As organizations navigate tight labor markets and increasing employee expectations, one thing is clear: The role of HR continues to expand. HR teams need to bridge the gaps across their respective organizations to fuel collaboration and help employees connect with their work and each other. That was the dominant discussion theme at Elevate, Paylocity’s 14th annual customer conference where nearly 4,000 attendees representing HR, Finance, IT, and Operations functions gathered to explore trends, share best practices, and learn more about Paylocity’s latest platform enhancements that help HR serve as the hub of a more connected organization.
Taking place over two days, Elevate featured more than 100 sessions with industry influencers, Paylocity leaders, and peer meetups where attendees could share experiences, ask questions, and keep up with the rapid evolution of the HR function.
Connected HR is a Key Driver to Unlocking Business Potential
At this year’s conference, the underlying buzz centered around “Connected HR” – the concept that because HR sits at the intersection of employees, leaders, and their organizations, modern HR teams need technology that’s as connected to the business as they are to solve big challenges. For example, fragmented processes and systems prevent true automation and streamlining of manual tasks throughout the business. Another issue is ineffective communication and collaboration across the organization, made even more difficult by geographically dispersed teams and varying communication preferences. Still another challenge, especially in the era of “quiet quitting,” is creating a strong culture and shared purpose across the organization.
Paylocity Highlights Platform Capabilities to Address Today’s HR Challenges
At Elevate, Paylocity highlighted modern solutions and recent enhancements that address these challenges:
- Streamlining and connecting companywide processes with enhanced Paylocity Workflows. Paylocity has expanded the functionality of Workflows, the process automation engine in the Paylocity platform that improves efficiency and data accuracy. Customizable Workflows can automatically collect employee information, assign recurring training, collect documentation and certifications, and get supervisor sign-off for completion of courses in the Learning Management System—all while syncing automatically to a single employee record.
- Ensuring the availability of accurate employee data and insights across the organization for better decision making. My Insights, released earlier this year, provides customizable, shareable dashboards that simplify analysis and exporting of real-time data and performance metrics contained in Data Insights, Paylocity’s data visualization and reporting engine. More than 6,000 clients already use My Insights, including Listerhill Credit Union, a financial services company with hundreds of employees in multiple states. Using Data Insights, Listerhill identified more than $200K in annual operational efficiencies.
- Improved communication with employees and collaboration across teams. Paylocity continues to add features to Community, its online social collaboration hub. New announcement templates and scheduling capabilities simplify one-to-many communication from leaders and enable employees’ voices to be heard. And a new Video Hub centralizes all the video content created by the company and employees in one place—making it easy to share engaging content companywide and track engagement.Paylocity has also added more capabilities into its mobile app, including chat and video to support recruiting, onboarding, and ongoing communications; as well as access to all company communications and every module in the Paylocity platform from employee smartphones. Usage of the Paylocity mobile app continues to grow—with a 27% increase in mobile users since the beginning of 2022.
- Building culture and a sense of purpose with tools to support the modern workforce. Unlike legacy HRIS tools, Paylocity differentiates its platform with features that enable better communication, connection, and collaboration. Employee-centric features are even embedded in core HR functionality. To help employees connect with their peers in more meaningful ways, the traditional organizational chart has been reimagined to not only show reporting structures but also foster connection and collaboration by including social profiles and 1:1 chat. Enhancements to Paylocity’s LMS provide opportunities for employees to create content by recording their own training videos and easily share them via Community.Martin Resorts—which owns and operates five boutique hotels in California—uses Community to help educate employees on employee benefits and build connection across its diverse employee population. “Paylocity provides our staff with a single platform that allows them to access so much information, from feedback surveys to their pay stub to their W-2. Community is a tool where they can communicate and collaborate with each other, their managers, and leadership,” says Sara Kennedy, Director of People and Culture.
The improved awareness and communication helped Martin Resorts improve employee engagement as well as 401(k) participation. By using Community to promote the benefits of its 401(k)-match program, Martin Resorts saw sign-up rates triple, which will ultimately impact employee satisfaction and retention.
“Given HR’s broadening scope, modern HR technology must evolve beyond streamlining HR processes to become a hub for the whole company—a single employee system of record and capabilities that unify people and processes across the organization around a common purpose,” said Steve Beauchamp, Co-CEO of Paylocity. “With those goals in mind, HR is now touching every part of an organization. That means HR systems need to not only drive automation but also drive greater connection among teams and every employee to help the modern organization reach its full potential.”
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