With the pandemic entering its second year, many organizations have adopted remote work as part of their everyday business operations. Many employers plan to continue this practice, in whole or in part, once the pandemic subsidies. 

The sustainability of this practice is putting increased pressure on organizations to optimize their remote technology solutions for collaboration, communication, monitoring, security, and performance evaluation when working from a distance.

Of course, applying technical solutions to workplace challenges is nothing new for HR. For almost two decades, technological innovations have helped HR departments become far more efficient, eliminating redundancies while vastly improving data integrity.

By automating a wide range of time-consuming business functions, HR professionals have been liberated to shift their focus from rote administrative tasks to high-impact tasks like strategy, employee engagement, and change management. 

In fact, according to PwC’s 2020 Human Resources Technology Survey, the core issues driving HR technology decisions today include: 

• Finding, attracting, and retaining talent 
• Developing people to reach their full potential
• Improving the employee experience 
• Creating collaborative work environments 
• Workforce planning 
• Ensuring employee well-being, diversity, and inclusivity 

With HR technology solutions in abundance to help enhance the overall employee experience, transform businesses, and assist organizations responding to change, here are five HR technology trends to watch for in 2021.

Some employers choose to take on employee benefits administration with paper forms and spreadsheets, thinking they’ll save money. They see the cost of online automation, coupled with the monthly commitment — usually per employee, per month (PEPM) — and find it hard to believe the benefits of the software would be worth the investment. It’s true that employee benefits administration software is not free, but the benefits of automation far outweigh the cost.

The reality of the situation is that regulation complications, paperwork, and human error end up costing employers far more time than it's worth. And of course, that doesn’t include the fines your business could incur as a result.

Here are six ways leveraging employee benefits administration software with automation can save you time and money.

1. Increased Efficiency for Both Employer and Employee

Automated employee benefits administration increases efficiency for both the administrator, and your employees who use it. Regardless of the task you are trying to complete, it will, in short order, take less time when it’s automated as opposed to old-fashioned spreadsheets, or worse, paper. 

Many companies still have employees fill out paper forms, which an HR director or assistant then has to manually enter into a payroll system, an HR system, and the health insurance system. What took two or three people to accomplish could have taken one — the employee — if an employee benefits administration software was used.

With well-organized systems, all of those different parts talk to each other and disperse the information where it needs to go, which means you get to focus on real work instead of paperwork.

Discover how our platform-agnostic approach to automation transformation provides the confidence our clients demand when implementing the perfect platform for any enterprise. Click here to learn more.

Managing an organization’s human capital is a complex job, and technology can automate and streamline aspects of it that before required hours of paperwork and rote calculation. The time technological solutions is freeing-up is allowing HR professionals to play a bigger role in the strategic direction of their companies. 

In fact, thanks to these advancements, the HR function is becoming more mobile, analytical, and adaptive - with HR analysts providing more insight into corporate direction, predictive hiring trends, and analysis of benefits and compensation plans.

Here are six primary ways technology is affecting HR:

Zenefits: Whatever Happened to "Under-Promise and Over-Deliver?"

The resignation this week of Parker Conrad as the CEO of tech darling and HR administration upstart Zenefits should hopefully serve as a wake-up call to other technology providers in the fledgling health insurance and human resources technology sectors.

The digital transformation of these industries is inarguably long overdue. Many group insurance brokers fear this disruption, still clinging to vestiges of the past. But long gone are the days when brokers could retain clients simply based on relationships: the annual round of golf, dinner out with the spouses, and a slap on the back just don’t cut it any more. Results matter.

How to Best Reach a Digital-Savvy Workforce

According to a recent Gallup poll, little progress is being made by U.S. companies hoping to improve employee engagement levels. In 2015, 32 percent of employees were classified as “engaged,” based on a number of measures such as believing their opinions count at work and having the opportunity to do what they do best every day. This figure represents only a 0.5 percent increase over 2014.

The majority of workers, 50.8 percent, were classified as “not engaged,” while an alarming 17.2 percent were classified as “actively disengaged.”