The process of Shift Scheduling is often referred to as rostering or Work Loading. Correct shift assignment is essential for a smooth and accurate attendance output. While most of the times the rostering or work loading is well defined there are certain cases where this can become challenging.

Challenges with Rostering

Two most common challenges faced during rostering include:

Unplanned Absence

Unplanned absence can cause manpower shortage requiring restructuring the roster. This may result in employees requiring to do multiple shifts/overtime or work on holiday/day off.

Unplanned Workload

Unplanned workload can be due to increased production demand/sales or due to rework caused by defective/incomplete product/service.

Tackling the Challenge

Deploying a robust attendance system like Mentis that allows:

• Easy Rostering
• Handling unplanned manpower shortage
• Automatic adjustments of shift scheduling
• Workflows to manage and plan the rostering
• Ability to manage rostering changes in bulk

Benefits of Good Rostering System

A good rostering system helps keep the

• Overtime under control
• Reduce Payroll Processing Efforts
• Improve employee morale/improve attrition
• Reduce defects
• Improves transparency

To know more and to get help with HR automation, please contact us and we will arrange a Demo of Mentis HRMS as per the HR automation needs of your organization.

With Baby Boomers exiting workforce there is a talent war between Gen X and the Millennials to fill the leadership roles. Millennials who grew teaching their parents and grandparents how to use smart phones and social networking platforms like Facebook, possess skills and understanding that earlier Generations don’t. At the same time Millennials  lack the attention span (attention to detail) that earlier Generations possessed. Millennials are much better at multitasking that their previous Generations and like to be challenged more than their predecessors.

The biggest shift will be the way the performance is being managed in the organization. With Boomers preferring once a year (or quarter) feedback to a routine Check-ins (daily/weekly reviews) by the GenX to a completely constant/continuous feedback by the Millennials the way organizations will manage their PMS systems is up for a major revamp.

As the baton shifts from Boomers to the Millennials the HR systems currently deployed are bound to become obsolete unless the technology keeps up with the rapid changes in the organization culture driven by the new generation leaders.

Mentis has initiated a new Gen version of HRIS that is being developed solely for the new generation leaders. With PMS systems that are no longer driven by the traditional Goal Sheets and Quarterly/Annual appraisals the new Gen Mentis employ latest technologies and handle the shifting thought process.

There are a certain criteria that the best HR & Payroll solution should meet. Here are the list of the criteria that the Best HRIS software should meet:

Experience Matters – Mentis has been in the market for over a decade. Started in 2007, Mentis has been successfully automating HR & Payroll for many companies. This experience allows Mentis ability to handle many challenges both in terms of implementation issues and solutions to the current HR practices at the companies looking for automation. Companies that have been using manual HR processes tend to struggle at automation as they have been used to handling the data in a particular way and adopting HRIS or Payroll software can at times become overwhelming. Experience in dealing with such challenges becomes very handy in successful implementation.

Depth in the Features – There are numerous HR software in the market today and each claim pretty much the same level of features. Attendance software is not just attendance software for manufacturing industry as it has several requirements like automatic shift allocation, shift rotation, gate pass management, over time management, handling of workers different than the sales staff. Similarly attendance for sales driven organization is entirely different as it involves ability to manage GPS based attendance tracking. Some companies have flexi-shift while others have stern attendance rules. Some companies have large manpower located in a centralized office whereas some have widespread retail or sales outlet. Attendance software needs to have the capability to match the needs of the business. This is not just the case for attendance, it is true for appraisal systems, workflows, leaves, expense management, travel, learning & development and so and so forth. This is where the depth of Mentis and its ability to handle all types of requirements come in handy.

Stable Solution – Having a system that works and works regularly is most crucial. A bug free and a stable HRIS is what makes Mentis a highly reliable solution. Once configured it requires little to no maintenance. A time tested system with all niggles sorted out helps companies rely on the output instead of constantly calling vendor for fixes.

Flexible Deployment – It shouldn’t matter if you need the HRIS in your own data centre or comfortable sharing your data with your vendor. There are pros and cons of both approaches and the system should be flexible to offer support for both the models. Mentis HRMS and payroll is available both on cloud and on premises. Mentis uses Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS as the preferred choice for the data centre as these companies offer most reliable and highly scalable and secure infrastructure.

Customizable – No one size fits all. The HRMS needs to be accommodating and be able to balance best practices with the ability to customize the solution as per the business requirements. Mentis is fully customizable to suit the needs of the company. Though it comes with plenty of features built-in with lots of configuration options, there are times when the requirements are unique and hence require changes. Mentis follows a controlled change management process that keeps the management informed about the changes while ensuring that the product stay stable. Unlike other solutions, Mentis prefers to keep the customization inside the product so as to ensure the future upgrades are not impacted.

Capable of Handling Large Transaction Volume – From as low as 100 to even several thousand employees can easily be managed in Mentis. Most of the Mentis initial clients were companies with manpower in excess of 1000. This ensured that scalability was built-in the Mentis HRMS from the first day. Mentis today has several customers that run their HR processes with several thousand employees without any performance issues.

Easy to Use/User Friendly – A good system that is not user friendly will never be successful. Mentis has been a preferred HR & Payroll software due to the ease of use and user friendly features built-into the portal. Mentis require little to absolutely no training for the employees. Even the HR users find it very intuitive and easy to adapt to Mentis.

Affordable/Higher ROI – A good HRMS should have a ROI less than a year. Mentis offers one of the quickest ROI due to an attractive cost and feature mix. Companies have easily recovered their HR investment within a few months of using Mentis due to the saving in terms of HR time, eliminating mistakes, improving employee productivity, better engagement and higher retention.

Easy to Integrate/Open APIs – HRIS should be open to exchange information with other systems. To eliminate duplicate data entry and its related perils, the HRIS should have open APIs to both allow to import and expose the information. Using open APIs always ensure that the system can easily fit into any IT environment or deployment model. Mentis offers extensive APIs that can be consumed to integrate with ERP, Job Portals, Third Party Systems, biometric devices, mobile devices and many of our partner apps.

Mobile Friendly – Most of the transactions, especially by the employees, should be easily handled from the mobile phone. To ensure this Mentis has native apps for both Android and iOS which can be easily integrated with any Mentis deployment (regardless of deployment model).

AI Ready Yes AI is the next big thing. HR has to come up to speed on it. Mentis already is AI ready. Whenever the company is ready to embrace the AI, Mentis will be ready to provide the solution. With built-in support for data science, machine learning, predictive models, chat bots & NLP, Mentis is already one of the most advanced AI platform for the HR industry.

Due to the reasons above, Mentis is undoubtedly the leader in the HR and Payroll Software industry. To know more you can continue browsing this site, interact with our AI ready chat bot or simply send us an email.

There are plenty of payroll solutions available in the marketing today. While deciding the payroll software companies look for low cost solution as they think that payroll software is a commodity with hundreds of payroll companies providing almost similar functionality hence the lower cost alternative is mostly preferred.

With the advent of emerging technologies like Data Science, Block Chain, Machine Learning that falls with in the ambit of Artificial Intelligence, the dynamics is going to change fast. In near future AI is going to become a very crucial assistant to the HR decision making and since AI is data hungry the choice of payroll solution will become critical. A low cost payroll solution might have solved the short time problem by providing an affordable solution but with these solutions unlikely to get around the AI anytime soon, companies will find themselves wanting while others using AI enabled Payroll solutions will be able to use the payroll data for critical decision making.

AI can help companies improve employee retention using Predictive Analytics and Payroll data forms a very crucial input for the effectiveness and accuracy of such predictive analytics.

It’s high time that companies start taking their payroll more seriously and look at it beyond just a salary processing tool. The data in the payroll is gold mine that the companies can utilize when embracing the emerging technologies.

HR & Payroll Software from Mentis is an AI enabled platform. Using payroll from Mentis can help companies not only fulfill the short term needs of salary processing and related compliance, it will also prepare the companies for the more exciting AI capabilities of the Mentis.

Data can be displayed in many different formats including point-in Time view, trends, insights (using Machine learning), help prediction (using data science, AI/CI and ML) and snapshot/live dashboards. While most HR systems will provide the data that can be further imported into a BI tool to give Point-In-Time view or even shows some trends but generating insights, prediction analysis and live dashboards require more than just these tools.

This is where MentisAI comes in. To know more about how to leverage AI in the HR space contact us.

MentisAI highlights:

• Chat bots
• Predictive Analysis
• Machine Learning
• Artificial & Computational Intelligence
  Many organisations across the globe have already realized the potential and are switching to MentisAI. Are you ready?

Contact us by visiting www.mentishrms.com and you can interact with out sales bot.

Most employees tend to be more motivated towards the initial phase of their association with their employers. As the time passes, the excitement tends to phase out and frustration begins to creeps in. This may be due to the decline in the urge to prove oneself, disagreement with the supervisors/management and or work culture, disillusionment with the job profile, comparison with previous employers, work pressure, displeasure with the appraisals so on and so forth.

It is not in the interest of any employer to have such a morale of their employees. It may not be feasible for all employers to provide an environment to satisfy everyone. There are however small measures that can be done without compromising on the basic work ethics and delivery quality. Some of the basic initiatives that would not cost much but could provide a motivational kick to your employees:

• Power Breaks: The power breaks can be given to your employees wherein they can do some recreational activities. If you have game rooms, the employees can play a bit, if not, you may allow them to spend some time on social networking site. If there is a concern with your IT policy you may consider putting a common machine in place for surfing. Employees these days have internet on their phones so all that is required is to allow for small power breaks.
• You may organize small events or gathering which would allow employees to have a chance to connect outside of the work environment
• Reshuffle the team for a short duration
• Allow employees to bring kids to work once a quarter or so
• Organize indoor games/championships

The list is endless and can vary based on the education, experience and cultural background of your employees. The intention is to have a healthy and balanced work life. You may have good managers who can discipline their team but what is more important is to have team members who are excited to report to work.

Late coming is infectious, if not controlled can easily become the culture of an organization. While it is nice to be flexible, the late arrival once sets in the culture of an organization is easily seen in task completion and deadline adherence. Organization that have a high rate of late coming tend to struggle in meeting deadlines. This is due to the ripple effect on the overall work environment. If staff does not make it on time then meetings cannot start on time, this waiting leads to wastage of manpower which affects the other dependent tasks. 10 minutes late every day over one year is equivalent to over 5 man days loss per person.

It is therefore very crucial for an organization to identify a punctuality index and track the adherence on a regular basis. It is important to analyze whether the index is lower at a certain time of the year (Seasonal – due to festivities), lower for a certain cadre/grade (lack of discipline due to seniority) or whether it is sporadic (lack of policy adherence or workplace culture issue).

Consider this:

Your vendors may hire sales and technical staff from their competition in order to gain advantage and skip the background verification suspecting biased response from the previous employer. In doing so they expose themselves to all kinds of suspicious and fraudulent elements in their systems. The real danger begins when they deploy these elements on your projects where they have access to your confidential and crucial information. You have trusted your service provider based on its track record and assumes that they would reciprocate by performing the due diligence while hiring. But what if these these service providers have overlooked the basic security to gain competitive edge and have now been exposed to risks that they are not equipped to handle. 

In such a situation do you really feel safe in the hands of your trusted service provider? The actions of such elements have been commonly seen in instances of credit card fraud or data leakage. You might have invested millions in securing your own house and eventually are left vulnerable by avoidable negligence on part of these service providers.

What can you do?

1. If your service provider has access to your crucial data (sales data, customer data, employee data, financial information, access to your IT infrastructure) you must insist on getting a copy of their Background Verification from your service provider. If the exposure is expected to be long term then you must get the background verification done from a third party agency. Many multinational and financial institutions today insist the background check of their vendor/service provider employees be done from an independent third party agency.
2. Insist on a contract or agreement with the service provider covering Non disclosure
3. Ask your vendor how they assure that their own employees do not indulge in these activities. If required ask for the copies of agreements that they have executed with their employees 

After all it is the security of your organization. It is better to be safe then sorry as the risk associated can be much higher than what most organizations can afford. 

Even if you have implemented technology to store all that data if the final dashboard to your top management is compiled by extracting all this data, the risk of leakage of the crucial raw data is very high.  In spite of background verification, strict procedures, and apt technology, the leakage becomes too easy. Many organizations feel so helpless that they are not even alarmed at the prospect of their data being leaked outside of their organization.

What can be done?

There are some of the basic measures that would significantly reduce the risk of data leakage:

• Implement an industry standard HRIS
• Prevent exporting of data from all crucial reports
• Insist on getting the top management to view their reports online (invest if required in getting dashboards as per your needs)
• Insist on multi-factor authentication on your HRIS
• Data access to the HR department should be limited
• Background verification of your HR department (both at the time of joining and randomly during employment)

If you need help with security audit of your HR data, you may contact us. Mentis HRIS comes with Multi factor authentication, role based data access and top management dashboard. To know more visit us at www.mentishrms.com.