to double check your software or excel document to make sure that you are onside with the changes.

Australian BPO Chooses PayrollHero for Philippine Payroll Needs

We received a great email today from one of our clients in Cebu, Philippines. House of I.T. is an Australian BPO that have been on the PayrollHero platform for quite a few months now. Its always great to receive emails like this. If you have a BPO in the Philippines and want to learn more about how we can help, just contact us.

“Before discovering PayrollHero our company was using a manual timekeeping biometric system and then generating reports manual reports that we could use in Excel for our payroll needs. It was manual, full of errors and required a lot of oversight. bpo payroll software

By finding PayrollHero we added more than just attendance tracking to our company. PayrollHero also handles payroll, taxes, deductibles, and just about anything related to human resources. Automated reports generated by the system can be used for submitting to our bank. Their analytics dashboard is extremely valuable to us as it provides an overview of employee attendance, tardiness reports and leaderboards.Now our HR department & accounting staff handling payroll are much more productive. PayrollHero gives our employees & management the transparency which every company should provide.

We are an Australian BPO company with clients across Australasia, US & Europe with 70+ staff in our Philippines office. Founded on the principles of providing superior professional expertise and comprehensive solutions for our clients complete IT needs, we offer a full range of IT development, implementation and maintenance services; including a secure and proficient network design, successful systems integration, effective project management and installation of technologies, right through to pro-active and reactive desktop support. We specialize in IT services but also provide an excellent support for SEO, website designing, architecture, website hosting, and data entry, as well as internal projects to support our own growing business.  

We are so pleased with our move to PayrollHero and would highly recommend them.” 
 
Alin Adrian Florea
Sales & Marketing Manager
House of I.T.
www.houseofit.com.au

Current Analytics Available via PayrollHero

Editors Note: This is another post by Kieran Peppiatt, Head of Client Success at PayrollHero.  Due to the overwhelming interest in our new Xray Insight pages he put together this post that explains the business intelligence that you can glean from PayrollHero.

With the launch of our new Xray Insights app we get a lot of customers asking us about what analytics we currently have on offer so I thought I share what is currently available. That said, we’d love to hear what you want to know about your employees.  We are constantly looking at ways to improve this area of PayrollHero and would welcome your thoughts and suggestions in the comments below.

Attendance Analytics

My Attendance

Here individual employees can see their own attendance for the current month. They can also view their overall ranking in the company and their correlation on specific dates against the company averages.

time and attendance analytics

Company Attendance Leaderboard

On this page you can see your employees overall ranking within the company. This is done by early, lates and absences.

You can also see a leaderboard of the employees with perfect attendance.

absence attendance statsearly birds attendance statslates attendance stats

Summaries

Here you can see how things like the weather and commute distance affect your company’s attendance. Do more people come in late when it’s cloudy, or do people call in sick when it’s raining? Here you can see if weather has any correlation with your employee’s attendance

You can also see how the commute distance of your employees affects their punctuality.

weather effect time and attendance

Xray Insights

Xray insights is available for iOS devices. It is designed for company leaders who need a quick snapshot or insight into how their company is performing. The app is currently in beta and the reason for this is because we are looking for feedback from our clients on what snapshots they would like to view. If you’re management, leader or company owner please tell us the sort of information you would like to be able to view from your company in the comments below.

Overview

We speak to a lot of HR people and business owners and one thing they want to know is what their average employee looks like. With the overview page of Xray insights you can see that in an instant. It tells you what percentage of your company is male/female, the average gender, age and tenure of your employees.
phone-overview ios stats

Staffing Levels

Ever wondered who is working at your worksites right now?  Sometimes it’s good to know where your people are. Being able to get quick insight to if one of your branches is under or overstaffed is invaluable. With the staffing levels page on Xray Insights you can do exactly that.
phone-staff

Attendance Analytics

Just like the attendance feed in the app you can get the same information straight from your phone. We really appreciate that running a business can lead to a hectic lifestyle and your not always in front of a computer. We wanted to make sure that you can access the information that is important to you where ever you are.
phone-attendance

iPad Only

Customer Feedback

Ever wanted to know which of your employees were doing a great job? Customer feedback lets your customers give a thumbs up any employee who wows them. You can then view the leaderboards to see who your customers love or who you might need help get ridiculously customer focussed!  The rankings for this are viewable via the Xray Insights app.

Daily Pulse

Ever wanted to get real feedback from your employees that isn’t biased or based any single employees opinion. Daily Pulse allows you to take measurements from your “crowd” of employees. Currently you can find out which employees are rated well by their peers. We will be introducing the ability to ask your own custom questions shortly.

daily-pulse

For more information please contact us at support at payrollhero.com

 

ATM Withdrawal Limits for Philippine Banks

Interested in PayrollHero? Sign up today and get 90 days free! – USE PROMO CODE 90ATMBP2018

Many foreigners come to the Philippines and ask the same question – what Philippine ATM bank machine should I use to take out money? The question comes up often as the banks charge a fee for foreign cards being used as well as the foreigner’s local bank will charge a fee. So finding a bank with the highest withdrawal limit is important so that the fees can be minimized as best as possible.

atm withdrawal limits for philippine banks

Here are the results for Philippine bank ATM withdrawal limits: 

Bank Max. Amount
BDO ₱10,000.00
PNB ₱20,000.00
BPI ₱20,000.00*
HSBC ₱50,000.00
UnionBank ₱20,000.00
EastWest Bank Customizable
Maybank ₱20,000.00
ChinaBank ₱30,000.00

References:

BDO Philippine ATM Limit (reference)
PNB Philippine ATM Limit (reference)
BPI Philippine ATM Limit (reference)
HSBC Philippine ATM Limit (reference)
UnionBank Philippine ATM Limit (reference)
EastWest Philippine ATM Limit (reference)
Maybank Philippine ATM Limit (reference)
ChinaBank Philippine ATM Limit (reference)

Update: A commenter gave some feedback on BPI.
philippine atm limits


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If this was helpful, you might like this:

How To Get To Fort Bonifacio (From The 4th Worst Airport In The World)

– Why Start a Business in the Philippines?

Philippine Payroll Software: Update to Attendance Review

philippine payroll software

We have made some changes to the attendance review page so that it shows exactly what is happening with a certain employees attendance. Has it been resolved? Were they absent? What time did they clock in and out? Now it all shows up neatly in a single screen for you to review. (see above)

Also, we added that same level of detail to the employee side. Now employees can log into their personal PayrollHero accounts and see what happened with their clock in and out, if infractions have been resolved, holidays, etc. (see below)

attendace philippine payroll software

If you have any questions feel free to contact us by responding to this post in the comments or emailing support at payrollhero.com.

New Xray Insights iOS App Now Available

business intelligence payroll software

Do you want to learn more about your company?
Do you want to have real time business intelligence in the palm of your hand?
Who was late today?
Who is currently at a certain location?
Which employee gets the most “likes” from customers?

There is so much to see about your business using PayrollHero’s Xray Insights iOS app. You can download the newest version here and sign into your PayrollHero account. It is an awesome way to get real time data from your payroll software.

Adventure Engineering in Da Nang, Vietnam

Editors Note: Introducing Vincent Paca, Adventure Engineer at PayrollHero. He will be contributing to the PayrollHero blog from time to time.

Not so many months ago, a talkative fellow wandered in my small Cebu office by chance. Dressed in shorts, flip flops and a black shirt with a man in a red cape. Turned out that was Mike Stephenson, CEO of PayrollHero. He talked about adventure, learning, teamwork and improving one’s self and the next thing I knew I was on a plane to Manila two days later to pair with a few of their engineers. A little under a year and here I am, in Singapore, busting out a blog post about the adventures and misadventures of Adventure Engineering.

Adventure engineers often travel depending on the client’s need. We go wherever we can be more effective at our job. Being ridiculously client focused, as we always say. (yes, we are hiring)

Da Nang, VietnamOne of the things that we wanted to try out this year was to partner up with 3rd party engineering teams to help us increase our velocity. In comes AgilityIO, a 150-strong engineering team based in Da Nang, Vietnam. We believe that a lot of problems can easily be solved when you’re in the same room together with your team. Making the communication loop so much shorter meant making things move faster.

At the beginning of April, Adam, Mike, Piotr and I decided to meet up in Da Nang, Vietnam to personally meet and work with team Agility. Adam, and Mike flew in from Singapore, Piotr arrived from Whistler and I catapulted all the way from Manila.

Getting to Da Nang is no simple task. Flying from the Philippines meant that I had to take a flight to either Hanoi or Saigon, then take another domestic flight to central Vietnam. I landed in Saigon around 12am bags in hand waiting for my next flight at 5am. DO NOT fly at these hours. Saigon domestic airport closes at night and the earliest they open is at four in the morning. I had to stay outside of the building and wait for it to open. Fun times indeed. I arrived in Da Nang around 6:30am. Being in Vietnam also meant that we had to wake up an hour earlier. Our daily huddle always happens at 6:47am GMT+8 and no, it doesn’t matter where you are.

I downed a can of RedBull and a shot of Cà phê sữa đá and headed to AgilityIO’s office with Piotr. Agility has a HUGE office in Da Nang, 5 floors of mobile and backend developers, it seemed like they had it all. We knew from the start that this wasn’t going to be a breeze. Communication and getting your thoughts across was definitely a challenge, but we didn’t let that wall stop us from where we’re going. We’re now two weeks into the project that we’re working with Agility and we’re almost near completion.

piotr, vince and agility team in da nang

A selfie with some of the Agility team in the background

Da Nang wasn’t all work and no play. We went for a food tour around Da Nang at lunch time. Summer from Funtastic Food Tour took us around Da Nang to its secret foodie gems scattered all around the city.

The next day we hopped in a cab and ventured to Hoi An. Our first stop was the Marble Mountains. The Marble Mountains is a cluster of mountains made of, you guessed it, marble. Going up one of the mountains wasn’t that difficult. Partly because the local government attached a modern elevator to the side of the mountain that takes you up halfway of the mountain.

(Adam, Piotr, Mike and myself)

(Adam, Piotr, Mike and myself)

Scaling the peak wasn’t all that bad either. All that marble makes for perfect steps when crawling up to the peak.

da hang, vietnam marble mountain stairsWe just made it in time for lunch at our hotel and just enough time to prepare for our motorbike tour around the countryside of Hoi An. This was the very first time I learned how to ride a motorbike and surprisingly enough it wasn’t that bad. Vuong took us around the scenic countryside of Hoi An, we rode on floating bridges, elevated bamboo bridges and along the rice fields. Exhilarating and enjoyable, the whole 5 hour ride was quite the experience.

bike tour around da nang

Finishing at 7pm left me little time to prepare for my 9pm domestic flight to Hanoi to get to Manila. Even though I left Vietnam a bit exhausted with mud on my shoes and a little bit of dirt here and there, I had a really great time. 10/10 would definitely do again.


Want to read more about our Adventure Engineers? Check out Nico’s story from when he left Manila to work from the Whistler office while getting his Canadian residency.

Interested in joining our team? We are always hiring!

What is an Adventure Engineer?

Kiro Harada Workshop on Improving Scrum with Kaizen

Editors Note: Introducing Adam Baechler, Product Manager at PayrollHero. He will be contributing to the PayrollHero blog from time to time.

singapore kaizen workshop

(L – R) Michael Stephenson, Kiro Harada, Adam Baechler, Stephen Jagger, Piotr Banasik, Nico Suria and Vince Paca)

On April 14th I was fortunate enough to attend Kiro Harada workshop on Improving Scrum with Kaizen in Singapore. Kiro is an Agile coach and is super knowledgeable of agile principles and methodologies including Scrum, Kanban, Lean, and Kaizen. Kiro was also kind enough to stop by our office and give us a brief introduction into how he use Domain Driven Design (DDD) within his teams. You can find Kiro on Facebook or LinkedIn. (Kiro was gracious enough to visit the Singapore PayrollHero office the next day to do a private session with our team)

I been practicing scrum for about 3 years now so I found the discussions about Kaizen and Domain Driven Design from the last couple of days the most interesting. So I thought I would share quick summary.

Disclaimer: I’m new to this and I have yet to implement any of these teachings. So please do seek out the advice of experts like Kiro.

Kaizen

For those who have not heard of Kaizen, it is a methodology for continuous improvement. Surprisingly the Kaizen didn’t originate in Japan but in the United States during WW2.

The core principle is to make your work easier and safer.

When applying Kaizen to a process you can think of it in 3 phase; Fix the leaks, Make it flow and finally Create a new process.

Fix the leaks first. When you are working and you notice a process is not producing the desired results. Slow down or even stop so you can inspect the process. Focus on effectiveness not on efficiency. The goal here is to creating constant value from your process.

Make it flow. Now that your process is creating value constantly we want to make it flow by increasing efficiency without sacrificing the quality of your output. A great way to do this is through E.C.R.S. First try to Eliminate steps from your process. Next try to Combine some steps together. Next try to Rearrange steps in the process. Lastly, try to Simplify individual steps in your process. Never try to go faster in this process by following E.C.R.S you should accelerate naturally.

Once your process is flowing smoothly you should feel your work is easier and safer. Now is the time to dream up a new process that will deliver better quality and value.

As a scrum team we follow similar actions of inspect and improve through our retrospectives. however this is only done at the end of our sprints. I hope that our team can adopt the principles of Kaizen to apply continuous improvement throughout our sprints.

Domain Driven Design (DDD)

We only had a short introduction here but in that short time we saw the huge value of Domain Modeling. Domain Modeling is a great way to visualize your products domains, decide how they should interact and test out your logic before you build it out extensively.

At PayrollHero we are going to try to use the Domain Modeling technique to identify the Domains of our applications to create a better system architecture.

Thanks for reading. Drop any questions you have in the comments below.

(Some photos from the day with Kiro)

Kiro Harada payroll hero Kiro Harada payrollhero singapore

kiro kaizen singapore walking with Baechler kiro in singapore