What are the Benefits of a Unified HCM Platform?

Transactional, so-called “routine” HR is a vital part of your business. Making sure people get paid, staying up-to-date with compliance and administering benefits are all mission-critical tasks. But without the right HCM technology and expert HR support, you’ll have no time to do anything else because those tasks, left unautomated, are overwhelmingly time-consuming.

Unfortunately, many human resources professionals find themselves in this exact situation spending entirely too much time drowning in a sea of paperwork, manually entering employee data into spreadsheets, and trying to keep up with countless files.

To aid in the battle against this administrative nightmare, smart medium and small businesses are arming their HR teams with a unified Human Capital Management (HCM) platform.

What’s a Unified HCM Platform, You Ask?

Think of an HCM platform as a one-stop HR shop hosted in the cloud and designed to merge and streamline all of your employee management requirements: from the start of the lifecycle with recruiting and onboarding, to running payroll, through managing and developing your employees. If your current HR toolkit consists of a mixed bag of disparate solutions that don’t “talk” with each other, you’ll end up spinning your wheels. Using a unified platform that contains all the tools you need to find, develop and retain employees will make you more efficient and reduce the chances of error, all while improving employee satisfaction.

A truly unified HCM platform will provide you with the following modules, which we’ll cover a little more in depth:

1. Applicant Tracking System
2. Employee Onboarding
3. Time and Attendance
4. Payroll
5. HR and Benefits Administration
6. Learning Management
7. Reporting and Employee Data Analytics

Attract Top Talent with an ATS

The ways candidates apply for jobs is changing. They no longer want to spend 30 minutes filling out a single application, and they don’t always do it from their computer either. A high-quality Applicant Tracking System (ATS) enables candidates to apply using any device, anywhere, at any time. It also provides the metrics HR needs to discover where the best candidates are being sourced from, find bottlenecks in recruiting and hiring processes, and capture missed opportunities.

Successful Onboarding before Day One

The most recent Gallup® State of the American Workplace study (2017) found that highly engaged business units have 59% lower turnover than their disengaged counterparts. By using an automated onboarding solution, businesses can connect with their new hires in a more engaging way by reducing the amount of paperwork needed to kick-start productivity. They can also reduce recruiting compliance risk by helping to ensure that all appropriate documentation and onboarding materials are reviewed and completed in a timely fashion. With an automated system, onboarding no longer means leaving your new hires sitting at a desk for hours filling out tedious paperwork (containing data that HR then has to enter and file).

Pay Day Doesn’t Have to be Nerve-Wracking

Payroll has long been a tedious, manual process that has resulted in many HR headaches. By implementing HCM technology, your company can automate the payroll process, making it completely seamless. Automation can help reduce compliance concerns and also decrease administrative effort. When you have a single system that manages HR, payroll, and benefits data you’ll never have to be concerned about duplicating employee updates. Changes made in HR flow smoothly over to payroll, helping to ensure that your employees are paid correctly and on time. Furthermore, when a payroll solution has built-in technology to manage payroll tax compliance, end-of-year headaches are minimized.

Control Overtime and Payroll Costs

Speaking of payroll, having accuracy between your time and payroll systems is no longer an option – it’s a necessity. Manual tracking of employee hours using time sheets and keying in the data can lead to costly payroll errors and upset employees. Time data that transmits directly to your payroll system provides a single source of truth to increase efficiency and helps ensure you have the right information.

Get the HR Data You Want

A workflow and content automation company conducted a survey and found that 49% of employees spend too much time trying to locate documents, while 41% say they have trouble pulling and finding data. If this sounds about right to you, imagine if, instead of wasting hours searching for the information you need, your HR data could be displayed visually with interactive charts and graphs right at your fingertips. Human resource data analytics tools can help identify key business insights by compiling pertinent data across HR, payroll and time solutions.

Are Your Benefits a Competitive Advantage?

Providing a traditional benefits package is a baseline essential for businesses, but they’ll never become an advantage over your competition if your company doesn’t have benefits that are tailored for our multigenerational workforce. A unified HCM platform can provide the necessary tools to help reduce the administrative tasks associated with – and dreaded by HR and your workforce – open enrollment and benefit elections.

Employee Development

Of course, you want to help your workforce grow and advance, so an HR solution that offers performance management is important. Having tools that enable employees to set and view their goals and objectives, take online training and development courses, and get feedback from their managers via a formal review process is key to improving engagement and making employees feel appreciated.

Engage Your People Throughout Their Careers

According to Gallup, 87% of Millennials claim that professional development and career growth are very important; however, providing solid development opportunities can be a challenge. Employers are already maxed out and many find it difficult to create personalized courses and training programs that meet the needs of employees. But with a dedicated learning tool, it’s simple to build training courses that deliver personalized content, as well as keep track of course completion.

A unified HCM platform is the solution. One set of data flows through every module, eliminating duplicate data entry, file transfers and human error. In summary, you can save a tremendous amount of time (which is money) because all modules talk to teach other using the same data.

Paycor offers a single source of truth for all recruiting, HR, time and payroll data, which is the best solution for medium and small businesses.

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