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With the MacLeod Review putting employee engagement on organisations' agendas and with a deadline of the end of March 2010 for the ‘Engaging for Success' recommendations to be implemented, organisations need to be taking employee engagement seriously. The business benefits of keeping employees engaged are obvious - improved productivity, staff loyalty, high levels of customer satisfaction, increased innovation and enhanced business performance. With the UK recession finally behind us and the much anticipated upturn on the horizon, it has never been a better time to focus on engaging your workforce.

All too often, organisations see engaging employees as a huge project requiring significant investment, but this needn't be the case. The fundamentals of employee engagement include paying employees on time and accurately, effectively managing time and attendance and communicating with staff. All of these are simple enough to achieve as long as the organisation has the appropriate software infrastructure in place.

The basics of employee engagement

Paying employees on time and accurately
Ensuring employees get paid on time and accurately is key. If staff are paid late and/or frequently have an inaccurate pay packet, this is a recipe for engagement disaster. Having a quality and flexible payroll system with the right level of functionality to support the size and type of organisation, is therefore a key enabler to employee engagement. The functionality of the payroll system may need to include all or some of the following to ensure the payroll runs effectively:

•  Payroll processing
•  The ability to maintain numerous companies/payrolls on the same system
•  Back pay calculation
•  BACS communication
•  Employee costing
•  Occupational sick pay functionality

The payroll system may also need customising to meet the company's specific needs.

Effectively managing time and attendance
When employees are not disciplined for being late or regularly absent, resentment can build amongst the workforce. To avoid this, managers need a) to be empowered to act and b) to be given access to accurate and real-time attendance information so that they can effectively respond to poor attendance and lateness in a strict but fair manner. This is where time and attendance software systems come in.

Time and attendance (T&A) systems ensure the effective monitoring and management of staff time. By providing an accurate, permanent and real-time record of hours worked, staff movements, holidays, sickness and lateness (including extended lunches), T&A systems deliver transparency and fairness across the organisation thereby promoting staff engagement. By integrating the T&A system with the payroll system, this means that hours worked are automatically registered in the payroll system to ensure staff are paid accurately.

Communicating with staff
It is a ‘no brainer' that by communicating effectively with staff, this helps them to feel valued by their employer. In its most basic form, staff communications can include providing employees with instant access to their own records on the HR system (otherwise known as HR self-service) so that information such as annual leave requests, training details and sick leave can be accessed as and when required. Another simple measure is to email electronic payslips directly to each member of staff the day before they are due to get paid. This ensures that any queries with the payroll are identified and resolved before the money hits the bank, avoiding staff resentment.

Software can also be used to automatically email a range of reports to managers, ensuring that they have the information to hand to aid decision making and better manage their teams. These reports could cover a range of areas such as budgets, financial forecasts, staff performance, sick leave and staff retention.

Using software to get the basic forms of communication right provides a solid foundation for all other forms of company communication.

The next steps towards an engaged workforce

Once the organisation is getting the basics of employee engagement right, they should only then look at other ways in which to engage staff, for instance staff development and incentive schemes.

Once again, software technologies can prove key here. For instance, using tailored business intelligence systems, organisations can accurately measure, cultivate and manage an employee's well-being against pre-defined key performance indicators (KPIs). The information used to measure and manage levels of staff satisfaction are generated from the results of staff surveys.

The business intelligence solution will interrogate and quickly extract a range of valuable HR data and subsequently produce a range of key reports. These reports could cover employee development, team engagement, new starter satisfaction and leadership capability, enabling organisations to proactively find ways in which to improve engagement whilst creating a more effective workplace.

It's not rocket science

Employee engagement is not rocket science although too many organisations are still failing to get the basics of employee engagement right because they are without the correct, supporting technological infrastructure. With the right software systems in place, the basics of employee engagement will fall into place - staff will get paid on time and accurately, poor time-keeping can be highlighted and addressed and the flow of company information will help staff to feel valued. With the basics sewn-up, organisations can then look at ways to further engage staff, once again using software as the foundation for engagement success.

By Mark Thompson, Managing Director of business management and information systems provider, COA Solutions (http://www.coasolutions.com/)