Human resources department plays a very huge role for the success of your company. The human resources personnel help engage them people that make the face of your business – the employees.
It is the HR staff that hires the right candidate. It is the same team that helps track time, measure employee performance, prepare payroll, among other issues. Some of these activities are time consuming yet highly repetitive. That is where the use of HR software to automate the processes becomes very important.
Whether you are small, medium or large enterprise, automating your HR can help you save money and time that can be channeled in other activities.
What are some of benefits of automating your HR department?
Gives a better First Impression of your OrganizationMost employees decide whether to stay or not in your organization within the first 90 days. In Fortune 500 companies, about half of new hires quit their jobs in less than 2 years.
While onboarding your new employees help ensure minimal attrition, there is still a lot of work that goes into it. You have a do a lot of forms, salary contracts, induction programs, new hire training and IT system allocations.
Thanks to HR software, it becomes easier to restructure your workflow such that it automatically triggers multiple actions. For example, using the automation software, you can easily send out requests hours logged, ID cards or anything that you would need.
For purposes of payroll processing, you can also offer a secure access where your employee can directly enter or edit their personal information. As a result, it helps streamline the onboarding process. It also helps cut down on the time taken to induct new employees into the company.
Helps Organizations reduce the Time Spent Tracking TimeA average manager spends around 15 hours a month sorting out employee timesheets. If your HR personnel spent a big chunk of their time looking through files, emails or time-log spreadsheets, you might end up achieving nothing at the end of the day.
Investing in HR automation tools helps organizations track and calculate the employee time. It also helps send the reports through approvals and finally ending it for payroll processing or billing. Thanks to the increased sophistication of technology, it has now become possible for HR department to do it in real-time. This can be achieved through configuring multi-level approvals. That way, you do not just save time, but you also become more productive.
Make Time-off requests Quick and EasyThere are some organizations that still play slaves to the status quo. They still manage their leave requests through traditional means. That is through – word of mouth, emails, and at times, they might use sticky notes. That challenge comes in when the managerial hierarchy demands approval at multiple.
That simply means that there are HR who would be left out from the application and approval of the emails. The caveat here is – the entire process might consume a lot of time. Besides, it comes with a lot of untraceable approvals and requests.
Investing in HR software can help you a great deal. That is why a large chunk of global workforce would go for automated time-offs. That way, updating employee records becomes easier and more efficient. Besides, you can manage the entire process through use of mobile HR. That way, it becomes easier to log time or perform other HR activities while on the go.
HR Software helps Empower your EmployeesWe all have different needs and requirements – and so are your employees. There are also those that travel frequently and have to submit their travel requests and expenses. They also have to submit reports after every undertaking.
There are those that will prefer contacting the HR department to get their professional and personal information updated in the organizational database. Besides, the more the company grows, the more the number of employees that would want to get assistance from the HR department.
The truth is, it is not easy to manage hundreds and a retinue of requests that might be directed to the HR. That is why investing in modern HR software that helps employees manage the system by themselves is very necessary. For example, what happens when an employee applies for an internal training directly on the HR system?
The HR department will create a workflow that would automatically post the training details to the employee record. At the end of the day, the employee gets empowered while the burden is taken off the shoulders of the HR department.
Makes interaction with third-party systems easierFor you to achieve reliable third-party integration, you need to invest in automation software. The Application Programming Interface (APIs) and Webhooks make exchange of information and communication easier with any third party application. If you are travelling, you will submit travel expense report to the HR department. Once it is approved, an instant notification will be sent to the HR accounting software to process the reimbursement.
Summing it upHR department is very crucial for smooth running of your organization. For your organization to be more productive, you need to cut the amount of time that goes into executing repetitive tasks. Investing in HR software helps automate the tasks, save time and increase general productivity of the HR department.
Author Bio:
Software Analyst by profession at SoftwareSuggest, she meticulously studies and write reviews about Software in categories such as Performance Management, HR management, Business Intelligence etc. She is a Google certified in Digital marketing with good analytical skills. In her spare time she loves reading fictional novels.
Email: Nidhi@softwaresuggest.com
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nidhi-raghuvanshi/
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Animation is an important aspect of not only entertainment stories, film and movie industry, but also in businesses. For many reasons, the demand for visual animation experts (animators) is on the rise. DreamGrow opines that animated video is the best strategy for your social media because it is fun, universal, cheaper to produce, evokes more emotions, and catches users attention better.
In fact, it is believed that adding animation to your website can boost sales by as much as 200 percent. These benefits of animation, coupled with so many other (increasingly) numerous upsides, are why you might want to pick up some animation skills.
So whether you want to pick animation as a leisure time hobby, or only want to hone the little already-existing know-how you have about the art, the platforms below are some of the best online platforms for learning animation.
Best Online Platforms for Learning Animation
Animation Mentor is one the best animation school available online. The platform prides itself as an “original online animation school taught by professional animators to grow you in the art of character animation.” and it uses a mentor approach to impact the art of animation to aspiring animation professionals — newbies, students, and pretty much any interested individual.
Animation Mentor was founded in 2005 by Pixar Studios and takes in students to its animation workshops and full programs via application processes only.
2. Bloop AnimationAre you totally new to the animation scene? Or you have little next to no idea what the art entails, but would love to learn more? Then Bloop Animation is a good place to start. Bloop Animation has a wide array of animation courses for beginners (and even professionals) and takes a step-by-step approach to teach animation to newbies till they become professionals.
Bloop understands that learning to animate isn’t exactly a smooth road and that is why it takes a slow and skmple approach to properly guide newbie, explain basic terms, required tools, recommend softwares, hardware, books etc.
3. AnimSchoolLike Animation Mentor, AnimSchool also adopts a mentor style of tutoring beginners and intermediates. Students of AnimSchool will learn to animate from industry professionals who already work for some of the biggest and best animation studios in the world like Disney and DreamWorks.
4. AnimDojiOf all the platforms on this list, AnimDoji is a personal favorite. AnimDoji adopts a practical and fun approach to tutoring on animation: regular mini-assignments, animation challenges, weekly interactive live sessions, peer reviews, discussion forum, and critique of students works by top industry professionals.
Signing up for Animation lessons on AnimDoji totally cost nothing although there is paid membership (goes for about £15/month) which comes with extra training materials and option to purchase more extra features as perks.
5. School of MotionSchool of Motion has a plethora of super interesting courses to help you kickstart your animation career but one of the best is the platform’s ‘Animation Bootcamp‘. School of Motion has a tone of project files and assets that are layered and supplied in digestible doses as you proceed deeper into higher learning levels. You also get to network and interact with students and professionals of like minds.
Some other perks to enjoy while learning Animation on School of Motion include private class podcast covering tons of topics, personalized critique on your works, in-depth design-learning PDFs, private Facebook group for bootcamp student to Foster interaction and learning.
6. LyndaLynda (a.k.a. LinkedIn Learning) is an online learning platform owned by LinkedIn, the world largest social media platform for professional.
The website (also mobile Apps for iOS and Android) offers a number of Animation training and tutorials. Lynda costs $29.99 per month. This gives you access to all the over 10,000 courses on the platform, not just the Animation courses.
7. UdemyUdemy is a global online learning platform offering free and paid courses in multiple fields. Animation courses are not left out with dozens of free and paid courses available.
For some reason, most of the paid Animation courses on Udemy are prices at $11.99.
There goes our list of best online platforms for learning Animation. You can use any of them to kick start your career in Animation. If you have used any of these animation platforms, share your taught. Which one is your favourite.
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Thousands of bloggers are doing their best to become key opinion leaders in their niches, but most of them fail to succeed. With more than 30 million blog writers in the US alone, it is impossible to get a foot in the door unless you keep publishing quality posts week after week.
A majority of bloggers agree as 80% of authors believe that writing amazing content is the most important factor for building a successful career. But how can you maintain consistency and keep finding interesting topics?
The answer is simple – you need to use data analytics to come up with fresh appealing ideas. In this article, we will show you 6 data-driven tips to find the best topics for your blog. Let’s take a look!
1. Start From Your Own BlogThe best place to begin with is your own blog. You should analyze existing posts to understand user behavior and learn which articles made the biggest impression on your followers.
There is a wide variety of valuable blog analytics tools, but Google Analytics is the first instance in this field. Using the Google’s native web intelligence app, you can discover all of the basic blog success indicators such as page views, time spent on page, lead generation, new subscribers, etc. The only thing left for you to do is to determine the desired objective.
If your goal is to raise awareness, then you should choose topics similar to ones that attracted many page views. If your goal is to gain new prospects, then you should find topics that generated leads. Make sure to know your objectives, and you’ll be able to design top-notch posts.
2. Analyze CompetitorsWhen you complete a self-analysis, you need to move on and research competitors. This way, you will stay up to date with popular topics and industry trends. The goal is to find out the style of writing of the most successful bloggers who always have their pages among the top results in Google searches.
As always, there are dozens of online resources to help you with this process. Our recommendation is Buzzsumo, a tool that can conduct a comprehensive competitor research based on your blogging preferences. Using it, you can find out the following details:
Analysis of content format, publish dates, and length Content alerts and competitor comparison reports Your competitor’s most shared content Users who share their postsThese and many other features will give you enough material to work on and create your own set of compelling blog ideas.
3. Check Out Google’s People Also Ask SectionGoogle’s People Also Ask section is a user-friendly feature that speeds up the search process even more than usual. But besides end-users, it also helps bloggers to detect the right kind of topics for their articles.
For instance, if you search for “why SEO is important for blog”, Google will display other frequently asked questions like:
Does blogging help SEO? How can I do SEO for my blog? Does blogging help SEO?All these questions revolve around the same topic (blogging and SEO), but they help you to discover a different angle to the same subject. Sometimes these suggestions will be even more obvious, so you just need to take advantage of the Google’s feature and find the appropriate topics for your website.
4. Listen To Your AudienceWho can give you better topic suggestions than the audience itself? If you listen carefully to what they have to say, you will find a plethora of great ideas to write about.
Content creators at Wiz Essay told us how they do it: “Blog followers leave many comments after reading our posts, so we tend to engage in communication and ask for their opinions. Doing so, we often get interesting ideas for research.”
At the same time, there are a lot of Q/A websites such as Quora that you can exploit to analyze niche-related questions and user interests. Simply enter your field of work in the search box, and you will see a list of popular questions that could serve as the source of blog post ideas.
5. Conduct a SurveyAnother way to learn more about the readers’ opinion is to ask them directly. You can conduct a survey on your website to understand user interests and preferences. Once you find it out, you can tailor blog posts so as to match the needs of your followers. Survey Monkey is one of the simplest tools to help you get the answers you need.
With this platform, you can turn insights into action with sophisticated survey strategies. Besides basic features, tools like Survey Monkey also offer survey collectors to send out via email, mobile, chat, web, social media, and more channels. In each case, you’ll learn more about website visitors and design articles accordingly.
6. Ask Your Sales and Customer Service AgentsAs much as you’d like to know your readers the most, the truth is that sales reps and customer service agents probably know them better than you. After all, they communicate with potential consumers on a daily basis, so they are aware of the prospects’ needs and demands. You should exploit this knowledge to create more interesting blog topics, so feel free to get out of the office and ask your colleagues to tell you about the target audience.
ConclusionBlogging may seem like an easy way to generate website traffic and build audience loyalty, but it still leaves many authors wondering: why am I not getting more page views? Most of the times, the answer is very simple: you are not choosing subjects based on measurement and analysis.
This article showed you 6 data-driven tips to find the best topics for your blog. Keep these tactics in mind and don’t hesitate to use them while preparing for new posts – they might bring you tons of new followers very soon.
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No matter what kind of office you are, nearly all can benefit from some extra tools that will improve productivity. Running a business can be challenging and so it is important that you stay ahead of the game with the latest productivity tools as this is what will ensure your business is running as efficiently as possible and that you are beating out your competition. Technology has allowed businesses to massively improve their productivity and this, in turn, means bigger profits for the business.
In this article, we are taking you through some of the top tools that you can use to improve your office productivity and ensure your business is being the most successful that it can be.
Carry on reading to find out more!
Project Management ToolsOne of the most important things to do in any business is to ensure that it is running as smoothly as possible is to ensure that it is being effectively managed and that projects are being completed to deadline and are to a high-quality.
What’s great now is that there are so many fantastic tools out there that you can use to manage your projects better. In the majority of offices across the globe now, it is some form of Kanban boards that are used to help effectively manage staff and projects.
The Kanban method is designed to help businesses streamline their workflow and it provides a visual board for staff to look at and better optimise how they are working.
Physical Kanban boards used to be the done thing since Toyota introduced them back in the 1940s, however, nowadays, it is digital Kanban boards that are most popular as they are easier to access and can be updated in real time.
Using a tool such as this can help you to reduce project costs and how much effort is involved to complete it. As we previously mentioned, using a Kanban board also means that staff collaborate in real time and this means less time wasted communicating and more time being committed to a project.
There are also tools out there that will allow you to track the time and the cost of every project will help to ensure that you are on track and are pricing out your work correctly. This will also show you areas in which you may need to add more resources if they are slowing down the process of getting the projected completed as quickly as possible.
Email Management Tool
Emails are a huge part of nearly every office and, for many people, much of their day will be spent receiving and sending emails. With a good email management tool, you will be able to organise important conversations better using tags and means you won’t forget to follow up on those very important emails!
To Do ListsWhile the old to do lists were always on pen and paper, this is no longer the case and lists can be made digitally. There are many different apps out there that will help you to create to do lists and also keep track of your activities.
Additionally, these types of apps will also allow you to set reminders for things such as meetings and this can be synched across to your other devices. An app such as Evernote allows you to create your own personal diary and you can save important notes in Google Drive to then share out across with other members of staff.
File Sharing ToolsIf you have to share document with customers or other businesses, it is important that you can seamlessly do this. Google Drive and Dropbox are some of the most popular tools to dot this with and they are a fantastic way to store any business documents that you also need to share with other people.
Copywriting ToolsYou may not think that copywriting tools apply to your office, however, copywriting tools are actually essential for most businesses.
If your business creates unique content to market products or services, then you will need to make sure you are using the right copywriting tools to ensure that the content really is unique and is grammatically correct.
CRM Tool
Another tool that will help to improve office productivity is CRM tools such as Microsoft Dynamics or SalesForce.
CRM stands for customer relationship management and these tools will help you to keep track and maintain customer information and you will also be able to track the sales process.
If you have a lot of customers to manage, it is also a good idea to try and integrate some Helpdesk management tools as these will allow you to quickly handle customer queries and complaints.
Related Topics Increase Website Visitors Best Accounting Software VPS Hosting Best Web Hosting How to design a Website 6 Reasons to Build a Website for your Business 5 benefits of a business website SEO Increase Search Engine Traffic & VisitorsThe post Top Tools to Improve Office Productivity appeared first on Nigeria Technology Guide.
Spring is around the corner and you might need to stock up on new-season essentials. Perhaps you need a new wardrobe, a healthier pantry or supplies for an outdoor hobby.
Before rushing off to your nearest shopping mall, I encourage you to look local and support small businesses in your area, not only on Small Business Friday (7 September) but every day.
Small businesses are the lifelines of every community. If we don’t support them, the economy suffers, and we miss out on great benefits.
Here are a few of those benefits:
1. Unique Products and ServicesSmall businesses exist because the founder identified a gap in an unsaturated market. In your community, this could be transport to schools in the area, or a home cooking service that delivers freshly prepared, healthy meals to your door.
Small businesses sell high-quality, locally produced products, manufactured in small quantities. This means you can own something that few people have. Something that’s unlike anything you’ll find in a supermarket and that will last a long time.
If you need to buy a gift for someone, visit the local market to find something unique and special rather than something anyone can own if they visit a big retailer.
2. Unrivalled Customer ExperienceSmall businesses have a smaller customer base, which means they’re likely to go above and beyond in their efforts to service their customers. They take the time and determination to get to know you and go out of their way to ensure you have a pleasant experience.
If the owner of the local bakery knows that you love her cherry pie, she’ll make sure there’s always one in stock. And she’ll probably keep the last one for you. When you start forming these types of relationships with local business owners, it can quickly start to feel like you’re supporting family, which makes your community stronger.
3. An opportunity to Develop your CommunityA significant portion of the money you spend at a local small business funnels back into your community. The taxes paid by small businesses could go towards infrastructure maintenance and development – like keeping the grass cut at the park or upgrading the roads. This, in turn, increases property prices and makes your community an attractive place to stop for those passing through. They may even spend the night at the local Airbnb.
Small businesses also support each other, creating a ripple effect for growth. A local construction company, for example, might prefer to offer their services at a lower rate to smaller business within the community. That small business could call on the community hardware store to do their paving.
The more a small business grows, the more jobs it can create for locals, helping to reduce poverty and crime in your area.
4. A chance to give backSmall businesses give back to the local community, not only through job creation and supporting other businesses, but also through corporate social responsibility initiatives.
Whether it’s allowing young people to job shadow, picking up litter in public areas, or donating food to the community’s old age home, there’s usually a small business taking the reins. When you support them, you indirectly support your entire community.
5. A chance to grow the economyYou already know that South Africa’s economy is under pressure. Supporting small businesses is the best way to indirectly play your part in economic development. Small & Medium Businesses make up 91% of formalised businesses in the country. They provide 60% of all jobs and contribute roughly 34% of GDP. In other words, they form the backbone of our economy, which means we should support them as much as possible.
And because they sell unique products and services, they help to diversify the economy and stimulate innovation. This means you’re funding great ideas and ventures that only exist outside of mainstream, corporate chains.
Starting and growing a business is hard work and takes a tremendous amount of risk. The South African government recognises the important role small businesses play in the economy and has built frameworks to support them, but we need to play our part, too.
The best way we can show our appreciation for small businesses – apart from buying from them – is to talk about them. Tell your friends, families and networks about the excellent products and service you got from them.
Leave a positive review on their social pages – one positive review could raise much-needed awareness about the great work they do and bring in more customers.
Also, if you have a friend or family member who owns a small business, support them – and pay the full price. Asking for freebies or a discount puts them in an uncomfortable position, especially when they’re trying to grow their business.
Let’s get the ball rolling this #SmallBizFriday. Remember, buying small adds up to big returns – for you, your community and the entire economy.
By Viresh Harduth, Vice President: New Customer Acquisition (Small & Medium Businesses) for Sage Africa & Middle East
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