Zenefits, one of the leading players in the human resources (HR), benefits administration, and payroll solutions space, recently announced new additions to its product suite aimed specifically at companies facing the unfamiliar task of managing a largely distributed workforce.
To help these organizations, Zenefits announced the People Hub and Employee Engagement Surveys as new additions to the premium Zen HR Package, both of which are designed to better connect remote workers and keep them engaged during the this pandemic.
"With the growing population of the workforce, millennials, and Gen Z, there were already signs of increased need for flexibility in the workforce," said Ankur Patel Product Marketing at Zenefits.
"The pandemic has really just evolved how businesses operate and accelerated the distributed work lifestyle." He added that the new features were already in the works since last year as the company anticipated changing norms in the workplace.
The unexpected prolonged remote work situation due to the coronavirus simply made the need for better remote work solutions more pressing.
Zenefits' People Hub and Employee Engagement Survey features are aimed squarely at aiding HR managers to help their remote workers stay connected and engaged.
Zenefits tested these features on its own hybrid distributed staff, as well as through pilot projects with select customers.
"In our company, more and more people were working remotely.
Our own facilities, office management, and HR needed ways to better communicate and push out information," said Christian Flaten, Product Marketing Manager for Zenefits.
Employee Engagement is a Challenge
Maintaining employee engagement is a challenge during the best of times, but is now far more challenging since employees are distanced from both each other and their managers.
A June 2020 Gallup poll showed the largest decline in U.S.
employee engagement in the 20 years they have been tracking the metric.
Employee engagement is a reflection of company morale and often an indicator of how motivated employees are in their jobs.
Issues like civil unrest, uncertainty when it comes to job security, and general anxiety about the pandemic are all contributing factors to declining employee engagement according to the poll.
"Employers now have to replicate the connectivity found in offices, where people are working shoulder-to-shoulder with their peers in a distributed setting," Patel said.
"On the other side of that is the thought of employee sentiment and engagement which is on the decline."
Zenefit's Employee Engagement Survey tools aim to help businesses get a handle on their newly remote and often highly distributed workforce by easily gathering and then helping employers parse and analyze that data quickly and easily.
By focusing heavily on making the data analytics part of the equation easy enough for anyone to use, Zenefits feels helping to level the playing field for SMBs by delivering tools that were previously only available to large companies.
The two new offerings complement the company’s popular Employee Well-being, Performance Management, and Compensation Management apps as additional tools to help Zenefits’ customers increase workforce productivity and engagement.
Communications and Collaboration Baked Into the Zenefits App
The People Hub, which is also available to Zen HR Package subscribers, integrates various messaging, collaboration, and interaction features inside Zenefits' mobile and desktop apps.
Employees and admins can use People Hub to communicate directly from one system, which even sends push notifications to mobile devices.
For remote workers, it simplifies key HR activities such as open enrollment, broadcasting important company information, and critical updates like new safety procedures or location openings or closings.
People Hub also automates announcements for company milestones like new hire announcements, birthdays and anniversaries, and holidays.
However, even Zenefits points out that while People Hub offers real-time communication and collaboration capabilities, it isn't a replacement for dedicated group messaging solutions, like Slack or Microsoft Teams, but simply an additional way for businesses to make themselves and their employees accessible within their default HR app.
Better Employee Engagement Through Surveys
Zenefits Surveys Word Cloud Conveys Employee Sentiment from Surveys and Polls.(Image courtesy of Zenefits)
One of the biggest challenges of maintaining employee engagement in remote or hybrid work situations is that it is hard to measure employee insights when workers are distributed across states, time zones, countries, and continents.
Surveys are particularly powerful tools in that scenario both to engaging employees as well as gather data on how they're feeling, working, and the issues they care about most.
To help, Zenefits' engagement survey tool comes with a variety of pre-configured survey types to gauge worker satisfaction, collect a pulse, check on employee net promoter score (ENPS), or even conduct a full review of the employee engagement.
“People operations — hiring, engaging, developing, and retaining workers — are more important than ever for SMBs,” said Matt Ketchum, Zenefits Senior Director of Product Marketing.
“We’re committed to help our customers navigate the rapidly-changing world of work, including digital solutions for replicating or extending the communication, camaraderie and culture created within a physical office.”
